Why an independent Scotland should stay well away from Nato

The National

5 hours ago

Even more nauseating was the shameless brown-nosing of Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, who offered Trump his 'congratulations' on what he called the US president's 'decisive action in Iran'.
Trump's spectacularly dangerous and inflammatory assault on the Islamic Republic was, Rutte snivelled, 'truly extraordinary and something no-one else dared to do. It makes us all safer'. On the 5% commitment, Rutte grovelled: 'You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.'
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Rutte, with this display of arse kissing, has given Keir Starmer a run for his money where obsequious flattery towards the president is concerned. What Rutte means by European member states paying in a 'BIG way' for their Nato membership is that their citizens will pay the price in cuts to health, education and other social spending. When the Spanish delegation dared to suggest that its fiscal sovereignty belongs not to Nato but to its own parliament, Trump threatened Spain with economic sanctions.
The US president is keen to be seen as a strongman. He left The Hague able to boast that he forced a deal whereby the US only agreed to uphold Nato's totemic Article 5 (the 'one for all, and all for one' clause that ensures collective defence among Nato members) after extracting the 5% commitment.
However, the agreement reflects not the US's strength, but its relative weakness. Despite its seeming victory over the old Soviet Union, the US empire has suffered a long period of decline. Catastrophic defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have exposed the dangers of imperial overreach on the part of a US federal state that thought it had an unchallengeable global hegemony.
(Image: Julia Demaree Nikhinson, via REUTERS) Trump's foreign policy – which, ironically, is based upon former president Barack Obama's 'pivot to Asia' – involves a tacit acknowledgement that a rising China threatens the US's position as the dominant world power. It is also an admission that the great US imperium cannot attempt to counter Chinese power in the South China Sea and the wider Asia-Pacific region while maintaining its current level of military expenditure in Europe. That is the fundamental reason for the 5% agreement.
Trump's bullying is par for the course for a Western nuclear alliance that was established in 1949 as a belligerent creature of the Cold War. Now as then, Nato is predicated not on peacemaking diplomacy, but upon a sabre-rattling, militarist stance against its perceived enemies.
In 1949, those enemies were the Soviet Union and its allied Warsaw Pact countries. Today they are Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation and Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus.
(Image: Sergey Bobylev via REUTERS) Far from being a defender of the 'free world', the founding states of Nato included the brutal fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Following their coup d'état in 1967, the Greek colonels' fascistic junta was accepted readily as a Nato member.
Little has changed. In the Nato 'family photo' taken in The Hague this week Starmer is – appropriately enough – sandwiched between two semi-fascists: namely, Trump and Türkiye's authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Standing behind them is the ideological talisman of the global far right, Hungary's dangerously racist and antisemitic prime minister Viktor Orban. By contrast, standing on the outer edge of the group is Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. Having pledged Canadian 'elbows up' in the face of Trump's threat to his country's sovereignty, Carney stands, elbows down, having agreed to the US's 5% demand.
All of which poses tough questions for the current party of Scottish government. The SNP aspire for an independent Scotland to be a member of Nato, yet also free of nuclear weapons. As this week's Nato summit underlines, the SNP's desire to join Nato would involve our country relinquishing a significant proportion of its hard-won economic sovereignty.
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Scotland's admission would be dependent upon 5% of GDP being spent on the military, with devastating implications for spending on social goods such as health, social care, education and housing.
If the fiscal implications of Nato membership are deeply worrying, the idea that an independent Scotland could join while simultaneously removing British nuclear submarines from the Firth of Clyde is naive at best. It is impossible to imagine Scotland's accession to Nato being granted without Holyrood agreeing, at the very least to lease the Faslane nuclear base to the UK Government for an extended period.
The rationale would be that the Westminster administration would require Faslane until such time as it identified a site for, and then built, a new nuclear submarine base.
In any case, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a UK lease on Faslane was not negotiated and renegotiated in perpetuity, keeping nukes on the Clyde on a permanent basis. Nato membership would make the SNP's longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons a dead letter.
From its highly dubious beginnings to its current recalibration in the face of the decline of the American empire, Nato is not a club that any progressive government should want to belong to.
An independent Scotland would do well to follow the lead of our Irish neighbours and keep well out of it.