The Vassalage of Europe to American-led Imperialism: Reverberations of NATO’s 76th Summit

In the backdrop of the ongoing NATO-backed, zionist inflicted genocide and famine in Gaza; the illegitimate bombing of Iran in violation of international law; the western-financed annexation of Palestine's West Bank; and the three-year intense conflict between Russia and NATO-backed Ukraine; the 76th summit of NATO was held in The Hague, Netherlands. This gathering of an increasingly fragile alliance—held against the stark reality of American imperial scrambling and European vassalage—revealed an empire in a state of imperial rampage, desperately clinging to relevance through escalating militarization and propaganda. Thirty-two NATO countries met for what was arguably quite a short summit—two days instead of last year's three—a truncated affair that betrayed the alliance's internal fractures and diminished capacity for sustained coordination. The summit ended with an unscrupulous communiqué consisting of five points(analyzed below) that signal the violent rendering of an empire's death throes.

The hollowness of this year's proceedings stand in stark contrast to the grandiose pretensions of previous summits, exposing NATO as a declining hegemon whose member states can barely sustain the facade of unity. As US leadership retreats into isolationist nationalism and European elites panic at their complete loss of autonomous strategic capacity, this summit represents nothing less than the institutional manifestation of imperial collapse—a desperate attempt to militarize their declining economies and transform weakness into aggression.

Last year, in Washington DC, we provided a summary and analysis of the pedantically Ukraine-centric summit, titled Planning Crimes: 2024 NATO Summit's Agenda. We warned our readers that imperialism is not a ballot-box issue. Warmongering and accumulation through financial, militaristic and ideological subjugation is not a partisan stance, especially the platform Donald Trump ran on claiming that he is a man of peace: "Such statements against NATO terrorism are only functional to discredit those who greenlighted those military interventions, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They want to convince us that imperialism can be reduced to a partisan issue, one between Republicans and Democrats. However, the end of imperialism will not take place via the ballot box, and no change of administration in the US will lead us to that point. Both parties are imperialist and both will militarize the world and produce propaganda against multipolarity and anti-imperialism."

This summit is a continuation of militarism, seeking a strategic defeat of Russia and consolidating the war economy, which is by no means an aberration from its criminalistic legacy—but rather the predictable response of a dying system that can only sustain itself through ever-escalating violence and exploitation. Further, the summit is a demarcation of a decaying empire, in its death throes, that is clinging to its power with nail and teeth, and as it is falling, it is becoming more obedient to the core that upheld it for the long 20th century - US-led imperialism.

NATO: A Barbaric Alliance

This barbaric legacy is inexplicable when confronted with its human rights record violations. NATO aided in the colonization of Africa and the suppression  of national liberation movements on the continent, sustaining colonial violence and white supremacy. NATO bombed Yugoslavia and led to its disintegration without United Nations Security Council (UNSC) authorisation. NATO bombed Afghanistan claiming that the nation had a role in the 11 September 2001 events. NATO countries, under the misnomer Coalition of the Willing, attacked Iraq and destroyed that country based on false accusations that it was harbouring weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons and much more. NATO bombed Libya, exceeding its UNSC mandate of “No Fly Zone” and “Protecting Civilians” and instead served as the airforce for the anti-government rebels (many of them happened to be Al-Qaeda affiliates) who were in fact committing war crimes.

NATO’s barbarism does not end here with mere regime change diktats and bombings with impunity, but the legacy it leaves behind is also the health crises endured by the bombed nations. Iraq, the former Yugoslavia (especially eastern Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, and NATO-occupied Kosovo) and Libya have had birth defects and cancer rates skyrocket due to the use of Depleted Uranium. These munitions remain in the environment, contaminating nature for 4.5 billion years, leading to what has been termed the “Silent Genocide”.While the list of crimes committed by NATO goes on, these are just a few for the defensive alliance that loves aggressive operations outside of its orbit. NATO’s media arm is largely responsible for state of the art propaganda infused with amnesia and scaremongering misinformation to make the Euro-Atlantic masses heed to the mindset of militarism.

