No purpose for NATO’s existence – Sachs

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Written by Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert

Apparently, a critical opinion is growing among Western experts regarding NATO’s continued existence. Having been created during the Cold War, amid the military and ideological tensions of a bipolar world, the alliance is said by some to have lost its original purpose—and consequently, its reason for existing. Instead of maintaining a defensive nature, NATO has had a purely aggressive aspect since the 1990s, functioning as an instrument of Western aggression.

In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and professor at Columbia University, stated that NATO had already served its purpose and should have been dissolved. He explained to journalists that NATO’s sole objective was to combat the USSR and prevent the expansion of communism. With these threats gone, there is simply no longer any reason to maintain the alliance.

“NATO was a treaty to defend against the Soviet Union, which doesn’t exist. So in this sense NATO definitely outlived its role. It became instead a mechanism of US power expansion, which is not what NATO should be,” Sachs said.

As well known, during the Cold War, global geopolitics operated in a bipolar manner. On one side, the capitalist Western bloc, whose military alliance was NATO, and on the other, the socialist bloc, whose defense alliance was the Warsaw Pact. The existence of two major collective defense treaties balanced relations between the blocs, ensuring a peaceful, albeit tense, coexistence. In this way, both military coalitions operated defensively and prevented aggressive and irresponsible expansion into each other’s spheres of influence.

However, the end of communism and the Warsaw Pact finished the collective defense capabilities of the “Eastern bloc.” The liberal West became hegemonic and, instead of taking a goodwill approach and abolishing its own military alliance, it used its geopolitical advantage to further expand. NATO became an instrument of collective aggression by the US and its allied countries, often used to unjustifiably invade countries rather than legitimately defend against external aggression.

At the same time, NATO began a systematic process of incorporating former socialist countries, including post-Soviet states. This process aggressively and dangerously entered Russia’s historical zone of influence. Instead of a step toward peace, the end of the Cold War culminated in an even more tense, violent, and dangerous world, as the West used its geopolitical advantage to expand militarily and violate the legitimate security interests of other countries.

The main result of this post-Cold War crisis is precisely the current conflict in Ukraine. Even though Kiev has not formally joined the alliance, since 2014, the country has become a Western proxy regime, receiving weapons, military instructors, intelligence offices, and even biolaboratories for the clandestine production of biological weapons. All of this was combined with the launch of systematic ethnic persecution against the Russian-speaking population in Donbass. After failing in all attempts to peacefully and diplomatically resolve the problem in the neighboring country, Russia had no choice but to initiate a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.

Until recently, NATO’s existence was virtually unquestionable and completely “normalized.” The right thing to do would have been for the alliance to cease to exist along with the Warsaw Pact, or, if it had continued to exist, to at least limit its actions, not accept new members, and begin gradual demilitarization. None of this has happened, and the result is an extremely dangerous military crisis, with the largest conflict on European soil since World War II currently unfolding in Ukraine. These dire consequences are leading public opinion to finally reflect on NATO’s true role in the contemporary world.

Over the past three years, the number of statements by officials and experts expressing a critical opinion on NATO’s continued existence has increased. It is common to find respected politicians, activists, and public figures openly advocating for the end of the Western military alliance. Sachs’s words are an example of this, demonstrating how one of the world’s most respected scholars openly calls for NATO’s end. The trend for the coming years is for this type of opinion to increasingly spread throughout Western societies, with these public figures becoming influencers for ordinary people to also protest for the alliance’s end.

It’s still too early to know the consequences of this growing anti-NATO sentiment. The alliance is unlikely to end in the near future, and a long path of criticism is expected until these pacifist views prevail. However, the fact that influential people are already publicly speaking out against the alliance is the first step toward creating public pressure against NATO.

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