NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine enters its ninth month and the security and economic consequences of the crisis continue to sharpen, some Western policymakers and pundits have begun brainstorming ways to end the confrontation before it escalates into World War III.
The US Congress could end the bloodletting in Ukraine at the stroke of a pen and perhaps even win a Nobel Peace Prize by withdrawing from NATO and transforming the alliance “from a mighty offensive oak to a tiny acorn unalarming to Russia,” Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Reagan administration Justice Department, has suggested.
In a recent op-ed in the Washington Beltway’s top media outlet, Fein, an international law specialist and outspoken critic of US wars of aggression abroad from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, suggested that NATO became “obsolete” after 1991, “when its raison d’etre – the Soviet Empire – dissolved.”
The observer stressed that the US-led expansion of the Western bloc toward Russia’s borders “provoked” Moscow to start its military operation in Ukraine, and that Kiev’s membership in the alliance would “fortify the encirclement of an already diminished Russia,” thereby “constituting a greater existential threat to it than the existential threat the Cuban missile crisis posed to the United States.”
Moscow hinted as much late last year, after it sent twin comprehensive security treaty proposals to the US and NATO offering a series of steps which would dramatically deescalate tensions between the West and Russia. The proposals included conditions for the mutual pullbacks of troops, missiles, aircraft and warships from areas where they could be considered a threat to the other side, a request that NATO halt its attempts to expand into Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, and limits on the deployment of alliance troops along the bloc’s eastern flank. Washington and NATO rejected the security proposals, saying that the alliance would not give close its “open door” policy for inviting new members.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in December 2021 that NATO had “squeezed” Russia up to its security “red lines,” leaving Moscow with “nowhere to fall back to.” “I have already said – they’ll put missile systems in Ukraine, 4-5 minutes flight time to Moscow. Where can we move? They have simply driven us to such a state that we have to tell them: stop,” Putin said.
But US lawmakers could allay all of Russia’s security concerns at the stroke of a pen, Fein believes. “By withdrawing from NATO, Congress would end the existential crisis” that kicked off the Ukraine crisis “and extinguish the executive branch’s ambition for regime change or weakening Russia,” he wrote.
Emphasizing that “the United States is NATO’s locomotive and the other members collectively the caboose,” the pundit pointed out that a push by Congress to quit the alliance would give Moscow the opportunity to halt its military operation in Ukraine, and assert that it achieved its goals of defending the Donbass and stopping NATO encroachment.
Pointing to the gargantuan amounts of cash available to the Pentagon, which he noted constitute a whopping $1.64 trillion in fiscal year 2022, Fein stressed that “NATO without the United States is a paper tiger and no existential threat to Russia with or without Ukraine.”
Russia is no threat to Europe either, the observer noted, pointing out that Moscow spends “a fraction” even of what Europe’s NATO members collectively lay out for defense each year, has a GDP considerably smaller than the EU’s, and has demonstrated on the ground that its military is no match for its Soviet-era precursor.
“In sum,” Fein wrote, “Russia is no military threat to Europe’s NATO members,” and a US departure from the alliance “would not leave them in the lurch.” Instead, he predicts, it would save America “hundreds of billions of dollars” in needless defense spending, including $100 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which could “drag on indefinitely” unless the conflict is stopped.
“Congress would burnish its own image and be lauded as peacemakers worldwide if it set in motion the termination of the Ukraine war by a statute ending United States NATO membership. It would also begin a desperately needed challenge to an imperial presidency,” Fein concluded.
Questions Abound
Fein did not specify how Congress could pull out of NATO, pointing to the obscure precedent set by the 1798 Congressional action which annulled a defense treaty with France. After former President Donald Trump hinted interest at withdrawing from NATO during the 2016 presidential campaign, lawmakers from both parties rushed to shore up support for the alliance, including via the NATO Support Act of 2019, effectively blocking the president from unilaterally withdrawing the US from the bloc.
Congressional support for Washington’s imperial foreign policy agenda crystalized during the debate over a $40 billion supplemental aid bill in May, when 57 House Republicans and 11 GOP senators voted against the new package of Ukraine assistance.
All 11 of these Senate Republicans and a majority of their House colleagues will remain in the new Congress when it convenes on January 3. However, it seems unlikely bordering on the fantastical that this anti-interventionist, MAGA-bent wing of the party will be able to convince the traditional neocon GOP majority on a change of Ukraine policy, much less the much more radical step of quitting NATO, as Fein recommends.
