Just in time for its 75th anniversary, NATO has dropped its mask. And the NATO summit beginning Tuesday in Washington is one particularly illuminating moment in this revelation.
The history of the Enlightenment teaches us never to accept a person’s or an organization’s self-image at face value. So do the early sources of Enlightenment ideas in ancient Greece. The Greeks already possessed that insight. Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo was the maxim: Know thyself.
If we take that injunction not lightly as a gentle reminder of the limits of human thought but also as meaning what the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclis insisted — that “It belongs to all men to know themselves and think well” — then we must regard self-knowledge as an essential human quality, which perhaps also ought to apply to our organizations.
With NATO, however, it seems to be exactly the reverse.
For NATO, denial of its true nature is part of the essence of the organization. Or to put it another way, an almost meditative immersion in its own self-image is part of the essence of the military alliance.
It is all the more astonishing, then, that Western media are so often content to reflect a thousand iterations of this self-image back to the public, without question and without pausing to consider whether the image adequately represents reality.
In fact, 75 years of NATO is equivalent to 75 years of denial, albeit with a dramatic expansion of scale and scope in recent years.
Hellbound and Down 