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What is NATO really? A defensive alliance? Yes. But is it more than that also? Yes. Is it a military machine built around American power? Of course. It's been a force for stability as well as a pretext for escalation. So NATO's always been more than the thing that it strictly says it is, and that's why its history matters so much. This is going to be an episode about questions, the. The questions that have driven and plagued NATO's existence right from the start. And hopefully the answers will tell you all that you need to know about NATO's past and most likely its future. Why was NATO created in 1945? Europe had been devastated by the Second World War, and Western leaders faced these two overlapping fears. One, that Germany might rise again, and two, that the Soviet Union might keep moving westward, building on the territory that the Red army had occupied in Eastern and Central Europe at the end of World War II. And at the same time as these fears, there was a deep uncertainty over whether or not the United States, after providing this decisive strategic and industrial heft in the war, would stay involved in European security at all, or. Or would it revert to its older habit of avoiding being bound up or entangled in European security affairs. So basically, Europe didn't just fear Moscow, it also feared the idea of being abandoned. And at first, Europe tried to solve this problem itself. Britain and France signed the Treaty of Dunkirk in 1947, which was this mutual defence pact originally aimed to prevent a resurgence of German aggression. Then in 1948 came the treaty of Brussels, which linked Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in a collective security agreement. But Europe alone could not credibly deter the Soviet Union. The military imbalance was just really obvious. And meanwhile, the United States was changing course. So the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan tied security, economics and ideology together. So Europe wasn't just being rebuilt, it was Also, from the US's perspective, being stabilized against Communist influence. Then came the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade in 1948. And at this point, the logic is completely unavoidable. Europe needed a guarantee, not just ideological empathy. It needed America in a big way. So on the 4th of April 1949, 12 states signed the North Atlantic Treaty and NATO was born. So when it was created, what was NATO really for? There's this famous line that's usually attributed to NATO's first secretary, General, Lord Ismay, and he said that the point of NATO was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down. And that's basically true. So NATO was defensive in. In its origin, absolutely. And it was solving three political problems at once. It reassured Western Europe that the United States was not just going to disappear back across the Atlantic. And it bound Western Germany at the time into a Western European structure. Because Europe could use a rearmed Germany against Stalin at this point, but an independent Germany rearming itself outside of of their structures still gave them the heebie jeebies. But this structure signalled to Moscow that any attempt to put pressure on one Western state might trigger a confrontation with all of them. And that's why NATO has always depended on the United States far more than the United States has ever depended on NATO. Because without Washington, NATO is a coalition of states with serious armed forces. But with Washington it becomes a really credible deterrent. NATO's always been a deal in this respect. So Europe contributes military power of its own, troops, bases, weapons, industry, and in the case of Britain and France, nuclear forces. But the decisive weight of NATO historically has always been America with the largest military, the central nuclear guarantee. And that's why the Americans have the position of the top commander in Europe for NATO. Article 5. What is it really? Article 5 is the famous heart of the treaty that created NATO. It's the foundational principle of collective defense. An attack on one is considered an attack on all. I'm sure you've heard this multiple times, but it is one of those phrases. Article five, attack on one is an attack on all that people think that they really understand until they read the actual fine print. Because the treaty doesn't say that every ally automatically goes to war in the same way. It does say that each member will take such action as it deems necessary, including armed force. So Article 5 does mean solidarity, but it doesn't mean that all the NATO member states respond in an identical way. I'm going to read it in full. So the parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all. And consequently they agree that if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United nations, will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forth with individually and in concert with the other parties such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force to, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. Okay, so what does this really mean? It's very wordy, but each word is deliberate here because it made the alliance politically sellable but strategically durable. Because if Article 5 had been too rigid, an attack occurs and X happens. Some governments might not have accepted it, but if it had been too vague, it wouldn't have really deterred anyone. NATO has survived partly because Article 5 sits in that quite helpful strategic ambiguous middle ground. Article 5 was only invoked once, after 9 11, when the alliance created to defend Europe was activated in support of the United States. And that alone tells you how NATO has evolved over time. What is NATO without the US? Back in 1949, NATO was still mostly a promise on paper. Then the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The Korean War broke out in 1950. Suddenly, communist expansion