Should NATO have ended with the Cold War?

If any further evidence were required, the recent Munich Security Conference suggests that the United States may soon scale back its role in NATO, or even leave the defence alliance all together.

The European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including the UK, France, and Germany, have been shaken by US Vice President JD Vance’s blistering condemnation of NATO in Munich, but ever since his first term, President Trump has questioned the alliance’s relevance, arguing that America shoulders an unfair share of Europe’s defense costs.

To many, it’s a crisis in the making but, perhaps, NATO should have been put out to pasture long ago.

Founded in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union and secure post-war Western Europe in the aftermath of World War Two, NATO was hailed by US President Harry Truman as a "shield against aggression." However, with the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, its original mission seemed complete. The Warsaw Pact – the USSR’s answer to NATO, dissolved, the Cold War was at an end, and a prosperous new era of peace and trade with Russia seemed imminent.

But rather than disbanding, NATO did the opposite: it expanded, bringing former Soviet states into its membership and, by so doing, inching closer and closer to Russia’s borders. Some saw this as essential for stability but others such as Cold War strategist George Kennan warned it would only stoke tensions.

For what had been created as a purely defensive alliance had, by the mid-1990s, mutated into an instrument for military intervention well beyond its original brief. The 1999 air campaign in Serbia, conducted without UN backing, set a precedent for NATO-led operations outside its founding principles. NATO’s extended engagement in Afghanistan became the longest war in US history, collapsing the moment Western forces withdrew, while NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, initially framed as a humanitarian mission, resulted in regime change and a fractured state.

This pattern begs an important question: has NATO truly been a force for peace in the past three decades, or has it instead contributed to the very aggressions it was meant to suppress?

While Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was undeniably an act of aggression, conflicts do not arise in a vacuum. Russia fired the first shots, and Putin is responsible for sanctioning the invasion, but bear in mind the broader context. NATO’s eastward expansion, despite firm assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late ’80s that it would not move "one inch eastward" if Germany reunified, was an immediate breach of trust. Further infringements - the 2014 Euromaidan protests backed by Western governments that resulted in the ousting of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, and the West’s continued push to integrate Ukraine into the NATO fold – only damaged the relationship with Moscow even more.

It is only by understanding the historical backdrop that we can see how NATO has, in part, shaped the environment that ultimately led to the Ukraine invasion. Wars rarely trace back to a single event but are the result of decades of missteps, provocations, and at times, unchecked ambition.

This, in turn, connects to the shift in the USA from pro to anti-NATO.. The American ethos has long been rooted in limited government, personal freedom, and a restrained approach to foreign intervention. NATO’s expansion, and the expectation that the US will indefinitely shoulder Europe’s defence costs, clearly runs counter to these principles. It is, then, no wonder that there is a growing political divide in the USA on NATO membership. Figures like Trump ally and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard represent a growing faction questioning the US’s military entanglements where US resources, military might, and leadership primarily European states, not America.

History has repeatedly shown that alliances originally formed for defence often morph into the conflict makers. Over 2,000 years ago, the Delian League, initially set up to defend ancient Greece against Persian aggression, eventually became a vehicle for Athenian dominance, culminating in the Peloponnesian War. In modern times, the intricate web of defence alliances in early 20th-century Europe designed to prevent war instead set the stage for World War I following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Many in the US now fear NATO is following a similar path.

The West often overlooks history’s cyclical nature. During a visit to Yalta, Ukraine, in 1990 just before the Soviet Union’s collapse, I met a Russian man who said something that has stayed with me. Americans, he said, view history as a ladder – constantly advancing, always improving – while Russians see it as a wheel, turning forward but inevitably repeating familiar patterns.

Back then, I dismissed his view as overly pessimistic. The Russia I saw around me seemed eager to embrace change and move beyond its troubled past. But today, his words ring true. The wheel has turned once more. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism, fuelled by nationalist fervour, and NATO’s expansion has, arguably, played a role in steering it along this course.

If Europe wishes to break free from the mistakes of the past, NATO’s future must be reevaluated. With America increasingly turning its gaze inward, Europe now has that opportunity to re-evaluate, and if the terrible loss of life in Ukraine through war is a sobering lesson, it’s something that long’s overdue.

Author and political thinker Michael Bedenbaugh is a respected voice in constitutional principles and American governance. Based in South Carolina, he is deeply involved in his home state’s development while contributing to national discussions on governance and civic engagement, most recently as standing as an independent candidate for Congress. He is the author of Reviving Our Republic: 95 Theses for the Future of America and the host of Perspective with Mike Bedenbaugh.

Story by Michael Bedenbaugh, edited by Anthony Harvison (Belters News/NewsX)

Main image: Courtesy, danzig_hamburg/Pixabay