By Maximilien Danton —

Russian Bullshit: NATO Encroachment

I've been in some unfortunate arguments on Reddit and in YouTube comment sections about the war in Ukraine. This one argument keeps being raised by people, which has motivated me to write this so I don't have to keep repeating the same points. This is not a fringe issue. Here is a quote from one of the biggest political streamers on the left:

In that circumstance, NATO is 1000% an aggressor outside fucking force. Russia is not. Russia is annexing its own fucking territory that it's had. Its own territory full of its own people, is not the same as NATO being like we're going to turn your country into a base and put literal fucking military bases and rockets into your country.

The context here is before the full scale invasion started in February 2022 and this person denied that Russia would actually invade. That confident prediction couldn't be more wrong. Since Russia has used this as a pretext for their full scale invasion, let's explore the claim in more detail.

Why does NATO exist?

  1. Defense against Russia

NATO exists primarily as a defensive alliance against a much larger power to the east, namely Russia. During world war 2, the USSR had a pact with Nazi Germany that allowed them to take much of the territory that we knew as the Soviet Union in eastern Europe. When Russia fought Nazi Germany after they were betrayed and attacked in Operation Barbarossa, they took every territory they could for themselves, stretching as far as east Germany.

Shortly after the second world war, the cold war began. Western Europe was weak and unable to fend of the now massively enlarged USSR. NATO was established by the US and Europe as a defensive pact should Russia invade. Primarily, NATO acted as a deterrent and defense, not as a military force that was gearing up to invade Russia.

  1. Peace in Europe

European history is a blood bath. There were constant wars throughout its existence. The world wars showed that the level of destruction and death that Europe was capable of would ultimately be self destructive. NATO created an alliance of European states in defense against any aggressor, including members against other members. If any country were to defect and invade another, there would be 31 other countries bearing down on them from the outset. This makes the prospect of war within Europe too costly for any state, member or not. It also avoids the pitfalls of bilateral security agreements, which is part of the reason why the whole of Europe were dragged into the first world war. If country A promises to protect country B, and country B is invaded by country C, then country D who has a pact with country C is then at war with country A and B, and so on. NATO avoids this trap with a one for all, and all for one defensive pact.

  1. Efficient Defense

If I have ships and you have planes, it makes sense to form a defensive alliance. It has so many advantages including cost, force generation potential, specialisation, and innovation. Cooperation creates opportunities that working alone or bilaterally just cannot achieve.

With that, let's look at the arguments for why Russia claims they are threatened by NATO.

NATO Is Planning To Invade Russia

NATO is a defensive alliance, and so the only way "NATO" could invade Russia would be if every NATO country had a common invasion plan. Besides being a gargantuan planning effort for an extremely costly war, NATO as an organisation has no binding treaty that you have to attack if someone else does. Hiding such a plan would be the most difficult counter intelligence job in history. For this plan to succeed, NATO would have to:

  1. Keep all their plans and schemes hidden from Russian and Chinese intelligence.
  2. Build up a military force that was geared for invasion, comprising millions of soldiers, thousands of tanks, artillery and munitions coming out the wazoo.
  3. An active policy of enlargement would have to be pursued with vigour, especially for Ukraine. Ukraine would need the red carpet rolled out for them and guarantees of protection during their joining. Finland and Sweden would also need to be aggressively courted to join the alliance, given their favourable strategic positions.
  4. Europe would have to find alternatives to Russian oil. The dumbest thing you can do is attack the country you are getting your Diesel and Jetfuel from with armoured vehicles and jets.

Did any of this happen? No! In fact the opposite happened.

  1. Europe was crawling with Russian spies before 2022. Russia was even able to assassinate political dissidents in Europe with little or no repercussions. It would have been impossible to hide such a plan especially considering countries like Hungary who were allied with Russia under Victor Orban, who called himself Putin's little mouse in a leaked conversation. There were no media leaks, no intelligence leaks and NATO exercises are defensive drills.
  2. Europe's military expenditure has been falling for decades. When the full scale invasion happened, Europe didn't have enough military materiel to send to Ukraine. When they did have any, they didn't send enough and they placed limitations on how the hardware could be used. Ukraine was not allowed to strike Russian territory with weapons from allies. The US was constantly chiding European countries for not spending enough on their military forces. That requirement was a mere 2% of GDP. Hardly something to be afraid of.
  3. The last burst of significant enlargement of NATO was in 2004. These were countries bordering Russia. They knew that they would inevitably be invaded, because Russia had been doing so for centuries. The year before, Russia officially took over Chechnya. Ukraine was not part of that group. Ukraine wanted to be part of NATO since 2008, but NATO was hesitant. Hardly the kind of thing a malign force would do if they were planning on attacking Russia.
  4. After the fall of the USSR, Europe went to great lengths to normalise relations with Russia. Part of that project was the principle of handel durch wandel. This was a German doctrine meant to foster peace through trade with Russia. The pipelines and purchasing of Russian resources was part of that plan. There was no pre-war decoupling. Even Putin's speech at the 2008 Munich security council telegraphing his intention to attack didn't rouse NATO from its slumber. Even after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine NATO did basically nothing. They certainly didn't try to stop using Russian oil. Obama sent blankets and helmets to Ukraine. Europe kept buying Russian oil.