didn't seem like an abstract idea. It actually looked very real, very alive, heavily armed and moving quite quickly. So NATO had to become a real thing. And this is when NATO built integrated command structures. So Eisenhower, before he was President of the us, became the first Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO. And that post has always gone to an American, because the alliance's ultimate credibility rests on American military power, American intelligence, American logistics, and probably above all, the American nuclear umbrella. So putting it bluntly, NATO is a European security system whose essential reinforcement is American power. And that's why Europeans have historically resented America's ability to call the shots at points. But they know that American skin in the game is absolutely critical. If NATO is so important, why did France leave? Sort of one of the biggest myths about NATO, for people who haven't been observing it obsessively, is that it has always been united or that things were smooth until later crises, but they weren't. The alliance has always been held together by some common fear, but also pulled in very different directions by national self interest. And France is the clearest example of that. Charles Charles de Gaulle distrusted how much power the United States had inside NATO and didn't want France's military permanently tied into a system that he felt was largely shaped by Washington. So in 1966, France pulled out of NATO's shared military command system and made NATO move out of its headquarters on French soil. But France at that point did not leave the alliance itself because it still wanted protection. It just also wanted a bit more independence. And then France only rejoined that command structure in 2009. But this is revealing. NATO members do want and need protection, but they don't want total subordination or the feeling of it. The United States wants burden sharing from its European partners, but also influence. Smaller states want reassurance and bigger states want leverage. NATO works because these tensions are are contained and disagreement is managed well, not because it's not there, it is. Is NATO actually defensive? This is where the alliance becomes a bit more controversial. So in theory, NATO is a defensive alliance in legal origin. That is absolutely true. It was created for collective defence and Article 5 remains the core principle. But in practice, NATO has obviously never just been sitting there passively waiting to be invaded. Even during the Cold War, it developed these integrated command systems, nuclear planning, military doctrines, scientific cooperation, especially as the space race and competition during the Cold War was heating up. But after the Cold War, the meaning of defence stretched further. Again, the real turning point came in the Balkans, in Bosnia and then in Kosovo in 1999. NATO use force beyond the territory of its members. This is a really major shift. So before then, NATO had existed mainly to deter an attack on its own member states. But in the 1990s, when it began acting outside of NATO territory, it was doing so in the name of crisis management and humanitarian intervention. Supporters of this would say that it proved NATO could adapt to intervene against ethnic cleansing, possible state collapse that would affect NATO members and instability in Europe in general. Critics would say this is mission creep, a defensive alliance turning into a more interventionist one. The truth is the legal origin remained defensive and the practical role had widened. Then came 9, 11. NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time and then went into Afghanistan. And that became NATO's longest mission and pushed the alliance beyond its origins. It showed that NATO could deploy, coordinate and sustain an out of area mission. But Afghanistan also exposed some limits of coalition warfare. But again NATO had adapted and again the definition of defence in the name of counterterrorism had stretched. So is NATO defensive in origin? Yes. In practice, not solely. It has acted in forward defence to protect members against conflict, spread spill over terrorism, piracy and to ensure regional stability and prevent humanitarian catastrophe. Did NATO actually break a promise to Russia? This is the most contested question in NATO's history. And let's not forget that Ukraine potentially joining NATO was a central part of Vladimir Putin's stated pretext for invading Ukraine in 2022. Now, at the center of this broken promise debacle is the famous not one inch eastward dispute. So when the Cold War ended, NATO might in theory have faced an identity crisis because the Berlin Wall fell, the Warsaw Pact dissolved and the Soviet Union went kaput. So if NATO had been only an anti Soviet machine, that could have been the end of it. But instead of that, it survived and it expanded. So in February 1990, during negotiations over German reunification, the US Secretary of State James Baker told President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev that if a united Germany remained in NATO, there would not be one inch further eastward extension of NATO's military jurisdiction. And these talks were happening because the Cold War order in Europe was collapsing. East Germany was disintegrating. Reunification looked possible, and the question on everybody's minds was whether or not a united Germany would be neutral, partly aligned, or would remain inside NATO. And Gorbachev's position at the time was not flat out hostility to the idea of reunification itself, but a concern that the Soviet Union mustn't come out of this strategically weaker, which it looked like it was going to, and that NATO's military structures shouldn't move eastward in a way that further threatens Soviet security. Declassified records show that Baker was not alone in offering this reassurance, that several Western officials discussed limits on NATO's eastward reach in the context of German