NATO’s Strategy Of Constructive Anarchism Fuels Endless Wars – OpEd
The ongoing war in Gaza reveals the futility of trying to solve a crisis without addressing its root causes. The US approach to crisis resolution has relied on harsh military and coercive methods to deal with various security-strategic and political challenges. The American international order has a simple rule: any change and transformation that creates a new game, a new plan and a new international order must be achieved by an all-out war. However, recent events such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, NATO’s expansion in the east and Russia’s provocation of war in Ukraine, the attempts to trigger a war with China over Taiwan and the naval blockade of this rival country, the unresolved wars and crises in different regions, and the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza, all indicate a grand strategy: NATO’s constructive anarchism.
NATO’s constructive anarchism strategy has several aspects. The first one is the undermining of international organizations that were supposed to provide multilateral solutions and security guarantees. For example, the United Nations Security Council has lost its ability to build a global consensus on “a common threat to global peace and stability” and has become a venue for rivals to veto each other’s plans to end wars and ensure security. This signifies the end of the collective security system, where no security phenomenon, war, or peace is seen as a common interest of all, and there is no single interpretation of any crisis that aims to resolve it. In this situation, if an international order is defined as a written or unwritten agreement among its parties to protect it and accept its common norms and values, we can confidently say that we are in a period of disorder and pervasive anarchism. In this period, we face not one order, but multiple overlapping and competing orders, and instead of multilateralism at the global level, we see intersecting coalitions and alliances that cannot reach a single agreement.
The second aspect is that in this situation, the US is not interested in resolving issues through international organizations and rules. Instead, Washington tries to align their NATO allies and use their combined military force to fight and maintain the current order. In other words, in a strategy based on constructive anarchism, the goal of the US military campaign is not to create a new order but to preserve the existing one. In this case, NATO’s constructive anarchism aims to eliminate three competitors: ideologically asymmetric groups that oppose the status quo; Russia, which is weakened by the war in Ukraine and could be fully dominated after Putin’s fall; and China, which is the main rival of this order.
Meanwhile, the occupation of the Palestinian lands and the disregard for the two-state solution have led to the Gaza war. This is an unsolvable crisis that aims to weaken the Islamic-Arab countries, destroy the Palestinian resistance groups, and eliminate the Israeli problem in the Islamic world. On the other hand, on the Ukrainian front, the strategy of constructive anarchism has successfully dragged Russia into a costly war of attrition, and the Americans claim that the goal of the war is to end Russia’s military power. Russia, which is NATO’s buffer zone with China, and its fall could pave the way for NATO’s global strategy, which is seen by Western strategists as the downfall of China. Meanwhile, the Chinese are well aware of the completion of the puzzle that outlines their demise. In this scenario, peace is not a priority.
The escalation of these wars shows that the Americans and their allies do not benefit from peace and their desired order cannot be achieved peacefully. Therefore, they are implementing a new strategy to eliminate their opponents rather than contain and control them. In this strategy, NATO’s constructive anarchism tries to revive the previous order based on fear and violence with a new form ofthe chaos and the tools of war.
The deployment of NATO fleets following the Americans in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and the opening of a new front in the Middle East along with Europe has made war the norm of the current situation, a war which, according to the White House’s usual practice, is synonymous with American peace. This is where we do not have a single and inclusive global peace, but a fragmented and contested peace among the Americans, Russians, and Chinese, which is vetoed and collapsed every time in a meeting. A peace that does not bring order, but is replaced by war. The wars that are creating a NATO out of disorder.