Alliances of nations

World politics is not just about the big players.

Putin claims, with the support of many Western sycophants, that NATO promised that they would not expend Eastward. This is not true, and the NATO charter was not modified to bar any nation West of Russia's border. However, the whole situation could have been handled a lot better if it had not been left in the hands of major nations with their paternalistic and hegemonic propensity to think they know best while also milking such opportunities to serve their own interests.

The nations that had been under Russian repression are rightfully concerned about their imperial ambitions, especially since the invasion of Ukraine. This has driven why many sought NATO membership, particularly because of the Article 5 promise of mutual defence if invaded, and NATO gladly agreed. Having been neutral up until the invasion, Sweden and Finland sought out NATO membership because of exactly the same concerns.

Putin blames the West for a situation largely of its own making, due to their own insecurity, which is not really about threats from outside per se, but about its own population rejecting the highly-curated society that Russia has always relied upon. The West is the nebulous cultural threat to that. Having nuclear weapons tends help that message as it can be used as a threat that drowns out the voices of any other nations when heard by Western leaders, resulting in them focussing upon their own security rather than that of all nations.

For Western leaders, and many pundits, like Sachs, Mearsheimer and Wilkerson, this makes the world seem like a chessboard with just a few powerful pieces, and all other nations are just pawns. In this atmosphere, for NATO it may seem that the ideal situation is to just make NATO stronger by including every country that wants to join, except for whomever Russia is invading at the time, as they don't really ever want to respond under Article 5. And the other nations fearing Russia seemed to have no alternative available to them. But did it have to be this way?

What would have been a solution for the European countries between the West and Russia would have been to form their own alliance, sort of like a Warsaw Pact without Russia. This would have given them a better focus for their concerns, instead of being also rans in a fairly one-sided choice. This would have put them in a stronger bargaining position, able to properly stand up for themselves, without having to kowtow to one side or the other. Of course, that would have weakened NATO's position, and consequently the hegemonic intent of its major backers.

The needs and fears of all nations need to be taken into account when choosing alliances, but making the only choices be between the major nations distorts the thinking of everyone towards only really focussing upon them at the sacrifice of world peace. This has allowed those major nations to corrupt the world order in their favour as they scapegoat their cultural enemies with propaganda to justify why they are entitled to exploit other nations, fight proxy wars in them, and otherwise disregard their security and the safety of their peoples.

Any alliance risks alienating others, so there has to be viable and clear reasons for doing so, a clearly defined endgame and termination path. No alliance should be permanent, as that would put in doubt the validity of the independence of its members. Mutual cooperation is useful, but being locked in makes it a constraint. If some nations are too powerful, they may try to dominate the alliance and sets its agenda to favour themselves. Just as with individuals, it is not selfish to make sure needs are met, but it is greedy to want to dominate others on the pretext of guaranteeing those needs.

Needs change over time, and security alliances can be a hinderance to world peace if they are still acting as if they are needed when they are not, or at least in their current format. A middle European alliance may not really be what the West and Russia wants right now, but it may be better placed to allay some of their core fears about each others' imperialist expansions. Since the invasion we have seen how hamstrung both sides have been militarily, so a middle alliance would seem to be quite able to stand up to both sides enough to avoid another isolated-invasion situation like Ukraine.

Such an alliance would tend to favour Western culture anyway, but probably more like moderate Europe than the US, so making it less like the chest-thumping nationalistic jingoism of the Western stalwarts. The alliance would be largely wanting peace and cooperation all round, making them better neighbours for everyone at their borders, including Russia, as there would be no threat from them saber-rattling at the border. If Ukraine had been in such an alliance, Putin wouldn't have invaded it.

However, in all this is the real threat from Putin wanting a powerful Russia as their legacy. It is too late for that, as no one else wants it. While such personal ambitions are promoted as national ambitions, and bought into by the Russian public, even if for their own safety from Putin, the situation will be perpetuated, fueling reciprocal overtures from the West, even though they pretend that they don't want such hegemonic influence as well. Having independent alliances among smaller nations around the world would provide a hedge against such ambitions becoming a reality.

After all, in a world now dominated by the super-economies of the US and China, the EU, as a consortium of middling nations, has enough collective economic clout to set much of the world agenda. It reminds us that collective effort towards a common goal is a powerful force for change in the world, despite differences and disagreements.