Few know that following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in 1945, Great Britain, which had ridden to victory on America’s shoulders, made a furtive attempt to destroy its other ally of convenience -  Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

Without consulting the U.S., PM Churchill developed a plan – Operation Unthinkable – ‘to launch an immediate preemptive war against the Soviet Union in mid-1945’. He wanted to deliver a knock-out blow to the U.S.S.R. while it was still reeling from WW II.  

Churchill had reasons to fear Stalin. By 1950, the Soviet Union had 4 million troops on hand with another 800,000 on call from its Eastern bloc. The U.S. had about 1.5 million spread thinly across the globe.

Saner voices in the U.S. however saw a merit (especially after the Berlin blockade of 1948 and North Korea’s attack on South Korea) in creating an alliance of like-minded Eurocentric countries as a bulwark against the Soviet  bloc.

The Americans took the initiative. They worked towards the formation of NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 became NATO’S birth certificate. It came at the expense of its sibling – the U.N. While the U.N. aimed supposedly at ensuring ‘a globalised, peaceful world’, NATO was committed to defend the North Atlantic area in ‘defensive action only, but built for confrontation’, i.e. to be a dove, but with teeth.    

For centuries, Britannia had ruled the waves. From the early 1900s, Pax Britannica had to yield supremacy to the more powerful Pax Atlantica. By parenting NATO, the U.S. ended its policy of isolationism. It crossed its Rubicon – the Atlantic – and converted the rest of the world into its parade ground.

The U.S., instead of being a guarantor of peace in the last resort, became a belligerent of the first resort. On 9/11, two commercial aircraft flying onto the World Trade Centre and one into the Pentagon fused that resolve into foreign policy.  

The early years of NATO were mired in dissension. No one could be found to head NATO, and those who were exiled to it deplored its ‘organized controversy’. As one NATO official put it, the threats in the 1940s and 1950s were external. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were all internal.   

Nothing though unifies as quickly as a common foe. U.S. paranoia of  ‘a Red under every bed’ changed to ‘a beard under every turban’. NATO was induced to involve itself in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Somalia, Iraq, and for the longest period (18 years) in Afghanistan, where at one time 130,000 NATO-led troops were deployed.    

On 8 July 2021, President Joe Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by 31 August. He reminded his allies of the reasons why they had invaded Afghanistan in the first place. Converting that forlorn failure into a mission accomplished, he argued disingenuously: ‘The U.S. [and they] went to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, to deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden, and to degrade the terrorist threat [and prevent] Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be continued against the United States’. [The 50 NATO and non-NATO nations had nothing to fear.]

And in case the Afghans thought they might (like the postwar Germans and Japanese) benefit from the charred fruits of defeat, he disappointed them: ’We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build.  And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country’. In Afghanistan’s destruction lay its resurrection.   

On 30 August 2021, the last U.S. combatant to flee Afghanistan was Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue. Eight months later, he would be in Europe – one of the first U.S. soldiers there after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Only an American rattlesnake could swallow its own tail.

Some within NATO nurture ambitions to exploit its enormous potential. Collectively, its 32 member nations have a total population of over 955 million. In their manpower and economics, if combined,  NATO ranks third after China and India. 

China however sees NATO through Russian lenses. It does not want to get involved in foreign conflicts. History has taught it the perils of invasion. India has yet to learn. Goa, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir were inhouse incursions. Since geography began, India has been paddling with one foot in the Bay of Bengal and the other in the Arabian Sea. It shares its Indian Ocean with other continents. The Atlantic Ocean however is 11,000 km. away.

PM Modi’s recent visit to the Ukraine tests India’s 75 year long friendship with Russia. To celebrate that anniversary in New Delhi, the Russian Ambassador declared recently: Dosti se zyada kuch nahi hota' [Nothing is more precious than friendship].

Another slogan - Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai – had a shorter shelf-life.

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

[DAWN, 29 Aug. 2024]