reunification and these security concerns that the former Soviets had had. But the key bit is this. These conversations were about the terms of German reunification in 1990, and they were not a formal treaty in any way. And this is why the dispute has lasted, because Russia argues that these verbal assurances created at least some kind of political gentleman's agreement that NATO was not going to move eastward. But the US and NATO's position is that no binding promise was ever made because such a commitment would need to be written into the treaties that settled German reunification. And NATO's own treaty leaves the door open to any European country admitted by unanimous agreement. So NATO's later enlargement was not a clear breach of a written legal promise. But it's also not true to say that no such assurances were ever voiced. But the real argument is what did they mean? How far were they expected to extend? And whether these informal assurances should ever have been expected to constrain NATO policy. And Gorbachev himself later on gave some mixed signals, too, which is why this is even more thorny. So in a 2014 interview, he said that the broader topic of NATO expansion was actually not discussed at all in 1990, and that the issue then was NATO military structures moving into the former East Germany. But then he also said that Western leaders violated the spirit of what had been agreed. So even Gorbachev's account kind of separates these two ideas. Yes, there was no formal 1990 deal talking about future enlargement, but also the post Cold War NATO expansion still breached what he thought was the spirit of what had been agreed, of political understanding. For countries like Poland and Estonia, joining NATO meant escaping this dangerous, this gray zone between Germany and Russia. For Moscow, the same process looked like a rival military alliance moving even closer to Russia's borders. Both sides were reading recent history in Europe and drawing opposite lessons from it. Because this is so contentious, you obviously don't just want to hear it from me. So I asked former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council, Dr. Andrei Khortunov, and European political scientist Sten Rinning if NATO did break a promise or not.
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Well, it's just being used by Russia as a propaganda means, disinformation to try to delegitimate and threaten these countries. In Eastern Europe, there was no commitment not to expand. Now, the truth is that the United States had no intention of expanding until it was clear that these countries in Eastern Europe needed help. They saw what was happening in Bosnia. They saw the activities going on in Russia. They realized that the old Russian intelligence mafia connection that had. You would have thought it would have disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it survived it.
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Back at that point, nobody thought that NATO would move further east. And I do remember I had a couple of conversations, let's say, with polls, with Hungarians, and most of them thought that their nations would stay neutral. It was a very volatile situation. Everything was moving very fast. But at that point, I don't think that even the. The opposition to Communist parties in Central Eastern Europe were entertaining the idea of joining NATO very fast. And the future of NATO was not secured. A lot depended on the US Position on decisions made in Washington. So right now, I think it's a kind of standard narrative in Moscow suggesting that this promise has been given to Gorbachev and that this promise was later on broken by the West. But of course, you know, I don't think that Gorbachev himself thought of a NATO expansion in the east back in 1990.
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It was not a promise. It was. It was a. It was an idea that James Baker, the Secretary of State, launched informally in a conversation with Gorbachev that concerned German territory. So the sort of the merging of West Germany and East Germany, Gorbachev didn't pick up on it. He didn't put it into writing. He never said it was an agreement. And irrespective if he had, it would still only concern German territory. And the Russian leaders have since made a lot of this remark. It's true that it was an idea that could have meant that NATO would not expand beyond Germany. And for this reason, US President Bush and German Chancellor Kohl, very quickly when they learned of this conversation and sort of the way things were going, they took control and said, we won't even discuss this any further.
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Over more than seven decades has NATO strayed from its origins. It's still at its core, a collective defense alliance anchored in American power. That bit hasn't changed. Article 5 is still the crux. The US nuclear umbrella still essential. Its European and North Atlantic geography remains key, though now the Arctic and Indo Pacific are increasing considerations. NATO became a military organization during the Korean War and a wider political security order during the Cold War. And then this expanding architecture in Europe, at times operating beyond its own territory in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. It outlived the enemy that it had originally been made for and became something bigger and in ways something more ambiguous than the founders initially imagined. Then after 2014 and especially after 2022, NATO returned to something closer to its original logic and aggressor. Russia's annexation of Crimea and then full scale invasion of Ukraine brought Europe back to deterrence, borders, reinforcement and fear of a wider war and wanting to stop it. Finland joined in 2023, Sweden in 2024. For those who said that NATO had lost its purpose, Russia gave it one again. Those are your questions answered. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and I will see you.