“Nonviolence Or Nonexistence”: Why Leaving NATO Embraces World Peace
By Dr. Tom H. Hastings Photos: Wikimedia Commons NATO overreach It is easy to understand why some “peace” people are criticizing Donald Trump’s frequent threat to pull the US out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a peace person, however, I have to agree with Trump’s threat. Pull out! I have entirely different reasons than Trump; mine are related to actual peace, not the Trumpian peace-through-domineering-intimidation. My reasons for wishing the US would pull out of NATO are the opposite of Trump’s. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April, 1949, primarily to counter a Soviet threat to peace as the Soviets gobbled up Eastern and Central European countries under their domination at the conclusion of World War II and over the next few years, forming their own military pact with Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia by 1955. This Warsaw Pact was the Soviet bid for geopolitical power and control. Arguably, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact co-developed as the Soviets and “the West” (western Europe and North America) were alarmed as each side increasingly consolidated competing coalitions of countries and evolving military structures. By the 1980s the military threat to and from the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact was obviously powerful–and just as clearly ineffective. Indeed, whether considering the global stalemate of mutually assured destruction as the endgame of competing nuclear arsenals or the mirrored standoff of proxy wars–Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.–the outcome of the post-World War II power struggle was insoluble by military might. Nevertheless, each side escalated. The Soviets had developed and installed their powerful medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles, capable of striking targets across European NATO member countries in 1976 and by 1977, then-president Jimmy Carter declared the development of corresponding US missiles, the Pershing IIs and Cruise missiles, to be capable of evading detection (304 Cruises) and able to strike Moscow from US bases in Europe in 5-8 minutes (108 Pershing IIs). Carter always claimed these proposed Euromissiles were only bargaining chips to get the Soviets to agree to dismantle their threatening SS-20s. Then he lost the 1980 race to Ronald Reagan. Reagan, it was said, believed the last glib person who talked to him. In the case of the Euromissiles, Reagan was told by some former (largely intellectually disgraced) CIA analysts that those Pershing IIs and Cruises could change all the equations in Europe and for the US. Reagan infamously said that he was convinced that a nuclear war could be contained to Europe and that we would prevail. Nonviolence rises up That’s when, finally, the citizenry of the NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact satellite nations stumbled into nonviolent civil resistance and broke the impasse. Citizens rose up in the US and the Soviet Union, but nothing compared to the millions in the streets in 1983-1984 around US Air Force bases in the UK, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. People power in the Warsaw Pact countries shook the foundations of Soviet domination and then forced it to crumble. Solidarity won in Poland, deposing the communist dictator. The Berlin Wall fell. Hungarians bolted from the Warsaw Pact and Soviet domination. The Velvet Revolution saw the end of dictatorship and the reformulation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, ending their decades under the Soviet thumb. The collapse of Soviet-backed dictatorships in all these places was a result of nonviolent civil resistance, not the violent civil war the CIA was hoping for. Indeed, our intelligence services were so ignorant of people power that they failed to predict any of this. The Warsaw Pact folded in 1991. At that point, NATO’s raison d’etre weakened. And when Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the justification for NATO vanished. But the combination of pathetic reliance on threats of nuclear annihilation and general militarism-for-profit not only prevented the logical end of NATO, the last standing major military alliance actually expanded. Eastward. From 12 to 32 countries. Toward Russia. This helped enflame the rise of strongman Vladimir Putin, who speaks and acts the Russian rage at the encroaching NATO powers, legitimately perceived as a threat by him and Russians. He has made a career–a life–out of fueling the irridentist longing for a revived Russian empire, back when it controlled Ukraine and the Caucasus region from 1721-1917. He’s even made bizarre references to retaking Alaska, or at least his trolls online have. Arguably, if NATO had grabbed the chance for actual peace around 1991 and simply also ended, we might not have the dual challenges of Putin invading Ukraine and Putin seeming to control Trump. With the generalized authoritarian backslide, we might be tempted to conclude that we’ve b
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Photos: Wikimedia Commons
NATO overreach
It is easy to understand why some “peace” people are criticizing Donald Trump’s frequent threat to pull the US out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As a peace person, however, I have to agree with Trump’s threat. Pull out!
I have entirely different reasons than Trump; mine are related to actual peace, not the Trumpian peace-through-domineering-intimidation. My reasons for wishing the US would pull out of NATO are the opposite of Trump’s.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April, 1949, primarily to counter a Soviet threat to peace as the Soviets gobbled up Eastern and Central European countries under their domination at the conclusion of World War II and over the next few years, forming their own military pact with Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia by 1955. This Warsaw Pact was the Soviet bid for geopolitical power and control. Arguably, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact co-developed as the Soviets and “the West” (western Europe and North America) were alarmed as each side increasingly consolidated competing coalitions of countries and evolving military structures.
