The 2025 NATO summit exposed a dying empire escalating wars and austerity to hide its collapse while backing genocide in Gaza and illegal attacks worldwide.
In the backdrop of the ongoing NATO-backed, zionist inflicted genocide 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 was held in The Hague, Netherlands. This gathering of a crumbling alliance—held against the stark reality of American imperial retreat and European vassalage—revealed an empire in terminal decline, 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 solely five points, a pathetic distillation 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 decline 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 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.
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 September 11 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 go 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. 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. These technocratic overlords, who built their entire power structure on subservience to American hegemony, now find themselves completely stripped of any capacity for autonomous action.
The Trump phenomenon has brutally exposed the alliance's fundamental contradictions and the pathetic 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 specter 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. 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) has decided to unleash its massive firepower, frantically rushing to manufacture consent for this self-destructive trajectory through relentless propaganda campaigns. Mark Rutte's hysterical declaration that Europeans must "learn to speak Russian" unless they submit to ruinous defense spending quotas reveals the pathetic 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.
This manufactured crisis serves to paper over NATO's existential fragmentation. 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 cognitive warfare extends beyond traditional media manipulation. NATO's deployment of diversity theater—using hosts of color 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.
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 fact that military hardware hubs, increased training to the armed forces of Ukraine, and much more is still intact despite its absence from this year’s Summit Declaration.
The summit’s key outcomes are as follows:
- Affirming collective defence enshrined in Article 5 of NATO, an attack on one is an attack on all.
- Increase GDP (Gross Domestic Product) percentage spending on defence and security-related sectors from the former goal of 2% to a whopping 5% by 2035.
- The increase in 5% is deciphered as follows: 3.5% on core defence requirements, 1.5% on critical infrastructure
- Harness transatlantic defence industrial cooperation among members and allies (such as Kenya, Jordan, the Zionist entity, and other Non-NATO Major Allies, NNMA).
- The forthcoming summit is in 2026 in Türkiye.
The Hike in Defence Spending from 2% to 5%: A Militarised Industrialisation
So far, there are 8 countries that do not adhere to the current 2% 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%, 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 labor 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% defence expenditure is quite preposterous. The key focus of this spending is on the military industry, with little to no impact on other sectors of the working people’s economy. Defence contractors of NATO, who are in bed with the Zionist regime’s genocidal technology, as Corinna Mullin points out, 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% percent 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 diktats of the global neoliberal economy — 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 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 in what the meaning of the 5 percent expenditure is. Defence spending is not about each country spending a cut from its 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 labor 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 is the same as 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 adamance 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.
“Challenging Convergence: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea”: The Death Throes of Unipolarity
The imperialist system's hysterical obsession with suppressing alternatives and multipolar possibilities 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 genuine alternatives—Russia's defiant resistance to Western diktat, China's economic juggernaut that has shattered the myth of Western supremacy, Iran's unwavering anti-imperialist stance, and North Korea's steadfast and nuclear refusal to bow before empire—represents the materialization of history's verdict against five centuries of Western domination. These nations embody the irrepressible tide of liberation that no amount of NATO propaganda can contain or reverse.
NATO's frenzied demonization of this "convergence" exposes the alliance's recognition that its unipolar moment is over. The old world order, built on blood and plunder, is crumbling before our eyes, and all the military spending and scaremongering in the world cannot resurrect what history has already condemned to death. The Global South's awakening, multipolarity's unstoppable advance, and the West's accelerating decline represent not merely geopolitical shifts but the fulfillment of 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's pathetic response, "I would not agree that this is against international law what the US did," reveals 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.
Rutte's sneering reference to Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea as having a "foursome" betrays his inability to comprehend that these nations represent the future while NATO wallows in the decadent death throes of a civilization that has exhausted its historical mission. The alliance's own "extended imperialist decadent orgy" spans decades of mass murder, from Yugoslavia to Iraq to Libya to Gaza—a blood-soaked legacy that no amount of propaganda can whitewash.
The Western media's desperate branding of these emerging powers as the "Axis of Upheaval" and "Axis of Adversaries"—cheap propaganda borrowing from World War II imagery—only highlights their panic at witnessing the birth of a new world order. They invoke the specter 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 dead, 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 declining, increasingly psychotic Western empire. History cannot be stopped, and NATO's futile resistance to this reality only ensures that its collapse will be more spectacular and complete.
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. This gathering of imperialist vultures in The Hague represents nothing less than a declaration of war against the world's working masses—a cynical blueprint for ransacking public coffers to feed the insatiable appetite of the military-industrial complex while entire populations are crushed under the boot of austerity. The alliance's desperate pivot from 2% to 5% GDP military spending exposes the terminal panic of a dying empire that can only sustain itself through escalating violence and the systematic impoverishment of its own people. As European vassals prostrate themselves before their declining American overlords, cannibalizing their social democracies to purchase weapons from the very powers that exploit them, the mask has finally slipped. NATO stands revealed not as a defensive alliance but as history's most destructive protection racket—a barbaric cartel of war profiteers whose every communiqué drips with the blood of the Global South and whose every summit plots fresh horrors against humanity.
The choice before the world's peoples has never been clearer: resist this imperialist death machine or watch it incinerate what remains of civilization in its frenzied pursuit of profit and domination.
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 .
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