By Kit Klarenberg / Substack
On March 3rd, Timothy Ash of elite British state-connected ‘defence’ think tank Chatham House made a series of startling proclamations in an interview with Bloomberg. His topline message was stark – “NATO is dead.” He spoke following the very public February 28th Oval Office fallout between Volodomyr Zelensky and Donald Trump. The impact of that debacle reverberates today, with questions abounding over continued US aid and intelligence sharing with Kiev, pending the Ukrainian leader’s signoff on a White House-endorsed minerals for security agreements deal.
Branding the catastrophic summit an “ambush”, Ash declared that Trump and his deputy J.D. Vance had “laid out very clearly” that the military alliance was to all intents and purposes moribund, with no hope of recovery. He noted other comments made by the US President at the Oval Office meeting indicated a clearly reticence by Washington to intervene military to protect the Baltic states should they end up at war with Russia, in seeming breach of NATO’s Article 5:
“It should be crystal clear now to European leaders that NATO is dead, we can’t rely on US security guarantees, they’ve come and spelled it out to us…NATO is more or less dead already…Even raising doubts about whether America would stand behind some NATO states says it all…We cannot rely on the Americans any more. We have to move on, we have to think about our own national interests, our own security, we have a very difficult transition period.”
Ash’s analysis is evidently echoed by European leaders. A day later, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined a €800 billion plan to “rearm” the bloc. Many member state chiefs reportedly “largely endorse” the plan, which calls for Europe to “become more sovereign, more responsible for its own defence and better equipped to act and deal autonomously with immediate and future challenges and threats.” Nonetheless, polls indicate European citizens oppose increased defence spending, and contractors warn this grand scheme will “take time” to realise.
If NATO truly is dead, it represents another long-overdue nail in the Empire’s coffin. It is also yet further confirmation that the US-dominated unipolar order, which has wrought untold death, destruction and misery over the past quarter century, is no more, and never to return. Residents of the Global South can breathe a collective sigh of relief – meanwhile, in a bitter irony, the same Western states that aided and abetted Washington’s unchallenged hegemony now find themselves defenceless.
‘Riot Squad’
The unipolar world was forged in an incendiary baptism of airstrikes and atrocity propaganda in Yugoslavia, March – June 1999. For 78 straight days, NATO relentlessly blitzed civilian, government, and industrial infrastructure throughout the country, killing untold innocent people – including children – and violently disrupting daily life for millions. While the US oversaw the ruinous campaign, both publicly and privately, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was an ardent advocate of even greater belligerence against non-military targets, despite the grave concerns and warnings of government legal advisors.
Then again, NATO’s assault was in itself completely illegal, conducted without UN Security Council approval. Such an intervention would’ve been unthinkable during the prior decade. Throughout the 1990s, Washington carefully constructed the chimera of a world united behind US leadership by ensuring UN backing for all its overt imperial actions across the globe. The bombing of Yugoslavia represented an unprecedented, highly controversial break with this strategy, specifically intended to serve as an exemplar thereafter.
An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article noted NATO’s unauthorised bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted autonomously as a worldwide “riot squad”. In this context, whenever China and/or Russia could plausibly use their Security Council vetoes to block US intervention overseas, NATO would simply invoke the UN Charter’s self defence clause to strike whenever and wherever its members perceived a “threat”, without hindrance or any consideration for international law….
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/14/collapsing-empire-nato-is-dead
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SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute)
Brown University Costs of War Portal
Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales
Nouriel Roubini: The US is now the focus of global instability
After the truth-shower 