As it says right on the NATO web page, “NATO is a political and military alliance of countries from Europe and North America.” Note the order of the adjectives: it is political first and military second. This is by no means an accident: NATO happens to be militarily insignificant. Its only success is in dismembering Serbia to create Kosovo. Destroying Libya hardly counts as a success. But NATO has certainly been successful politically, becoming much larger. Between the collapse of the USSR and the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation in the former Ukraine, it absorbed Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. NATO had plans to ingest the Ukraine and Georgia as well but choked, then settled for the more digestible Finland and Sweden as consolation prizes.

Expansion is one of NATO’s main functions. Newly ingested nations have to have their militaries trained and equipped with mostly US-made weapons according to mostly Nazi German-inspired NATO standards and this requires a huge, sprawling bureaucracy. Another major function of the NATO bureaucracy is planning and organizing training exercises in the course of which various NATO member militaries collaborate on attacking Russia or repelling Russian attack (because there are no other enemies to think of) undaunted by the facts that attacking Russia would be pure suicide and that Russia has no interest whatsoever in attacking any NATO member countries (but stands ready to destroy them if they attack Russia).

This last parenthetic clarification needs some unfolding. Although NATO is supposedly a defensive organization, it hasn’t actually ever defended any of its members. It has participated in various US-led offensive operations (in former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan). NATO charter’s Article 5 stipulates that in case of attack against a NATO members, other NATO members have to hold consultations on coming to the aid of the suffering NATO member, but each member gets to decide what aid to offer (it could be limited to mailing it a box of delicious lollypops). More importantly, there is no stipulation that if a NATO member is attacked, other NATO members have to voluntarily commit suicide by attempting to defend that member.

Let us consider a specific example. Suppose that Russia decides that it has finally had enough of British meddling in countries close to Russia’s borders and decides to fix the problem once and for all. A choice weapon to use would be one of its new Sarmat missiles. These missiles are fired from a mobile launcher, take a few minutes to deploy, fly arbitrary paths through the stratosphere (making them impossible to intercept) and carry 10 hypersonic reentry vehicles, each of which independently maneuvers precisely to its target and carries a nuclear charge of between 800 kilotonnes and 2 megatonnes. One such rocket, delivering 20 megatonnes, would be sufficient to neutralize Britain politically and militarily for all time, meaning that there would be nothing there for the rest of NATO to defend.

There would still be the question of vengeance, but what NATO members would be willing to commit suicide by attacking Russia in a futile attempt to avenge Britain? None, really. As for British retaliation, Britain does have four Vanguard-class submarines armed with increasingly unreliable American-made Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, but it is entirely uncertain whether any of them would be launched in response and in any case Russia has missile defense batteries that would intercept them. This is all purely hypothetical, of course, because the Russians are patient to a fault and will in all likelihood just sit back and watch the British establishment degenerate at its own brisk pace, being just a decade or two away from becoming entirely harmless. On the other hand, if Russia were to destroy Britain prophylactically, none of the remaining countries would even dream of bothering Russia for a good long time. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” as the British like to say.

Let us therefore leave aside the silly notion of NATO’s mutual defense doctrine as a bedtime story for mildly retarded children and focus on NATO’s actual core competencies: expansion, weapons procurement and military training exercises. While the expansion part of the NATO bureaucracy is now happily chomping away on Sweden and Finland, it is hard to ignore that the failure to engulf and devour the Ukraine and Georgia has stopped the NATO enlargement juggernaut in its tracks.

Georgia’s absorption into NATO was aborted quite swiftly. In 2008, during the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Georgian military, under NATO and Israeli tutelage, attacked Russian peacekeepers in neighboring South Ossetia. The Russians then rolled into Georgia and took barely a week to thoroughly humiliate the Georgian military. Peace was restored, although some Georgians still fester over their defeat and join up with the Ukrainians as mercenaries, thereby achieving two defeats for the price of one. The Georgians were quick to realize that going to war with Russia was a bad idea and that NATO membership would make them vulnerable rather than secure, but there remained the possibility of being engulfed and devoured by the European Union. This possibility persisted until 2024, which was marked by the failure of a color revolution attempt. Georgia’s EU-installed president (a French national) was dethroned and civil relations with Russia were restored.

