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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/natos-poorly-drafted-treaty

NATO’s Poorly Drafted Treaty

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

Here is the NATO Treaty.

1: Its Article 13 alleges that any Member-Nation which decides to quit the military alliance can do it only by denouncing NATO — “any Party may cease to be a Party one year after its notice of denunciation has been given to the Government of the United States.” The standard dictionary definition of “denounce” is “publicly declare to be wrong or evil.” So: the virtual owner of this military alliance — its only superpower, whose military protection each one of the other Members is buying by joining the U.S. alliance — is there informed that the only way to leave the alliance is to “denounce” it, to declare itself to be hostile toward it, an enemy of NATO; this alliance is 100% an “You’re either with us or against us” gang operation, which, to join, must be to be a member of until the organization itself terminates; because to leave it while it still continues is to become targeted by it as being yourself an enemy of it. Article 13 is saying that any Member that will ever leave the organization can do so ONLY by “denouncing” it. In other words: any such nation will thereby become an enemy of the superpower whose protection it had sought by joining this superpower’s gang. Another problem with this key word (“denounce”) is that it announces to the entire world that when the U.S. Government produced this Treaty in 1949 — at a time when the country it was intending to conquer, the Soviet Union, had no military alliance against the United States but subsequently became compelled to produce one (the Warsaw Pact) in 1955 — that the U.S. Government was already being run by neoconservatives, just as much then as when in 2003 it invaded Iraq entirely on the basis of lies. 

How does the U.S. regime deal with this problem of its having been profoundly neoconservative even so soon after the end of WW2? Of course, it deals with that by, first, ignoring the matter altogether, as it has always been doing; but another way of addressing this problem has been to lie about it. For example, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who owned the leading fake-‘progressive’ magazine The Nation, which is a guiding light to the fake ‘progressives’ in Congress so that they can know how to pretend to be progressives, in order to serve effectively the Democratic Party’s most liberal megadonors, headlined on 31 March 2009, “No to War, No to NATO” (which, if it had been authentically progresive would have instead been written “No to Imperialism, No to NATO,” since a progressive is intensely anti-imperialist but very definitely NOT anti-war if “war” is being waged against an imperialist’s invasion of one’s own country, because a war against a would-be usurper is a patriotic duty, not wrong at all — and this fact is even recognized in the U.N.’s Charter, in its provision (Article 51) on “self-defense.” So, right off the bat, she is waving a fake ‘progressivism’ — not the real thing, merely an imitation. But then it gets even worse, when she says, in an outright lie, to the effect that NATO is — as it claims to be — a defensive and NOT an offensive alliance, “What was originally designed as a defense alliance against the Warsaw Pact has taken on a very different post-Cold War, global interventionist role.” Actually, however: when the NATO Treaty and organization started in 1949, there wasn’t any such organization on the opposite side: the Warsaw Pact started six years later, in 1955, in order to counter NATO. So, this is how the Democratic Party’s apologists for their nation’s imperialism — the American variety, which is called “neoconservatism” — deal with its neoconservatism: by lying about the history. (Of course, on the Republican side, neoconservatism has been built into it at least ever since the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who was proud to be an American imperialist and to champion it.)

2: Its Article 5 says that an “armed attack” against one Member is an armed attack against all Members, and that each “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” It also says that “Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council.” Importantly, however, it fails to include the necessary-to-include CONNECTING provision, which would have been included there if NATO were to have any authentic claim to being a DEFENSIVE alliance (which it actually is NOT), to the effect that ONLY IF the Security Council authorizes the United Nations to respond to that “armed attack” (i.e., that that armed attack is in fact an aggression and NOT authentically a DEFENSIVE armed attack in nature), will NATO be AUTHORIZED (by the Security Council) to activate the purely retaliatory, 100% DEFENSIVE, RESPONSE, to that aggression which then would be — under international law, from the U.N. — aggression perpetrated against the territory of NATO. Lacking that connective provision, NATO’s Article 5 is written for an aggressive military alliance and not ONLY for a defensive one.

