If NATO Collapses, It Will Not Be a Tragedy—It Will Be a Reckoning
Power, hypocrisy, and the end of a moral illusion.
For Canadians, the idea that a sitting U.S. president would openly float annexing Canada as the “51st state” should be unthinkable. It is the kind of rhetoric one expects from imperial powers toward weaker neighbours, not from a country that has long claimed to be our closest ally. Yet Donald Trump has done precisely that—while simultaneously pressuring Denmark to relinquish Greenland, openly disregarding sovereignty, international law, and the postwar norms that the West claims to defend.
These threats are not merely diplomatic oddities or bombastic theatrics. They strike at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO is built on the premise that its members respect one another’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. When the alliance’s dominant power casually undermines those principles, NATO ceases to be a defensive pact and becomes something far more fragile: a hierarchy enforced by coercion.
Much of the Western commentary has framed this moment as an existential crisis for NATO—one demanding fear, panic, and immediate rallying around the alliance. But there is another perspective, one that is conspicuously absent from mainstream discourse: if NATO were to fracture or collapse as a result of these actions, it would be a fitting fate for a military alliance that has spent the last quarter-century violating the very norms it claims to uphold.
The myth of the ‘defensive, rules-based alliance’
NATO presents itself as a defensive organization, a stabilizing force committed to peace, democracy, and human rights. Yet its post–Cold War record tells a different story.
In Afghanistan, NATO waged its longest war—two decades of occupation, counterinsurgency, and nation-building rhetoric that ended not in stability or democracy, but in collapse. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, trillions of dollars were spent, and when NATO forces withdrew, the country was left poorer, more traumatized, and back under Taliban rule. Whatever justifications were offered in 2001, the outcome is indisputable: plenty of suffering and no lasting benefit to the Afghan people.
Libya is an even starker indictment. NATO’s 2011 intervention, framed as humanitarian, culminated in the violent overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi without any viable plan for what would follow. The result was not liberation, but state collapse—civil war, slave markets, the proliferation of militias, and a dramatic fall in Libya’s human development indicatory. A country that in 2010 ranked 54th on the UN HDI—which measures education, health, and income—was shattered in the name of Western moral authority, and finds itself in 117th place today.
Disturbingly, credible investigations later raised the possibility that the war itself may have been driven in part by personal political calculations at the highest levels—most notably allegations that French President Nicolas Sarkozy sought to eliminate Gaddafi to suppress evidence of Libyan financing of his election campaign. While the full truth hasn’t been conclusively established, the fact that such allegations were plausible at all underscores how little democratic accountability governed a war sold to the public as a moral necessity.
These violent interventions were not aberrations. They were the logical outcomes of an alliance that increasingly substituted military force for diplomacy, accountability, and restraint.
Nowhere, however, has NATO members’ moral bankruptcy been more clearly exposed than in Gaza.
Gaza and the collapse of moral pretence
As Israel carried out a campaign against Palestinians in Gaza that leading human rights organizations, legal scholars, and UN officials warned bore the hallmarks of genocide, most NATO states—including Canada—responded with a now-familiar script.
They claimed they wanted restraint.
They claimed concern for civilians.
They claimed commitment to international law.
And then they did the opposite.
Weapons continued to flow to Israel. Diplomatic support intensified. UN resolutions calling for ceasefires were blocked, diluted, or ignored. Even the word genocide—a legal term with clear meaning under international law—was treated as taboo. Western leaders refused to name what millions around the world could plainly see. This included Prime Minister Mark Carney, who distanced himself from the term following an election campaign event in which someone in the crowd shouted “there's a genocide in Palestine!”
All this was not neutrality. It was participation in the gravest crime known to humanity.
What’s more, across NATO countries, citizens who protested Israel’s actions—often peacefully, often invoking international law—were surveilled, vilified, suspended from universities, fired from jobs, or criminalized. In Canada, the gap between official rhetoric about democracy and the repression of dissent became impossible to ignore.
An alliance of states that claim to defend freedom abroad cannot tolerate it at home.
Ukraine and the manufacturing of false confidence
Ukraine offers another sobering example of NATO’s reckless approach to security. For years, NATO powers insisted that the alliance’s enlargement posed no threat, that Russia’s security concerns were illegitimate, and that Ukraine’s path toward NATO membership was simply an expression of sovereign choice. At the same time, they armed, trained, financed, and politically emboldened Ukrainian leaders—sending a clear signal that the West stood behind them.
What NATO did not provide was the one thing that might have made such encouragement responsible: a binding security guarantee. Ukraine was left in a strategic no-man’s land—too aligned with NATO to remain neutral, too exposed to be protected.
Western leaders spoke endlessly of deterrence while fostering the illusion that Ukraine could confront a nuclear-armed great power with conditional Western backing. Domestic Ukrainian actors were encouraged to believe they could prevail with NATO’s support, only to discover—once war came—that this support was carefully calibrated to avoid direct confrontation. Ukraine paid in blood for promises that were never fully made and never fully honoured.
This was not a tragic accident. It was the predictable result of NATO’s foolish expansionist logic: pushing military frontiers outward towards Russia while outsourcing the human cost of confrontation to a non-member state.
Canadian complicity and responsibility
Canada was not a bystander in these campaigns. We participated. We endorsed. We justified. From Kandahar to Tripoli, successive Canadian governments aligned themselves with NATO’s interventions, often silencing dissent by appealing to alliance loyalty rather than moral clarity.
That is precisely why Canadians should not respond to NATO’s potential unraveling with reflexive nostalgia or fear. Alliances are not sacred. They are tools—and when tools are used to perpetuate harm, they deserve scrutiny, not reverence.
If NATO collapses because the United States no longer even pretends to respect its allies’ sovereignty—because it treats Canada and Europe with the same imperial contempt it has long shown toward the Global South—that is not a betrayal of NATO’s values. It is the exposure of its reality.
Hubris turning inward
There is a grim irony in watching Western capitals panic at the possibility of coercion from Washington. For decades, NATO member states normalized the violation of other countries’ sovereignty in the name of “security.” Now, as similar logic is casually applied to Canada or Denmark, the shock is palpable.
But this is how empires behave when they sense decline. They stop pretending. They discard norms. They test how far power alone can carry them.
If NATO cannot survive without unquestioning submission to American dominance, then it was never a partnership of equals to begin with. And if its collapse forces Canada and Europe to confront uncomfortable truths—about militarism, complicity, and the limits of force—that reckoning may be long overdue.
Beyond NATO
None of this is an argument for isolationism or vulnerability. Canada still needs security arrangements, diplomacy, and international cooperation. But security rooted in coercion, hypocrisy, and unaccountable violence is not security—it is instability deferred.
If NATO falls apart under the weight of its own contradictions, history will not record it as a tragedy inflicted by one reckless US president alone. It will record it as the implosion of an alliance that mistook power for legitimacy, force for justice, and loyalty for morality.
And for Canada, that moment—unsettling as it may be—could finally open space to imagine a foreign policy guided not by fear of displeasing Washington, but by principles we claim to hold dear.
Sometimes collapse is not the end of order.
Sometimes it is the end of illusion.