NATO’s attempt to engulf and devour the Ukraine has been in the works since 2014 and is still a work in progress, although most sane people now consider it an impossibility for a number of excellent reasons such as a lack of undisputed, secure borders and an ongoing military conflict with Russia. It all started with the overthrow of the legitimate, elected government in Kiev and its replacement by a unelected, illegitimate one appointed personally by Victoria Nuland of the US State Department. The people of Crimea would have nothing to do with these new rulers, and neither would the people of Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Crimea swiftly seceded and voted to join the Russian Federation while Donetsk and Lugansk remained as separatist regions within Ukraine. The Kiev regime then launched what it called an “anti-terrorist operation” against these two regions. In response, Donetsk and Lugansk organized local resistance forces.

Why did the Russians accept Crimea but did not immediately accept Donetsk and Lugansk? The simple answer is that Russia understood that war was inevitable but needed time. It used that time to build new weapons systems (Kinzhal, Tsirkon, Oreshnik, Poseidon, Sarmat/Avangard, etc.), launch 42 warships, 11 nuclear attack submarines and 11 diesel-electric submarines and to reorganize its military and its defense industry to prepare it for modern combat.

Fast-forward to 2022. The volunteer resistance forces, merely 30 thousand men, held a defensive line for 9 long years, suffering some 10.000 mostly civilian casualties from Ukraine’s relentless shelling of residential districts. By February of 2022 the Ukrainian army was finally ready to crush the resistance. The two regions prepared for this inevitability by holding independence referendums, declaring independence and asking Russia for military assistance. Russia responded by recognizing the newly independent republics and agreeing to offer military assistance. These were all perfectly legal maneuvers in accordance with international law with Kosovo providing the legal precedent. The Russian army struck exactly one day before the planned Ukrainian attack and thwarted it. Soon thereafter, a negotiated end to the conflict was reached between Kiev and Moscow: the Ukraine would leave Donetsk and Lugansk alone, disarm, repeal anti-Russian laws and swear to military neutrality.

However, NATO would have none of that. Boris Johnson flew to Kiev and ordered the Ukrainians to fight “to the last Ukrainian” and that is exactly what the Ukrainians have been doing ever since — for three years running. That is not what is surprising; after all, NATO shouldn’t be expected to let go of its victims so easily. What is surprising is that the Ukrainians have been quite willing, for three years running, to fight this futile war “to the last Ukrainian,” suffering disproportionately higher casualties than the Russian side, while their eventual defeat has been guaranteed all along. But this is a topic for another article — one best written by a team of clinical psychiatrists with expertise in suicide cults. In any case, the short of it is that NATO has lost twice in a row: in Georgia and in the former Ukraine.

“What’s the difference?” you might think. “Another country, another fiasco — NATO should be accustomed to endless defeat by now.” But the former Ukraine is different. First, the Ukraine is by no means a trivial case. It is right in the center of Europe and is the largest country in Europe by area. Second, the war in the Ukraine is not between the Ukraine and Russia, as Western propaganda would have you believe. Rather, the Ukrainians are just pawns, willing or (increasingly) unwilling, in a proxy conflict between the United States (with the rest of NATO in tow) and the Russian Federation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that it is a “proxy war,” in these exact words; who are we to argue otherwise? Defeat in this proxy war would not be so bad for the United States — hiding behind an ocean and not saddled with too many Ukrainian refugees (a few hundred thousand are about to be expelled, together with some Haitians and some Syrians). But it would be a disaster for the EU (Poland and Germany especially) where Ukrainian refugees/migrants number in the millions and their ranks are likely to swell further in the course of Ukrainian defeat. European leaders, unpopular as they already are, dread the reputational damage they will suffer as supporters of the Kiev regime who have imposed austerity on their populations in order to lavish funds on Kiev and the refugees.

The Ukraine is a localized problem, but there is a global problem: NATO is running out of countries to engulf and devour. Like a cancer, NATO has to grow all the time (or an entire army of well-paid NATO bureaucrats would have to be dismissed for having nothing to do). They have already swallowed all of the tiny nations: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Montenegro and (Northern) Macedonia. And so NATO had no choice but to gobble up previously neutral Sweden and Finland.