Furthermore: “armed attack” — a crucial phrase — is entirely undefined. Would a cyber-attack be an “armed attack”? Would a blockade be, if it’s carried out only OUTSIDE OF and surrounding the “attacked” nation? Would an armed insurrection that was promulgated by a foreign Government in order to take it over (conquer it) (such as the U.S. itself routinely does in its many coups) — would that constitute an “armed attack? (There also are many forms of unarmed attacks, such as by means of subversion, and by illegal — U.N. non-authorized — sanctions and secondary sanctions to enforce those. Do NATO Member Nations not even care at all about being safe against such tactics — tactics that the U.S. Government itself perpetrates more frequently than do all other nations in the world combined? Why are they allying themselves with the most aggressive power that the world has known since the time of Hitler?

NATO is so blind to its being an aggression-alliance with the world’s most aggressive Government — America’s after WW2 — so that even in NATO’s own article on the “Founding treaty” (this Treaty), it says: “The negotiating countries disagreed on how long the Treaty should last. Some countries favoured a long-term agreement that would set the initial duration at 20 years, while others feared that anything beyond 10 years would be seen as an unnecessary extension of the war effort.” It’s referring there to 1949. What was the “war effort” at that time? There was no war; so, what was the “war effort,” other than a desire by the armaments companies after WW2 not to see a plunge in the market-valuations on their stock as a result of the end of WW2? Both President Truman and President Eisenhower created and built up America’s military-industrial complex or “MIC,” and, now, were welcoming other countries under their “nuclear umbrella” and pitching to them this free ride on the backs of American taxpayers for the protection of the fortunes of their war-profiteers, top owners of the companies that had been thriving on their sales of weapons to the American Government, who were also top donors to the Democratic and Republican Parties. It was a con-job all-around, selling as-if this were a ‘defensive alliance’ the world’s all-time biggest offensive alliance in order for the U.S. Government to be able to expand its empire — something that hadn’t previously existed and that America’s Founders had intended would never even exist at all.

3: Nowhere in the document is there any provision by which to expel any Member (or “Party”). If, for example, a given Member becomes taken over by a coup or otherwise radically changes its Government so as to emerge as viscerally antagonistic toward one or more of the others, then there is no way for NATO to be able to adapt to that and address the problem. It would be an enormous problem because some decisons by NATO require unanimity, either because of the Treaty itself (which requires unanimity in order to accept a new Member), or else for practical reasons.

4: Nowhere in the entire rotten document does the essential provision in ANY decent Constitution or Charter appear: its Amendment Clause. Never once in the document does the word (or any synonym for it) “amend” appear.  The word “revise” does once appear, but ONLY in a note added to it in regard to changing a definition of one of the Treaty’s words (specifically “Party” to or member of the alliance) which has always been redefined each time that NATO’s membership has been increased. So: like the canonized text of a religious Scripture, which is “set in stone” so that the myth can never be modified or factually corrected (and its believers must adapt to it, because it cannot adapt to new and corrective information that was not previously known or anticipated), this collective Treaty is and always has been shaky at its very foundations. It’s just sales-literature for the chief marketing-organization of America’s MIC.

A great (as both science and art) 1992 BBC documentary, “Operation Gladio - Full 1992 documentary BBC”, presented numerous first-person testimonies from the perpetrators themselves regarding the CIA’s Operation to terrorize European populations through false-flag attacks, into fearing the Soviet Union. It recruited from Europe’s Fascists and Nazis to carry it out. It has been the other side of NATO. NATO is the heir to Nazi; the CIA has been a complement to that. And the EU was created by the CIA. All of this has been a large organized-crime effort, on behalf of ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, etc. They advance ‘peace’, ‘peace through strength’, etc. And all of them market the equipment for wars, and they also market the Governments that are the purchasers from those corporations. These are international markets. For example: NATO sets the standards for the weapons. This is a very large and comprehensive organization. One of the many common phrases to refer to it is “The Collective West.” But the U.S. side of it won’t be satisfied until all of the East, and all of the South, have also joined it. NATO won’t be enough.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.