By the 1980s the military threat to and from the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact was obviously powerful–and just as clearly ineffective. Indeed, whether considering the global stalemate of mutually assured destruction as the endgame of competing nuclear arsenals or the mirrored standoff of proxy wars–Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.–the outcome of the post-World War II power struggle was insoluble by military might.
Nevertheless, each side escalated. The Soviets had developed and installed their powerful medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles, capable of striking targets across European NATO member countries in 1976 and by 1977, then-president Jimmy Carter declared the development of corresponding US missiles, the Pershing IIs and Cruise missiles, to be capable of evading detection (304 Cruises) and able to strike Moscow from US bases in Europe in 5-8 minutes (108 Pershing IIs).
Carter always claimed these proposed Euromissiles were only bargaining chips to get the Soviets to agree to dismantle their threatening SS-20s.
Then he lost the 1980 race to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, it was said, believed the last glib person who talked to him. In the case of the Euromissiles, Reagan was told by some former (largely intellectually disgraced) CIA analysts that those Pershing IIs and Cruises could change all the equations in Europe and for the US. Reagan infamously said that he was convinced that a nuclear war could be contained to Europe and that we would prevail.
Nonviolence rises up
That’s when, finally, the citizenry of the NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact satellite nations stumbled into nonviolent civil resistance and broke the impasse. Citizens rose up in the US and the Soviet Union, but nothing compared to the millions in the streets in 1983-1984 around US Air Force bases in the UK, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere.
People power in the Warsaw Pact countries shook the foundations of Soviet domination and then forced it to crumble. Solidarity won in Poland, deposing the communist dictator. The Berlin Wall fell. Hungarians bolted from the Warsaw Pact and Soviet domination. The Velvet Revolution saw the end of dictatorship and the reformulation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, ending their decades under the Soviet thumb. The collapse of Soviet-backed dictatorships in all these places was a result of nonviolent civil resistance, not the violent civil war the CIA was hoping for. Indeed, our intelligence services were so ignorant of people power that they failed to predict any of this. The Warsaw Pact folded in 1991.
At that point, NATO’s raison d’etre weakened. And when Gorbachev oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, the justification for NATO vanished.
But the combination of pathetic reliance on threats of nuclear annihilation and general militarism-for-profit not only prevented the logical end of NATO, the last standing major military alliance actually expanded. Eastward. From 12 to 32 countries. Toward Russia.
This helped enflame the rise of strongman Vladimir Putin, who speaks and acts the Russian rage at the encroaching NATO powers, legitimately perceived as a threat by him and Russians. He has made a career–a life–out of fueling the irridentist longing for a revived Russian empire, back when it controlled Ukraine and the Caucasus region from 1721-1917. He’s even made bizarre references to retaking Alaska, or at least his trolls online have.
Arguably, if NATO had grabbed the chance for actual peace around 1991 and simply also ended, we might not have the dual challenges of Putin invading Ukraine and Putin seeming to control Trump.
With the generalized authoritarian backslide, we might be tempted to conclude that we’ve blown it, as a species, by making such bellicose decisions for so long, for war painting ourselves into a losing corner from which there is no hope of a peaceful exit.
But that would be a mistake. Once again, we are at the juncture that reminds me of something Abba Eban said long ago, referring in his case to the Middle East: “We will do the right thing–after we’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”
That right thing now is civil resistance, the thing that liberated India in 1947, Ghana in 1957, Zambia in 1964, Tanzania in 1964, the Philippines in 1986, Eastern and Central European nations in 1989, Chile in 1990, the Baltic states in 1991, Serbia in 2000, Liberia in 2003, Tunisia in 2011, South Korea in 2025, and other countries along the way.
Yes, by Freedom House analysis and rankings (and other organizations who study democracy), the autocrats have gainedover the past 20 years and levels of freedom have declined. However, before that, democracy was gaining every year, the vast majority of cases as a result of nonviolent people power, which wins far more often than does violent uprising.
That is what just stopped the premier autocrat, Viktor Orban (the one so admired by MAGA that Steve Bannon referred to him admiringly as “Trump before Trump”) in Hungary. Trump supported him; Putin supported Orban as well. They all lost–by a landslide. Indeed, the only reason it counts as a democratic peaceful handoff of power is that Orban clearly saw the lopsided loss and knew that challenging the results would be even more ignominious for him when Hungarians rose up en masse to toss him out.
And that mass nonviolent resistance can stop Trump and others. If we are willing, we can win. War profiteering, NATO, and other militarized fossils can mercifully become even more patently obsolete. The future is exactly what Dr. King said, nonviolence or nonexistence.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.