There is, however, an issue with having Sweden and Finland join a military bloc. Sweden, you see, signed the Treaty of Nystad with Russia in 1721, in which Sweden, having been defeated in the Northern War, swore to military neutrality. And Finland, after its disastrous dalliance with Hitler, signed with Russia the Treaty of Paris of 1947, in which Finland swore to… military neutrality. Now, the act of abrogating one’s responsibilities as they are spelled out in a peace treaty generally means an automatic return to a state of war. By accepting these two countries, NATO was expanding its membership by two countries that are now automatically in a state of war with Russia, thereby violating Chapter 8 of the NATO charter. Perhaps Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek minister of finance, had a point when he said that Europe is now “the stupid continent.”

What would such a war look like? More humiliation for NATO, we must suppose, but will it be the same sort of humiliation suffered by NATO in the former Ukraine or something more severe. We must bear in mind that for Russia the Ukrainian territory is a special case because it is historically Russian territory (Malorussia and Novorussia is what it had been called for centuries) peopled by people who speak Russian as their main and native language, were baptized in the Russian Orthodox church and are culturally Russian. Yes, they have been brain-damaged to the point of hating who they actually are and embracing a fake, synthetic identity. A Ukrainian is a Russian who was forced to stop being Russian but went beyond and stopped being human. Atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region attest to the fact that these are brain-damaged monsters.

Being Ukrainian is not so much an ethnic identity as a mask. In some cases, it stuck to the face and has to be removed surgically, together with the head. But in many other cases, the mask comes off effortlessly the moment a Russian flag is hoisted in a city center and the erstwhile Ukrainians instantly forget how to speak Ukrainian and start singing the Russian national anthem and applying for Russian passports. Russians see the Ukrainians as Russians who have lost their way and are waiting to accept them back as prodigal sons. This explains the slowness of the Russian war effort in the Ukraine, which is driven by the imperative of avoiding Russian casualties, be they military or civilian, on either side, leaving just the Ukrainian military targets as fair game. Russia could easily demolish every single bridge, railhead, fuel depot, pumping station, etc., on Ukrainian territory, making it completely unlivable, but that is not its goal because the territory is peopled by Russians.

Are NATO countries (Finland and Sweden now included) peopled by Russians? No, they are not. Therefore, Russia is under no obligation to avoid collateral damage while destroying these countries militarily. Western leaders and NATO officials are making a very serious mistake by thinking that Russian actions in the former Ukraine are somehow representative of how Russia would prosecute a war with NATO countries. They really need to get it through their heads that NATO countries are not Russian; therefore, Russia has no reason to be gentle with them. Perhaps Varoufakis is right and NATO-heads are simply too stupid to process this fact?

As Putin’s aide Nikolai Patrushev recently noted, NATO is “conducting exercises at our borders at a scale unseen in decades… They are training for conducting a broad offensive from Vilnius to Odessa, seizing Kaliningrad region, imposing a naval blockade in the Baltic and the Black Seas and executing preventive strikes on the staging locations of Russian nuclear deterrence forces.” Something just doesn’t add up here. On the one hand, NATO has spent 11 years training and equipping the Ukrainian army, which is at this point the second-largest and most combat-capable military formation in Europe — second only to the Russians — and lost, because Ukraine’s defeat is now, in most experts’ estimations, a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, NATO is gearing up to fight Russia — and what? Lose even faster than the Ukraine? Is that a reasonable plan? Is it in any sense realistic?

Not in the least! The United States, while its forces make up almost half of NATO, wants to end its proxy war against Russia in the former Ukraine and has no intention of fighting any further wars with Russia. The United States has lots of dangerously old nuclear reactors that need replacement and the largest purveyor of nuclear technology on Earth, with a 74% market share, happens to be the Russian state consortium Rosatom. This is only the most striking example of why the United States needs to have good relations with Russia.