Propaganda, Scaremongering, and the Fracturing Alliance

The summit unfolds against a backdrop of unprecedented fractures within NATO, as member states grapple with the stark reality of American imperial retreat. President Trump and his AMERICA FIRST political project represent nothing less than Washington's systematic abandonment of global leadership—a seismic shift that has left Europe's globalist elites in absolute panic. Despite the divisions within NATO, with reactionary members like Hungary and Türkiye seeking to leverage their positions on one side, and pro-US nations like Poland and the Baltic states (the so-called 'New Europe') on the other, all parties acted in unison during this summit and its final communiques. These technocratic leaders, who have built their power structures on subservience to American hegemony, now find themselves stripped of any capacity for independent action.

The Trump phenomenon has brutally exposed the alliance's fundamental contradictions and the dependency of European ruling classes. Rather than presenting a united front, NATO members find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of mutual recrimination and panic-driven militarization, their globalist establishments desperately scrambling to maintain relevance as their American patron withdraws from the world stage.

The spectre of AMERICA FIRST has shattered any illusion of transatlantic solidarity, revealing the hollow core of European "sovereignty." European allies, terrified of American abandonment and utterly incapable of independent strategic thinking, are being coerced into a frenzied arms race that serves neither their populations nor their genuine security interests. This is not strategic planning—it is the death rattle of a vassal system whose master has decided to go home. 

Member states no longer trust American leadership, yet they remain shackled to a security architecture that demands ever-greater sacrifices for an increasingly hollow promise of protection. The alliance has devolved into a protection racket, where European vassals pay tribute to a declining hegemon that grows more erratic and unreliable by the day. The alliance's members are being blackmailed into bankrupting their social programs to feed an insatiable military-industrial complex, all while watching their globalist elites' entire worldview collapse as American hegemony retreats into isolationist nationalism.

At this juncture, the Western Mass Media (WMM) rushes to manufacture consent for this self-destructive trajectory through relentless propaganda campaigns. NATO’s Secretary General, Mark Rutte's hysterical declaration that Europeans must "learn to speak Russian", unless they submit to ruinous defense spending quotas, reveals the desperation of a dying alliance. His admission that populations must be "rattled" into compliance exposes the authoritarian impulse at NATO's core—a recognition that only fear and manipulation can sustain support for policies that impoverish working people while enriching arms dealers.

The cognitive warfare extends beyond traditional media manipulation. NATO's deployment of diversity theater—using hosts of colour like Nigerian-British comedian Ikenna Azuike—represents a cynical attempt to legitimize imperial violence through progressive aesthetics. More sinister still is the militarization of childhood itself, with ten-year-olds like Suus and Adit (from Youth News Foundation) being weaponized as propaganda tools alongside fabricated youth organizations that mirror the indoctrination tactics of history's darkest regimes.

This systematic propaganda assault aims to normalize the cannibalization of European social democracy in service of American military dominance. The alliance's policy architects openly acknowledge their manipulation: "We need to explain to the European publics why increased defense spending is necessary," admits NATO's Benedetta Berti, revealing the contempt for democratic consultation that drives alliance policy. The pretense of democratic legitimacy—claimed by analyst Armida Van Rij as what distinguishes NATO from Russia and China—rings hollow when populations must be terrorized into compliance through manufactured threats and media manipulation.

The result is a cascade of authoritarian measures across Europe: forced conscription returning to Lithuania, Sweden, and Latvia, with Croatia poised to follow. These are not the actions of a confident alliance but the desperate measures of a fragmenting empire attempting to maintain control through coercion. The systematic dismantling of social services to fund militarization represents not strength but the death throes of a system that has lost all legitimacy and resorts to fear as its final argument.

“Challenging Convergence: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea”: The Death Throes of Unipolarity

The imperialist system's obsession with suppressing alternatives to unipolar hegemony reveals the terminal panic of a dying order that knows its time has run out. History is an unstoppable force, and no amount of NATO's desperate militarization can halt the inexorable march toward multipolarity. The alliance's pathetic attempts to maintain unipolarity represent nothing more than the death rattle of a system whose contradictions have finally caught up with it.

