The NATO summit held in July in Türkiye proved that fears of the Alliance’s imminent demise — taking Donald Trump’s bluster at face value — were frankly exaggerated. Instead, what actually happened was a redistribution of the burden among the member states, with a greater share falling on the Europeans; and the reaffirmation of a policy of permanent war against Russia, under the pretext of defending Ukraine and a supposed Russian threat that only leaders in Europe seem to see. But this does not mean that the internal divisions and weaknesses NATO has revealed over nearly five years of war have been eliminated.

The most striking decision made was to commit member states to providing $70 billion (more than 60,500 million euros) annually to Ukraine to sustain the war effort. This amount is in addition to the 90 billion euros that Europe recently approved to send to Kiev just to keep the Ukrainian state apparatus — on the brink of collapse — operational for two years.

War budgets

This means that European countries’ budgets will have to permanently include funding for the war. The confrontation with Russia — which the major European powers have come to defend tooth and nail to counter the diplomatic path initiated by the Trump administration in 2025 — has thus become routine policy, an institutionalization of war by Europe and NATO as a whole.

It is no wonder, judging by the latest U.S. positions, that Donald Trump has agreed to tone down his initial proposals to end the war “within 24 hours” and to blame the conflict on his predecessor, Joe Biden — especially considering that the U.S. military-industrial complex is raking in vast sums of money from Europe’s commitment to defending Volodymyr Zelensky and sacrificing Ukrainian lives. What’s more, the U.S. suffers no direct consequences.

The European Union’s (EU’s) main unifying force, in fact, has become the militarist path it adopted using the war in Ukraine — and, on top of that, the fabricated “Russian threat” — as a pretext. Let us recall the boycott of the [2015] Minsk agreements — explicitly confirmed by senior German and French leaders (Angela Merkel and François Hollande) — which would have prevented the military conflict. Let us also recall the subsequent sabotage — through the direct action of Boris Johnson, then prime minister of Britain, in concert with the Biden administration — of the peace agreement that Ukraine and Russia were on the verge of signing in Istanbul in March and April 2022, just a few weeks into the war.

European disunity

The divisions tearing the EU apart are glaringly obvious, and they render Europe, as a whole, a nonentity, incapable of intervening in international affairs — except when led by the U.S. The 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) that the U.S. has forced NATO members to allocate to military spending is a fee the U.S. charges for its protective umbrella. The sanctions that Europe was forced to impose on Russia, coupled with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, have subjected all countries on the continent to U.S. dictates, pushing them toward economic irrelevance.

Under these conditions — forged by both Biden and Trump, it should be noted — the role of Europeans in NATO is more constrained than ever. This is because, in addition to still lacking significant military capabilities of their own and the military-industrial capacity to do without U.S. production, they no longer even possess the relative economic autonomy they enjoyed just a few years ago. 

The announced efforts to establish a “European pillar” of NATO, in this context, amount to nothing more than a redistribution of tasks between Europeans and North Americans within the same web of dependence on Yankee imperialism — a dependence now exacerbated by current circumstances.

Highly selective ‘aid’

To better assess the significance of that additional “aid” to Ukraine decided upon in the Ankara NATO summit, consider the following comparison. Figures published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for 2024 indicate that funds allocated for economic development across all of Africa totaled 36 billion euros. EU institutions contributed 6.5 billion euros to Africa that year. But they channeled more than 18 billion euros to Ukraine. [1 euro = $1.15]

In other words, a single country received nearly three times as much as an entire continent with 1.6 billion inhabitants — a continent, incidentally, that supplies the bulk of the low-wage labor migration from which European capital benefits and about which, at the same time, the ruling powers complain. This shows that the choices made by European leaders have nothing to do with “development,” but are solely aimed at securing their place within the web of imperialist capital’s interests.

A great deal of cynicism accompanies these so-called choices made by Europeans. In fact, the endemic corruption in Ukraine — of which the government in Kiev and Zelensky himself are both architects and beneficiaries — and the dominance that far-right forces exert over the country’s institutions reveal the unscrupulous nature of the European ruling elites. 

While swearing respect for “democracy” and feigning concern for the defense of “Western civilization” (whatever that may be), they are, in fact, paying a hefty fee to the mercenaries on duty to ensure that the policy is followed; and they protect all the Nazi scum that permeates the armed forces and recruitment centers, because they consider it the most useful and suitable force for the kind of war of attrition they intend to perpetuate.

A dubious cohesion

The apparent unity of NATO displayed in Ankara is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Of NATO’s 30 European members, 23 are also members of the EU. This overlap means that the turmoil within the EU — and there is no shortage of it — inevitably reverberates through NATO’s cohesion.