NATO IS DEAD

Written by Michael Thervil

NATO IS DEAD | PHOTO BY ALEX BRAONDON

[NATO] Through the eyes of many geopolitical analysts within the international community, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO is now dead. NATO which was founded and since expanded since 1949 to 32 member states after the second world war, has according to many “reached it’s limit of usefulness to the world”. in the beginning NATO was formed as a collective organization to stop the Soviet Union (formally U.S.S.R.) from reaching the boarders of Europe. However, since 1949 several things have happened; starting first with the Soviet Union not concocting plans to invade Europe, followed by the Soviet Union making no effort to militarily annex any part of Europe, followed by the Soviet Union in 1991 collapsing which gave birth to what is now known as the Russian Federation.

But these historical occurrences are not the reason why NATO is now considered dead by geopolitical analysts. NATO is dead for two reasons which start off with the over dependence on the American military and secondly by its inability to remain relevant in a multi-polar world. While the Americans spent an estimated $980 billion on NATO defense in 2025, which accounted for well over the 2% agreed upon number by all NATO members. It took the combined efforts of both Europe and Canada, two countries, to even come close to matching that as they spent an estimated total of $512 billion on NATO defense. All other NATO member countries pale in comparison.

With the exceptionally low number of NATO member states that met the agreed upon percentage in terms of military defense spending, this left those member states to not only become dependent on the American military to carry the brunt of the NATO defense budget, but it also allowed them to fall into complacency. Some geopolitical analysts have gone as far as to say that many NATO member states have taken advantage of the fact that they have been able to get away with not meeting their fiscal obligations to NATO while still being able to reap the benefits of Article 5 protection. Article 5 protect in a nutshell simply means if one NATO country is attacked, then all NATO member countries have been attacked and thus are justified to come to the military defense and aid of the attacked NATO member state.

The question of the day is how many NATO countries have been directly attacked by non-NATO member states. The answer to that question is historically one time when America stated it was attacked on September 11^th, 2001. The so-called attack on America on September 11, 2001, allegedly led by Osama bin Laden, is considered by many the world over to be sketchy at best by many people both inside and outside of America. Outside of that, 76 of the 77 years that NATO has been in existence, the one year that it was attacked failed to justify the trillions of dollars that has been spent to keep what many are calling a failing alliance afloat.

This leads to the widely held idea that NATO is irrelevant in a multi-polar world. since the soviet union hasn't existed in order 35 years (half of the existence of NATO), combined with the fact that Russia has never declared or projected any plans or actions to forcibly annex or invade any part of Europe, augmented by the fact that world has now reached the age of multi-polarity where there are no permanent friends or enemies – only like-minded interest where any country can do business with any country despite American led sanctions; the relevance  and legitimacy of NATO has indeed collapsed upon itself.

From the perspective of non-NATO member states within the international community, it appears that the only countries that greatly benefit from what’s left of NATO are the European countries that have grown too weak, complacent, and decadent to stand on their own.