NATO - Eighty Years of Peace If You Ignore the Rest of the World

Nancy O'Brien Simpson

Photo: flickr.com by Министерство обороны США, https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/

Войска США

“NATO has kept the peace for nearly eight decades and created the conditions for prosperity and democracy to flourish.”
U.S. State Department

This is a remarkable claim, repeated with near religious reverence by Western leaders. NATO has kept the peace for nearly eighty years. One almost admires the audacity. Because outside a narrow band of white European countries, the postwar world has been anything but peaceful. For much of humanity, the NATO era has been an age of fire.

Yes, NATO succeeded at one thing. It prevented Western European powers from once again tearing each other apart. No small accomplishment on a continent with a talent for self-destruction. But to confuse intra-European restraint with global peace is either willful blindness or imperial arrogance. NATO did not keep the world at peace. It simply moved the violence elsewhere.

Since World War II and NATO’s formation, the United States with the political blessing, silence, or logistical support of its European allies has waged war across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Napalm fell on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Villages burned. Children fled naked down roads, skin peeling from their bodies. NATO, supposedly the guardian of peace, was nowhere to be found.

Worse, the Vietnam War was not even an American idea at birth. It was prosecuted in part to preserve French colonial interests. Business holdings and imperial pride masquerading as anti communism. Millions died so Europe could lose its colonies slowly rather than all at once.

Then came Iraq. In 2003, the United States invaded on the basis of an outright lie. Weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Tens of thousands were killed, many more maimed, millions displaced, an entire region destabilized for generations. NATO allies either joined the invasion or politely looked away. Peace, apparently, does not extend to Baghdad.

Afghanistan followed. From 2001 to 2021, the United States and NATO allies bombed, occupied, and rebuilt a nation into a fragile simulacrum of democracy that collapsed within days of withdrawal. After twenty years, trillions of dollars, and countless civilian deaths, Afghanistan returned precisely to what it had been before Western intervention. So much for exporting enlightenment at gunpoint.

And these are only the most famous wars.

Korea, flattened into rubble.
Iran, destabilized by coups.
Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, where United States backed interventions crushed elected governments.
Libya, reduced to chaos after NATO airstrikes.
Yemen, bombed with Western weapons.
Palestine, occupied, displaced, and denied statehood for decades under Western protection.

One begins to see the pattern.

When Western leaders boast that NATO has preserved peace, what they mean is this. Peace has been preserved for them. If you are brown, black, or living far from Brussels, you do not count in the peace ledger. Your wars are peripheral. Your dead are collateral. Your suffering does not interrupt champagne toasts in European capitals.

Even within Europe, the record is not pristine. NATO’s expansion eastward, undertaken with astonishing hubris and strategic deafness, helped provoke the catastrophe in Ukraine. This does not excuse Russian aggression, but it does expose the lie that NATO is a neutral guardian of stability rather than a geopolitical actor with consequences.

Meanwhile, NATO countries enjoy extraordinary standards of living. Universal healthcare. Paid parental leave. Free or affordable higher education. Robust pensions. These benefits are made possible, in part, by an unspoken arrangement. The United States foots the military bill.

America pours nearly 1.5 trillion dollars annually into its war machine. Money that does not go to healthcare, education, infrastructure, or social security. European NATO members lecture Washington while quietly outsourcing their defense to it, enjoying Scandinavian social democracy under an American military umbrella.

It is a stunning moral inversion.

Perhaps it is time for NATO to practice humility. To stop congratulating itself for eighty years of peace while standing atop a mountain of foreign dead. To reckon honestly with the wars it enabled, the countries it broke, and the racial hierarchy implicit in whose peace matters and whose does not.

NATO did not keep the world at peace.
It kept Europe comfortable and exported the violence.