BILJANA VANKOVSKA: It’s Time to Consign NATO to the Dustbin of History

It’s Time to Consign NATO to the Dustbin of History

 

By Biljana Vankovska

SOURCE: Globetrotter

   

As NATO’s next summit looms – against the backdrop of an escalating proxy war in Ukraine and a genocidal horror in Gaza – the sane and moral world must roar in defiance, shattering ideological shackles. NATO is a zombie alliance, lurching forward despite its irrelevance, its fangs dripping with the blood of nations it claims to protect. In Ukraine, NATO’s members pour fuel on the inferno, championing escalation over peace. The United States, its puppet-master, plays a vile charade – preaching peace while strong-arming allies to bankroll its war machine. Trump’s $175 billion Golden Dome, a space-based missile defence boondoggle, is a reckless gambit that threatens global annihilation.

 

Without US muscle, NATO is a toothless fraud. Its true mission – past and present – is not defence but terror-mongering, fabricating enemies to feed the ravenous military-industrial complex. This hydra now entwines media, academia, and Hollywood, peddling war as entertainment. NATO is a global arms bazaar, hawking obsolete weapons and testing new ones on the corpses of the vulnerable. Its mantras – ‘peace through strength’, ‘path to peace with more weapons’ – is Orwellian poison, weaponising language to silence dissent. Those who dare question this madness are smeared as traitors to peace.

 

The Hague summit will churn out its tired script: skyrocketing military budgets – now potentially 5% of GDP – siphoning resources from health care, education, and the poor. Russia and China will be vilified as existential threats to justify this plunder. NATO flouts the UN Charter and its own founding charter, leaving a trail of ravaged nations and dead civilians. Its cheerleaders – think tanks, the media, and warmonger officials – demand a ‘stronger, fairer and more lethal NATO’, lusting for hypersonic weapons, preemptive strikes, and space militarisation. This is not defence; it’s domination on steroids.

 

The 1999 bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a turning point in NATO’s history. Launched without UN Security Council approval, it was a brazenly illegal assault, justified by a sham ‘humanitarian’ pretext. No legal basis existed; NATO’s actions mocked Articles 51 and 2(4) of the UN Charter, setting a blueprint for lawless militarism dressed in moral drag. Article 2(4) enshrines the principle of state sovereignty and prohibits unilateral use of force. Article 51, which governs the right to self-defence, provides the only explicit exception to this rule, allowing military force solely in response to an armed attack. Since NATO’s intervention was neither authorised by the UN Security Council nor conducted in self-defence, it constituted a breach of both provisions of the UN Charter.

 

Its 50th anniversary was celebrated with bombs on a sovereign state that did not threaten NATO whatsoever. It was the promotion of the ‘out-of-area’ doctrine – something that would prove very useful in the forthcoming interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. The 1999 bombing campaign wasn’t about human rights protection – it was imperial border-carving, birthing client states like Kosovo and outposts like Camp Bondsteel, the United States’ Balkan fortress. The Kosovo conflict was complex, its suffering real, but NATO’s illegal intervention unleashed chaos, unaccountable for war crimes like depleted uranium, civilian infrastructure strikes and a significant number of ‘collateral deaths’. It gave the hegemon a blank check to redraw maps and shatter states. It de facto opened the Pandora’s box for any other great power.

 

In May 2000, during a lecture at the George C. Marshall Center marking the first anniversary of NATO’s intervention, I issued a Cassandra-like warning: that Macedonia – my country – would soon be drawn into military conflict as a result of the spillover effect. Nine months later, that prediction became reality. NATO, alongside the EU, imposed a logic of ethnic partition, echoing the blueprint used in Bosnia. To this day, the Balkans suffocate under the legacy of NATO’s so-called ‘military humanism’ (to borrow Chomsky’s phrase). The EU’s state-building medicines did the rest. The entire region still resembles a powder keg. Ironically, in 2018, Macedonia – renamed North Macedonia – surrendered its constitutional identity in exchange for NATO membership, seduced by hollow promises of peace, prosperity, and security. Instead, the country finds itself entangled in the Ukraine quagmire, expected to allocate up to 5% of its GDP to armaments, while more than a third of its population languishes in poverty.

 

NATO’s economic and social toll is catastrophic. Its demand for ever-higher military budgets – 2% of GDP, now 3.5%, or 5% – is a death sentence for social welfare. Hospitals crumble, schools decay, and citizens are crushed under austerity while NATO’s warlords feast on our taxes. Anti-NATO circles rightly decry this economic vampirism, but their calls for budget restraint or austerity tweaks are band-aids on a terminal disease. These palliative measures leave the beast intact, free to drain nations dry. The real cure is radical: disband NATO entirely and embrace a multilateralism based on the UN Charter principle: peace by peaceful means. Anything less is complicity in its crimes.

 

Peace movements will protest the summit in The Hague and elsewhere, but NATO’s elite, barricaded behind security cordons, will sneer, as will their media lapdogs. NATO’s complicity in Gaza’s genocide and Ukraine’s catastrophe will be buried. The ruling class, deaf to public outcry, thrives on our practicality and civility. Peace activism must be a relentless, daily rebellion, not summit-pageantry. The warmongers rule our nations, funded by our labour and taxes, making this fight local, too. In my country, Macedonia, the Levica (Left) party demands the country’s withdrawal from NATO. My 2024 presidential programme proposed a simple, defiant act: a letter to the US State Department to exit the alliance and embrace neutral status instead.

 

In a fractured, multipolar world, where Trump’s erratic reign has shattered order, NATO and the EU are fusing into a militarised monolith. The EU’s ReArm initiative erases their boundaries. This isn’t about ideology; it’s about survival. Like the child in Andersen’s tale, we must scream the truth: NATO is a naked destroyer, perpetuating violence (physical, structural, and cultural) while gutting the UN system and imperilling global peace.

 

Disband it. Leave it. Choose military neutrality and work for a shared future for humanity. Nothing less will do.

 

No to NATO. Yes to Peace.

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AUTHOR BIO: Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, a member of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is a member of the No Cold War collective, and can be contacted at: bvankovska@gmail.com