The refusal of the United States to fight Russia leaves the other half of NATO — “the stupid continent” — twisting in the wind. Yes, it makes up an entire half of NATO, but it is a half that cannot do anything at all without the US. NATO forces are commanded by General Christopher G. Cavoli, an American, use mostly US weapons and rely on US logistics and intelligence. Essentially, NATO cannot make a move without orders from Washington, and Washington will not authorize an attack on Russia.

NATO training exercises to fight Russia do not reflect reality; they reflect a lack of imagination. What, then, are NATO nations preparing to do? Waste taxpayer money, of course — that goes without saying — and Americans are all in favor of that since most of that European taxpayer money goes to American military contractors, who then finance the election campaigns of American politicians. But what are they gearing up for militarily? Herein lies a surprise: they are gearing up to fight each other!

It really shouldn’t be such a surprise: the past 80 years, since the end of World War II, have been an exceptionally long period of peace in European history. It is quite normal for European nations to be more or less continuously at war with each other. And now that NATO followed up on its long string of fiascos with its largest fiasco yet (the Ukrainian fiasco) it is time for the Europeans to abandon this failed framework and look for more winnable conflicts. Attacking Russia would not be winnable — it would be suicidal — but attacking each other might be considered good, clean fun and quite sportsmanlike.

Is there any evidence that the Europeans might be plotting something along these lines? Indeed, there is! Various European nations are starting to conspire and scheme outside of NATO, essentially giving it up for dead. No sooner did Sweden and Finland join NATO than they started work on creating a Scandinavian Alliance, comprised of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. They have surmised that they have nothing to do as part of NATO, now that Trump has betrayed them by making peace with Russia. “We don’t need America!” they thought and set to work:

• Sweden, still having a bit of industry left, will make weapons — tanks, airplanes, etc. It’s rather short of energy and natural resources… but it can buy these from Russia, right?

• The Finns have the largest army in Europe on a per capita basis and have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to die for no good reason.

• Norway controls major seaways and has a powerful navy: six vintage submarines (35 years old or so), five frigates (used to be six, but one sank while being commanded by an all-female crew after a barge didn’t get out of its way fast enough) and lots of patrol boats.

• Denmark can offer two whole companies of elite troops who were instrumental in achieving NATO fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Danes will need help in repelling American attacks on Greenland. They are begging the French to lend them a nuclear weapon or two. If the French agree, the Russians will sigh, shake their heads and… add Copenhagen to their target list of places to automatically wipe off the face of the Earth in case of serious trouble. How very sad that would be, considering that the Danes concluded the “Treaty of Love and Brotherhood” with Russia all the way back in 1493.

• Iceland also wanted to join the Scandinavian Alliance but wasn’t allowed in on account of not having any armed forces.

But right away there was trouble in paradise: the Finns immediately announced that they won’t be fighting alongside their Danish brothers in defense of Greenland. They have a 1272km border with Russia and are busy building bomb shelters. They seem to have set as a goal to be able to hide underground their entire population of 5.5 million. Why would the Russians waste their time attacking Finland is a question they don’t seem to have asked. The Russians just don’t see the Finns as a threat. They are the usual suspects for who drank all the vodka, but that’s not a capital offense.

But the Finns didn’t stop at that. They got themselves a golf-playing schizophrenic named Alexander Stubb, who invited NATO contingents for… fighting a war with Russia, and then asked for nuclear weapons. The Russians sighed, shook their heads and… organized the Leningrad Military District which will wipe Finland off the face of the Earth in case of serious trouble.

Is the Scandinavian Alliance the only new entity the decomposing corpse of NATO has sloughed off? Not at all! King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands just recently piped up and opined in public that the Netherlands should be armed to the teeth. He must have looked at his neighbors — Germany and Belgium — and felt threatened. I would feel threatened too, given what Germany did to the Netherlands under Hitler and what Belgium did in Congo under King Leopold. To be safe, perhaps the Netherlands should strike first.

Zipping over to the other end of the decomposing corpse, there is Hungary, which seems to be looking for the exit door from the European Union, seeing as it is about to be deprived of its veto power within this august organization. Hungary is preparing to join in an alliance with Serbia. Both of these countries have some military objectives to achieve. Hungary needs to bite off a chunk of former Ukraine, which was once part of Austria-Hungary and is still peopled by Hungarians whose rights have been seriously violated by the Kiev regime. Serbia needs to get back Kosovo and Republika Srpska. Arrayed against Serbia is a mighty alliance of Albania and Croatia.

