Why NATO’s defense hysteria warrants resistance

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On March 24, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) chief, Jens Stoltenberg, hailed accelerated financial and military aid to Ukraine from Norway, further compromising the latter’s less hawkish approach to serve zero-sum conflict strategies. Other key voices, such as Sweden, are now being pushed to step-up their counterproductive military cooperation, while Washington uses NATO’s bloc anxieties as a pretext to justify a two-fold increase in its defense budget. This defense hysteria is designed to set up more roadblocks to negotiating peace in conflict hotspots and keep Europe from embracing any semblance of “peace” as arms galore.

Evidence from Norway, Finland and Sweden reflects a broader pattern of conformity to NATO’s arms buildup and sustained expansion at the expense of global security and European unity. Major powers such as France and Germany are already arrested in non-combative tensions spanning economic, nuclear and climate imperatives for their populations, and have sent mixed signals on the extent of their overt assistance to NATO’s Europe-centric defense push. "The pace now, when it comes to increases in defence spending, is not high enough," complained Stoltenberg in a recent bid to urge defense spending boosts. "My message to allies is that we welcome what they've done but they need to speed up, they need to deliver more in a more dangerous world."

We have seen this movie before. Coercing states into spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense is a recipe for a false sense of security, given that scores of NATO states are already facing growth headwinds, but are told to put the bloc’s hegemonic geopolitical ambitions first. The United States is already hellbent on sidestepping the decision-making autonomy of less hawkish NATO member states, as it tries to market its record-setting defense budget as a dual necessity for China containment and NATO assistance. These are precisely the rationales employed by some of the bloc’s top military spenders in the past to deny a level-playing security field for affected nations the world over.

Take groundless allegations of Beijing’s so-called “bullying” of its neighbors in the East and South China Seas. The toxic assumption of regional conflict led the United States to market its self-defeating Indo-Pacific strategy as a selling point for the military, and by extension, NATO. However, it is Washington’s notorious support for European militarization and its role as an intervening power in the Indo-Pacific that poses the greatest risks to peacebuilding and stability in sovereign waters. Stepped-up defense spending heightens those risks for all other member states that celebrate more arms at the expense of nonalignment. 

The United Kingdom’s own prioritization of depleted uranium ammunition supplies to Ukraine is also a wake-up call for NATO apologists. The arrival of the ammunition after rejecting broad-based peace calls has been rightly termed by Russia’s US ambassador as bringing “humanity to a dangerous line, beyond which nuclear Armageddon looms more and more clearly.” Where are the bedrock NATO principles of strategic deliberation that counterproductive defense spending hopes to violate in full?

A wide wave of protests witnessed against the West’s arms and defense escalation stands to gather more steam. Particularly because true strategic autonomy means charting a nation’s own path to domestic stability and geopolitical risk reduction, as opposed to following the dictates of NATO. Proceeding in the latter direction can also translate aimless defense spending into a stronger military status-quo that is maximally favorable to Washington and European elites, keeping others in the dark.

The renewed push for NATO military exercises and defense supplies through Scandinavian proponents comes as no surprise. Unmet assurances of ‘more arms for more stability’ have deepened skepticism within bloc ranks to NATO’s perpetual cycle of violence and interference in conflict hotspots, leading to a flurry of diplomacy in other regional forums. Flashy Western visits to Kiev are also struggling to gain traction with the public, as NATO insists on directing hard-earned money towards bloc objectives that have brought Ukrainian security and European growth aspirations to their knees.

The internal division on supporting NATO’s military spending is striking. As Politico Magazine notes, “not even a war has succeeded in pushing Europe’s biggest powers to reach their defense spending targets,” keeping Europe’s largest economies away from perpetual support. Let’s be clear: NATO is responsible for its own defense hysteria, and the credibility crisis that has emerged on the back of it.

Finally, by playing into the nuclearization card from time to time, NATO has dialed-up leverage for Western defense industrial complexes. These industries have willingly traded away global stability for an arms race before. Now add to it NATO’s insistence that allies have no choice but to respond through more ambitious military spending goals, and the greatest risk to near-term nuclear deterrence is the confrontational posture that comes from within the bloc. 

Taken together, NATO’s dictation of defense imperatives and glorified conflict contributions brings its military hysteria out into the open, meriting resistance from within.