But maybe you think "sure, but Russia isn't saying that NATO will attack, only that they don't want NATO close to them.", but you must see how ridiculous it is to feel threatened by a defensive alliance that never attacked you and also did everything in their power to keep you on side,

Nowhere, not one reason for NATO to exist is to invade Russia. Nobody wants to invade Russia. It's a terrible place. Mostly desolate and poor with awful weather. To make it even less appealing, Russia has a massive population of 140 million people, and because the people are worthless to the state, sending them to their deaths doesn't deter Russian war plans. Russia also has a massive nuclear stockpile. Countries with nuclear weapons don't get invaded. This has been true since 1945.

But it's like the Cuban Missile Crisis

No, it fucking isn't! The cold war was very much a war, even though Russia and the USA didn't directly attack each other. Both Russia and the USA were building up massive nuclear weapon stockpiles and building increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction with each other's names on them. There were some very touch and go moments in that war. The trade and constant deference to Russia in Europe is the opposite of a war. Europe was trying its best to peacefully coexist with Russia. Even the US was, with Hillary Clinton embarrassingly presenting the Russian foreign minister with an actual big red "Reset" button in 2009. Joining a defensive alliance in peace time is not a threat. If it was, wars would be constant and unceasing.

Furthermore, French, British, and American nuclear weapons would have no problems reaching Russia. Ukraine joining NATO would not have threatened Russia at all. If you needed to put your ICBM silos in Latvia or Ukraine, they wouldn't be intercontinental now would they? Is it reasonable to think that US Nuclear submarines or B2 bombers couldn't deliver a nuclear attack to Moscow?

But NATO attacked in Kosovo!

This is the sole military intervention that fingers NATO as an organisation itself. The reason for the intervention was a genocide perpetrated by Serbia. If you have a genocide on your doorstep, it sure does justify a military intervention, if anything ever has.

What about Iraq? Afghanistan?

After 9/11, understandably the US invoked article 5 of the treaty, which makes sense considering the brazen terrorist attack in the US. Isn't this what a defensive alliance is supposed to do? If Russia believed that this was not justified, they wouldn't have used the same pretext to start the second war with Chechnya. There is a vital distinction here too that hangers on of Russian bullshit don't consider: Chechnya was annexed by Russia. Neither Iraq or Afghanistan became "NATO" territory.

NATO did not take part in the Iraq war, but member states formed a "coalition of the willing", trusting the US pretext of weapons of mass destruction. Which NATO members were not part of the Coalition of the willing? Small insignificant ones like France and bloody Germany.

This argument almost always leans heavily on US military adventurism. Whatever can be said about that is irrelevant to NATO as an organisation. The glaringly obvious fact that Russia wasn't the target of post cold war military actions by the US spells out how little of a threat NATO actually is to Russia.

But it's a proxy war between NATO and Russia!

It isn't. The participants in a proxy war are not the countries who are proxying other nations. In a proxy war, you don't directly attack your target and they don't directly defend. You support a side that is favourable to you. Russia invading Ukraine is not a proxy war with NATO, because Russia is fighting the war themselves without a third party representing them.

NATO has also done a piss poor job at fighting the "proxy war" if it was that. Denying the best weapons to Ukraine. Blocking the use of supplied weapons on Russian territory. Slow rolling military aid when it's most needed, denying any air defense from their own territories. It would be the dumbest possible way to fight a proxy war against Russia. In any case, picking Ukraine as the battleground would be idiotic, since Ukraine had a very small military force before 2014.

But NATO wants Russia's resources

Russia's primary resource is oil and gas. Europe has aggressive targets for reducing reliance on fossil fuels, not increasing dependency. Attacking another country for stuff you plan on not using is absurd. It's much less effort to just buy it from them and go about your business reducing fossil fuel dependency. Hell, even China is doing that! The US policy is not to do that but they have their own oil and gas. It was also not their policy in the Obama years, which was exactly when Russia decided it had to destroy Ukraine and takes its territory.

The Reality

The reality is that Russia is the encroaching nation. Russia has in the last 30 years, invaded Afghanistan, Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine. Russia is an imperialist aggressor country that is constantly looking for ways to expand. It has in the last 10 years alone taken Belarus and now Georgia. Russia uses disinformation, sabotage, vote buying, funding of disruptive political actors and other "Active measures" all over the world. They were involved in Brexit and the US elections in 2016 onward.

Their greatest victory however is over idiots on the internet who are willing to swallow their bullshit to sound like sophisticated and nuanced geopolitical pundits. Occupying a false middle position doesn't make someone smart, it makes them an idiot. Believing that everything the west does because it was the bad guy so many times by sympathising with countries that are doing the worst things the west was guilty of in their imperial war phase doesn't make someone a champion of the downtrodden, just an enthusiastic boot licker of the boot stamping on a human face forever.