The emergence of forces, namely China, Iran, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Russia, albeit with their own internal contradictions, resembles an obstacle to the unabashed hegemony enjoyed by the five centuries of Western domination. These nations are the new target of NATO’s propaganda.  NATO's frenzied demonization of this "convergence" exposes the alliance's recognition that its unipolar moment is crumbling. The Global South's awakening, multipolarity's unstoppable advance, and the West's accelerating decline represent not merely geopolitical shifts but the fulfillment of a historical necessity.

Yet, even as they preside over this terminal decline, NATO's genocidal hypocrites continue their barbaric support for the Zionist entity's extermination campaign in Gaza. The Netherlands, under Mark Rutte's leadership, grotesquely asked "What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?" while shipping weapons to fuel the slaughter—a confession that lays bare the alliance's complete moral bankruptcy. The Zionist regime exists solely as NATO's rabid attack dog, sustained by Western weapons and diplomatic cover for crimes that would make the Nazis blush.

When confronted with the reality of international law violations—the illegal bombing of Iran by Zionist and American forces—Rutte responded: “I would not agree that this is against international law what the US did”, revealing the intellectual and moral poverty of Western leadership. These are not the words of confident hegemons but the desperate ravings of cornered criminals who know their "rules-based order" is nothing but a fig leaf for imperial brutality.

The Western media's desperate branding of emerging powers that challenge NATO’s hegemony as the "Axis of Upheaval" and "Axis of Adversaries"— amounts to cheap propaganda borrowed from World War II imagery and  highlights their panic at witnessing the birth of an alternative, albeit embryonic, multipolar world order. They invoke the spectre of fascism while practicing it themselves, supporting genocide while claiming to defend democracy, preaching human rights while enabling mass murder.

History has rendered its verdict: the unipolar moment is dying, multipolarity is ascendant, and no amount of NATO's flailing can prevent the emergence of a world where Western hegemony is nothing but a nightmare from the past. The alliance's every desperate action—from Ukraine to the South China Sea to the Middle East—only accelerates its own demise and hastens the arrival of the multipolar future that represents humanity's liberation from centuries of Western barbarism.

The convergence of these powers is not an aberration to be contained but the natural response of civilizations that refuse to accept permanent subjugation to a decliningWestern empire. History cannot be stopped, and NATO's futile resistance to this reality only ensures that its collapse will be more spectacular and complete.

The Criminal Agenda of the Summit

While the communiqué from the 2024 summit primarily centred Ukraine, this year was about how to achieve  expanded military spending. It must be clearly stated that the fact a year’s communiqué differs from the previous year,  does not mean that former agreements signed at previous summits are annulled. These communiqués and agreements are aggregated and expanded. So, the presence of military hardware hubs, increased training to the armed forces of Ukraine, and much more is still intact despite their absence from this year’s Summit Declaration.

The summit’s key outcomes are as follows:

The Hike in Defence Spending from 2 to 5 per cent: A Militarised Industrialisation

So far, there are eight countries that do not adhere to the current 2 per cent spending of national GDP: Canada, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Croatia, Belgium, and Luxembourg. With this year’s declaration of increasing the requirement from 2  to 5 per cent,  the working masses of this whole bloc will carry the brunt of diminished public expenditure on social services, healthcare, education, and people-centred infrastructure.

The meaning of this spending should be viewed from the perspective of an imperialist economic model of core, periphery, semi-periphery and how it produces crises of accumulation that lead to the current moment of reactionary global fascism. Whereas, the WMM claims that all of this spending is to defend “Europe” from an encroaching enemy, it is the contradictions produced by decades of a neoliberal economic model of de-industrialization and financialization of the economy such that working people do not have sustainable jobs and instead join the irregular labor pool of the “gig economy.” In other words, as the imperialist core forces peripheral countries, through sanctions, warfare, and other coercive measures, to accept neoliberal diktats and serving as a reserve army of labour that can be exploited because of the absence of worker rights, the working people in the core lose their livelihoods and are forced to operate in the inherently precarious gig economy.