This will be quite a fight! Albania has 6600 fearless soldiers (7500 if you count reservists) equipped with 40 very elderly tanks, 19 planes and 19 helicopters. The mighty force of Croatia has 18 thousand soldiers, 10 ancient Soviet Su-21 fighter jets (also, the French are giving them 12 equally elderly Rafale jets) and some armored vehicles of Yugoslav vintage.

Serbia is the most well-armed neutral nation in the region. It has 82 missile systems, 117 fighter jets, some Mi-35M helicopters, 262 tanks, Russian Pantsir-C1 and S-400 air defense systems and some Chinese-donated stuff. Serbia is also the largest arms producer in the region. In 2021, it sold weapons worth $384 million to Cyprus, Algeria, the United States, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bulgaria and Saudi Arabia. Serbia was the victim of NATO bombings in 1999, as a result of which it lost territories peopled by Serbs. Serbia’s constitution requires Serbia to defend the rights of Serbs wherever they may be. As NATO falls apart, Serbia is gearing up to undo these losses.

Meanwhile, at the heart of the Western European subcontinent we have Britain, France, Germany and Poland. Their leaders are playing a childish game of “king of the hill” (when they are not snorting cocaine together) trying to figure out who will be the most powerful economic disaster in all of Europe. Given the vanishingly small approval ratings of these leaders, it seems unlikely that they will rally the troops and it is unclear what, if anything, they will be able to achieve.

• The Brit Kir Starmer seems to have neglected to pay his three Ukrainian male prostitutes and they’ve taken to torching houses and cars that they thought were his.

• The French Emmanual Macron seems to be a victim of spousal abuse.

• The Poles feel just a tiny bit more powerful in an alliance with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but feel threatened because, as they recently discovered, most of their cucumbers are imported from Russia! Imagine their angst!

• And then there is Merz, who went out of his way to essentially declare war on Russia, causing Russia to summon the UN Security Council to discuss, although summoning some men in white coats with syringes loaded with haloperidol, lorazepam, or promethazine would be more helpful.

I would be remiss not to mention the second largest army in all of NATO, which is Turkey. Turkey is its own worst enemy but can feel proud because it made lots of other enemies all by itself. There is, of course, Greece, which is forever poised to attack Turkey and get back some of its islands whenever Turkey grows weak. There are, of course, the Kurds, which are one of the largest ethnic groups to have been deprived of their own country, being spread between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Armenia and having a particularly large and dissatisfied presence in Turkey. And now Turkey has decided to bite off a chunk of the failed state of Syria, thereby making enemies of both Arabs and Israelis simultaneously — a feat that requires special talents. It is impossible to predict what will become of Turkey, but peaceful coexistence with its neighbors seems like a particularly unlikely outcome.

Does NATO yet exist? There are different gradations of existence:

• Organizations, to be said to exist, have to be organized; disorganized organizations can be said to be nonexistent, there being a contradiction in terms.

• The reality of military alliances whose members are busily forming other military alliances seems rather questionable.

• Organizations also have to be effective — fit for their stated purpose. The stated purpose of NATO is mutual defense, but few, if any, NATO members seem particularly eager to risk life and limb in defense of each other. The oft-mentioned Article 5 of the NATO charter only requires members to hold discussions, which they are certainly willing to do, especially if the meeting is catered and there are cocktails afterward.

• The existence of political organizations is particularly difficult to ascertain because politicians (such as the NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte) can flap their gums virtually ad infinitum, making it appear as if the organization they represent exists whereas it is a mere figment of their diseased imaginations. Narcotics can exacerbate this effect; in particular, cocaine tends to make people excessively talkative and feel much more interesting and important than they are.

We can imagine NATO sailing off into the sunset on waves of cocaine addiction emanating from the office Narco-Führer Zelensky in Kiev. Assorted representatives of the “stupid continent” will endlessly assemble, shake hands, hug, kiss… snort cocaine… babble incoherently… while reality drifts farther and farther out of their reach.