Hala Hilwiyat
There’s a saying among anti-imperialist commentators that NATO stands for the “Nazi Arming Terrorist Organization” or “Nazi Arming and Training Organization.”
Apart from being a moderately funny joke, it’s unfortunately rather true. Of course, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization won’t readily admit their Nazi origins, but its history and current operations don’t keep much a secret.
NATO gave participants of the Third Reich an opportunity to rebrand directly after World War II. Founded in 1949 by the U.S. and its European allies, NATO’s mission was to counter socialism and extend U.S. influence in Europe. NATO’s first secretary general, British military officer Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, bluntly summed up its purpose as “to keep the Russians (USSR) out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
NATO absorbed Nazi personnel and strategies into its military framework and used those very same methods to enforce Western dominance across the globe, initially focusing on Europe.
From the very beginning, one of NATO’s most egregious hires was Adolf Heusinger, a former Nazi general who served as Chief of Operations under Adolf Hitler, helping plan the military campaigns that leveled Europe. After the war, instead of facing prosecution and accountability for war crimes, Heusinger was awarded a cushy desk job at NATO and was even promoted to Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee in the early sixties.
Another disturbing character in the Nazi to NATO pipeline was Wernher von Braun, a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer who oversaw rocket development using forced concentration camp labor. His V-2 rockets killed thousands of civilians in London and Belgium during the war. His expertise in the field of rockets made him an attractive NATO recruit in the early days of the Cold War, as the USSR’s rocket technology was becoming increasingly sophisticated.
To continue to cement its power in an effort to challenge the growing scientific success of the Soviet Union, the U.S. recruited over 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and intelligence operatives under “Operation Paperclip.” It is hard to see how anyone at the time could frame this organization as a bastion of democracy and peace. The whitewashing and normalization of Nazi criminals and labor was done to demonize socialism as more and more anti-colonial movements aligned with the USSR and China.
Von Braun got a gig with the US Army, followed by a stint as a pivotal figure in NASA’s space program – again, to directly challenge the multiple gains made by the USSR in space exploration and other aerospace advances. The US and its NATO partners celebrated Von Braun as a visionary for using his Nazi-era rocket science to propel the US to almost equal footing as the USSR. The U.S. strategy of completely rehabilitating and rebranding fascists is a legacy they carry on through NATO.
NATO plugged entire Nazi spy networks straight into their Cold War operations, such as “Operation Gladio.” Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s top intelligence officers, was another person who escaped any accountability for his crimes. After the war, instead of being thrown into a cell for running surveillance for the Nazi’s numerous crimes, Gehlen was handed funding and full autonomy to create the Gehlen Organization, a Nazi-built spy network that became West Germany’s official intelligence agency. It worked alongside the CIA and NATO, ensuring that socialist movements within Europe were stifled and subverted.
NATO has spent its tenure imposing its fascist ideology upon any country that threatens the spread of US capitalism and empire. Today, its vision is also tightly focused on the Middle East.
One well documented example is in Afghanistan. NATO ran a brutal 20 year occupation under the pretense of liberation, but left the country gutted – stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of resources while leaving civil society in chaos and unsure of its future under the Taliban. US and European based weapons manufactures made Afghanistan a testing ground for new weapons at the cost of thousands of civilian lives.
The US and its allies conducted drone strikes, air raids, and night operations, killing thousands of civilians and making 2018 the deadliest year on record for Afghan children. Despite being there officially to stop the Taliban, NATO’s “counterinsurgency” programs ironically did a remarkable job at fueling the Taliban’s ranks. Meanwhile, it propped up a kleptocratic puppet regime in Kabul that stole land and funneled jobs to cronies that did not have much backing from the Afghan people.
When the occupation collapsed in 2021, NATO and the US fled, and the US installed regime unsurprisingly crumbled quickly. The Taliban made a quick comeback, ultimately marketing NATO’s mission as a failure politically – however, NATO got away with years of looting Afghanistan’s resources. Like every corner NATO touches, it left devastation.
In 2011, NATO targeted Libya under the banner of “humanitarian intervention.” Its true objective was to eliminate Libya’s popular leader Muammar Gaddafi and crush his plan for a gold-backed African currency, independent of the dollar and American financial institutions. Western powers panicked at the threat to their currency, which they used to ensnare African nations into debt traps with the help of institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Through a fierce bombing campaign, NATO annihilated a sovereign state, facilitated a civil war and mass displacement, and created the conditions that caused Libya – one of the most prosperous African nations – to become an open-air slave market. Gaddafi was tortured and murdered, possibly by foreign actors and mercenaries on US payroll. And, of course, western capitalists with interests in numerous Libyan resources (such as oil) got what they came for.
From 2015 onward in Yemen, NATO countries armed the Saudi coalition from to the teeth and provided them full political backing with full knowledge of the consequences. The US, the UK, and France sent weapons, logistical support, and intelligence to Saudi Arabia as well as the UAE, which conducted genocidal bombing campaigns targeting civilian infrastructure. The coalition bombed hospitals, civilian gatherings, markets, and schools, creating the conditions for widespread famine and disease such as cholera. Yemen became one of the most impoverished nations in the world with record high starvation rates. Defense contractors and weapons manufacturers raked in profits to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
For the past two decades in Syria, NATO member states funneled weapons and training into armed groups with direct ties to sectarian terrorist militias. These fighters, many from foreign countries outside of the region such as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and others – were chosen to take down a government that refused to comply with US and Israeli regional domination. In the winter of 2024, in an aggressive military advance backed by NATO member Turkey, they eventually succeeded, overthrowing Bashar Al Assad and installing a a mercenary regime composed of mostly non-Syrians. The war in Syria killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people and displaced millions. Syria’s infrastructure lies in ruins. NATO-backed chaos, in addition to the United States enforced sanctions, have redrawn the map of the region and made survival nearly impossible for millions of working people, particularly Alawite, Shia, and Christian minorities, as well as even a Sunni majority that is at uneasy odds with the new regime.
While they unleash unbridled chaos and terror in the Middle East, NATO’s leadership still has the audacity to speak publicly about humanitarian values. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg repeats vague slogans about “freedom and democracy” while his team approves drone strikes, sanctions, and occupation.
History demonstrates that after 1945, fascism was incorporated into the structure of imperialist global power without hesitation. NATO gave it a shiny new name and an endless stream of resources. The legacy of Nazi military planning, surveillance, and violence endures in every sanctioned war crime.
To this day, as it expands its operations across the world, NATO continues to enforce a global system that upholds the rule of capital and punishes any resistance to it. The people of the Middle East, like the people in every corner of the globe, need sovereignty, infrastructure, and freedom. NATO’s existence threatens all of this.
The bottom line is clear: we must abolish NATO.
Hala Hilwiyat is a political commentator with a focus on Syria, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Western Asia.