The WMM claims that industrialisation will take place given the 5 per cent defence expenditure is quite preposterous, since the question of “industrializing whom? And industrializing what?” are left unanswered in such ambiguous claims. WMM’s industrialization claims focus on NATO’s defence contractors, who are in bed with the Zionist regime’s genocidal technology, as Corinna Mullin points out. They are expanding into a global war economy built on death, pillaging, and environmental catastrophe. The camouflaging of this spending as industrialisation is a farcical attempt to assuage the masses to believe that it will somehow benefit them as well. In fact, even the 1.5 per cent on infrastructure is meant to transform and rehabilitate roads, railroads and telecommunications is purely meant for militarised purposes, as the Dutch Minister of Justice and Security put it, “But we can make it about rebuilding our infrastructure: There is not a bridge in the Netherlands that can actually hold a tank.”

The imperialist summit focused on the expansion of free-trade and removal of protectionist measures. It states, “We will work to eliminate defence trade barriers among Allies [i.e. NNMA] and will leverage our partnerships to promote defence industrial cooperation.” This means that national industries, be it for defence or otherwise, will be forced to adhere to the dictates of  neoliberal globalization.. As history teaches us, this will only result in the doctrine which says that might makes right.

In the discourse on weapons industries, several business attendees at the Summit noted the necessity of standardising weapons production for the imperialist NATO bloc, so that weapons produced by one country can be used in others, for example on  tanks produced by the US or Germany. Behind this discursive evasion lies the key  to  the meaning of the 5 percent GDP on local production of weapons for the sake of self-reliance. The 5 percent stipulates that they are on defence spending, broadly defined, which includes buying weapons from the US and Germany. When NATO hardware is diverse the bloc is weaker in their view,  hence the need for standardization. While a tiny country, like Albania, might produce a number of tank shells, it will be overshadowed by the overly industrialised Germany and the US that have achieved economies of scale, forcing tiny countries to shut down local production and diverting their funds on being consumers of German and US military equipment, or serving as a reserve army of cheaper labour for outsourced production. Eventually, spending on defence means injecting money into the already militaristically industrialised economies, leading to further de-industrialization of the semi-peripheral countries.

Take the case of the idea of a unified air-defence system. Ukraine is thirsty for Patriot missiles. During the summit, Trump was asked by a Ukrainian journalist if he can send more to Ukraine. In an admission of the intersection of imperialist wars, Trump tied what the imperialist system is doing in backing Ukraine to what  it does with the Zionist regime: “We're going to see if we can make some available. You know, they're very hard to get,” he said. “We need them, too. We’re supplying them to Israel.” The obstinance of some confused “anti-imperialists” who claim that the struggle for Palestine’s national liberation is the same as the struggle for Ukraine shatters when we see that the empire is backing Ukraine while committing the genocide against the Palestinians. 

The Cunning Boomerang of Aid and Dependency

Those minds who have stopped drinking propaganda will not be estranged by the recent decision of the European ruling elite to inject billions into the US economy while impoverishing the working masses. In the Third World, aid and loans are presented by mainstream media as means to repay the global injustices and the kindness of the former colonizers who are cleansing their guilt by providing such aid. Notwithstanding the nature of aid being often contingent on structural adjustments (i.e., aid will only be given if the public expenditure and services are downsized and the economy liberalized), a key ramification of depending on aid is the creation of economies that are developed based on receiving help/stimulus from foreign actors. It is what Thomas Sankara and many others have warned against; that is, aid makes one docile and obedient to the aidgiver. 

Europe is abandoning any possibility of Eurasian integration (with Russia and China) by consolidating its vassalage to the Anglo-Saxon imperialist hegemony. The self-immiseration of Europe is perfectly shown by the suspected US-backed Banderite terrorist attack on the NordStream Pipelines linking Russia’s natural gas to Europe, a key source to quench the EU thirst for cheap energy and sustain its industries. This resulted instead in higher energy bills, de-industrialization, and the entrance of US energy providers to replace Russia. 

With the return of the Trump regime to the White House, European NATO members are anxious that the aid dependency they enjoyed under Biden—marked by endless blank checks to both Israeli forces accused of genocide and the Ukrainian military fighting Russia—may soon come to an end. This is coupled by the ironic approach of a man who claims to love the free-market yet imposing trade barriers that the imperialists despise when Third World countries attempt to defend themselves from having excess production from the imperialist core dumped on them. Trump’s move to tax his European counterparts and forcing them to play the game of vassalage has been met with  kowtowing by Von Der Leyen (EU Commissioner).

After more than three years of propaganda against an encroaching Russian enemy, Europe has decided to chip away whatever sovereignty they had to the Americans  in the following ways: 

• After visiting Trump at his golf course in Scotland, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen agreed to being charged 15 percent tariffs on EU exports to the US, solely out of fear that Trump will pull out his aid from Ukraine

• The fear that Trump will pull out the some 80,000 troops stationed across a vassal Europe.

• Brussels, in a stunning display of geopolitical astuteness, has proudly committed to funneling US $600 billion into the U.S. economy and snapping up $750 billion worth of American energy over the next three years just to replace Russia —because apparently, subsidizing the richest country on Earth is the new cornerstone of European strategy. Meanwhile, the UK, negotiating solo and supposedly adrift, managed to shave 10 per cent off tariffs on its exports. But who’s counting? Certainly not the EU, busy writing checks and calling it sovereignty.

The recipe of aid and dependency the US has mastered in the Third World now boomerangs and reaches Europe, making the continent servile and docile to the diktats of US-led imperialism, drowning in a sea of beggery. 

At the same time, beneath the surface of European vassalage lies a more sinister dynamic—one that reveals the cunning of a declining but still calculating imperial periphery. Trump's recent "historic" agreements with von der Leyen exemplify this phenomenon perfectly. While the bombast and photo-ops suggested European capitulation, the substance reveals something far more insidious: Europe's masterful deployment of strategic entrapment disguised as submission. By offering inflated figures and headline-making numbers that cannot possibly be delivered, Europe ensures that the US defense industry becomes financially bound to Europe, the US energy sector locks into European demand (despite lacking the capacity to fulfill such massive commitments), and any future American attempt to reduce its European footprint would come at enormous domestic economic cost. The beauty lies in the fact that none of these commitments come with meaningful enforcement mechanisms, because none of them are actually deliverable. The volumes cannot be supplied, the money will not materialize in full, and the arms purchases will take decades. But the commitments have already reshaped expectations, lobbying dynamics, and strategic planning.

Most crucially, this "deal" pulls US attention and capacity away from other critical theatres, notably the Indo-Pacific. The resources needed to fulfill even a fraction of these European commitments will crowd out bandwidth for confronting China, managing Taiwan tensions, or addressing Red Sea challenges. Europe has engineered a transaction so large it distracts Washington from other strategic priorities, effectively sabotaging the much-desired "pivot to Asia" through the very act of submission.

Jackals and Vultures

“The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood," declared Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, and his prophetic words expose the predatory essence of NATO's latest summit.

But this gathering of imperialist vultures in The Hague reveals something even more sinister than simple robbery—it exposes a dying empire whose European vassals have perfected the art of submission as entrapment. While cannibalizing their own social democracies to purchase American weapons, European elites simultaneously ensnare their declining hegemon in commitments that cannot be fulfilled, dependencies that cannot be broken, and strategic overextensions that accelerate imperial collapse.

This is not the desperate flailing of cornered animals, but the calculated violence of predators who understand that their system's survival depends on ever-escalating militarization, manufactured crises, and the systematic impoverishment of billions. As they pivot 5 per cent of European GDP toward instruments of death while populations freeze in energy poverty, as they standardize weapons of genocide while children starve in Gaza, NATO stands fully revealed as history's most destructive protection racket—a barbaric cartel whose every communiqué drips with blood and whose every summit plots fresh horrors against humanity.

The choice before the world's peoples has crystallized with brutal clarity: build the multipolar future that is being midwifed by forces combatting imperialism, or watch this cannibalistic empire devour what remains of civilization in its frenzied pursuit of profit and domination. History will not wait, and neither can we.

Essam Elkorghli is a Libyan PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches Libya’s modern political history and contemporary imperialism in education. He is the assistant editor for Middle East Critique Journal, serves on the board of Pambazuka News, and a member of the Global Pan African Movement.

Matteo Capasso is a Professor at Northwest University, Xi'an, People's Republic of China. He is the author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya  and Editor of Middle East Critique.

*A version of this article appeared in Black Agenda Report.