NATO now admits it’s the top marketing arm for U.S.-and-allied weapons firms.

9 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

A stunning 4,000-word interview of Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, was published by the New York Times on July 5th, which received stunningly little attention in the U.S.-and-allied press; and, in it, he made clear that NATO has nothing to do with democracy versus dictatorship, but is entirely about increasing military spending — just as-if it were controlled by whomever the top investors in those corporations are. He also made clear that NATO will be expanding beyond the existing North Atlantic Treaty Organization because it will increasingly be focusing upon also “the Indo-Pacific” in order to ‘defend’ not only against Russia but increasingly against China (though that isn’t in the “North Atlantic” region). Highlights from that shocking interview will be posted here at the end, but first will be presented the broader perspective in which to understand the reason why NATO continued on after 1990 and even greatly increased its size after communism and its NATO-mirror Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union itself (its alleged enemy), all ended in 1991 so that NATO’s previously alleged very raison d’etre, its reason-for-being — protecting against communism and the Soviet Union — had terminated (though NATO went on expanding, thereby proving the lies of its founders).

The crucial moment in this matter (disproving the lies of its founders) occurred on 24 February 1990 when U.S. President GHW Bush privately and secretly told West Germany’s leader, Helmut Kohl that all of the U.S. team’s verbal promises to Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact would end, then NATO wouldn’t take advantage of that by expanding up to the very borders of Russia so as to repeat what Hitler had tried to do in his Operation Barbarossa: blitz-invading Russia to conquer and absorb it. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker famously said on 9 February 1990 that “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” And, then, privately, President Bush himself, personally at Camp David, two weeks later, on 24 February 1990, responded to Kohl’s understanding that this was the U.S. position, by telling him, “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn't. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” Bush equated peace with Russia, to being defeat by Russia. The U.S., Bush was telling Kohl, must succeed at doing what Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had failed to do: defeat and absorb into its empire Russia. He also told Kohl, on that same day, “We have weird thinking in our Congress today, ideas like this peace dividend. We can't do that in these uncertain times.” Kohl (and the other U.S. stooges, such as France’s Mitterrand, whom Bush likewise told this after him) obeyed. They all kept silent and cooperated with the U.S. Government’s plan. (The plan had actually been decided upon by President Truman on 25 July 1945.)

Here is a graph of the U.S. stock market, three sections of it — all stocks, all industrial stocks, and all military (chiefly armaments-producing) stocks — during the period from 1950 to 201; and, in it, you can see that whereas until 1990 all three sectors grew at around the same rate, then suddenly, after 1990 (after the U.S.S.R.’s end), the ‘Defense’ (actually aggression) category in the U.S. stock market skyrocketed, so as to leave Industrials and entire Market way behind in growth. In other words: now that armaments-production was untethered to any authentic remaining national-security threat to the U.S., it has been increasing its profits (selling to U.S.-and-allied Governments) as fast as it can, at the expense of the taxpayers in the U.S., so as to maximally serve the armaments-producers’ investors. On 21 April 2024 I headlined “How America’s Military-Industrial Complex Wins All of Its Wars Against America’s Taxpayers” and explained how it’s being done.

Trump’s MAGA “Make America Great Again” was a promise to transfer a far bigger percentage of these costs away from U.S. taxpayers and to European taxpayers. America’s European and Canadian stooges (excepting possibly only the leader of Spain) have accepted this, and consequently the billionaires-controlled press throughout those countries are warning their gulls (subscribers) that the big black Russian bear is preparing to attack and swallow them up, and so, their Governments will need to reduce spending on health, education, welfare, infrastructure, and ohter non-‘defense’ expenditures, regardless of what the public wants. It comes from on-high, from the billionaires.

Here are my 1,000-word highlights from that New York Times 4,000-word interview on July 5th of Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO:

“The Interview: The Head of NATO Thinks President Trump ‘Deserves All the Praise’”

Q: I’m going to start with a big but basic question: Why should NATO matter to Americans now? What do Americans get out of this treaty today?

A: If you want to defend the U.S., you have to make sure that three things are secure. You need a secure Arctic, because it is opening up and the Chinese and the Russians are sailing there. You need a secure Atlantic, because it’s your sea; it is crucial. And you need a secure Europe, because Russia’s here. … [Furthermore,] for the U.S. to stay strong and safe, there is this embeddedness with European security and working together to keep the Indo-Pacific safe. … President Trump deserves all the praise, because without his leadership, without him being re-elected president of the United States, the 2 percent this year and the 5 percent in 2035 — we would never, ever, ever have been able to achieve agreement on this [NATO countries’ agreeing to more than double their spending on ‘defense’ against Russia]. … I have to keep the whole of NATO together. And the biggest ally is the United States. That biggest ally has paid, since Eisenhower, more than the Europeans. And now, for the first time in 65 years, we will equalize between what the U.S. is paying and what the Europeans are paying. And without Trump, that would not have happened. … [And,] he did an excellent job on Iran with the bombing of the nuclear facility. And as I said in that text message, you are now flying into another big success. …

Q: All right. We are meeting after this NATO summit, and the big success is that the member nations — except for Spain — agreed to increase their defense spending to 5 percent of their G.D.P. by 2035. Can you briefly talk me through why 5 percent is the right number?

A: Yeah, and by the way, all 32 agreed. There’s one issue with Spain. Spain is saying, OK, we agree, but we think we can reach all those capabilities with a lower investment. That is absolutely impossible. … We have an enormous geopolitical challenge on our hands. And that is first of all Russia, which is reconstituting itself at a pace and a speed which is unparalleled in recent history. They are now producing three times as much ammunition in three months as the whole of NATO is doing in a year. This is unsustainable, but the Russians are working together with the North Koreans, with the Chinese and Iranians, the mullahs, in fighting this unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. So here, the Indo-Pacific and your Atlantic are getting more and more interconnected. We know that China has its eye on Taiwan. … There is no way we can defend ourselves if we stick to this old 2 percent. So when it comes to core defense spending, we have to move up to 3.5 percent. And then of course there is all the defense-related spending. … This is an enormous amount of spending. But if we don’t, we’ll have to learn Russian.

Q: I’m sure you saw comments by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, that this new target will cause the end of NATO because it will basically bankrupt NATO members. …

A: I’ve never taken him seriously. When you talk about fake news, listen to Sergey Lavrov.

Q: So you’re not worried about an arms race between Europe and Russia?

A: No, not at all. …

Q: There is an underlying issue as well, which is that President Trump does not like to get into foreign entanglements. …

A: It’s not only about defending Europe; it’s about the United States, for the reasons I mentioned earlier: that the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe and the Arctic are not secured.

There’s a second reason that has to do with the Indo-Pacific. There’s an increasing realization, and let’s not be naïve about this: If Xi Jinping would attack Taiwan, he would first make sure that he makes a call to his very junior partner in all of this, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, residing in Moscow, and telling him, “Hey, I’m going to do this, and I need you to to keep them busy in Europe by attacking NATO territory.” …

Q: But part of the idea of NATO is about allies who share a commitment to democratic values. It was created for that. And now you have as part of this alliance what some would call a democratically backsliding United States. You have Hungary, which calls itself an illiberal democracy. And you have Turkey under President Erdogan, which has been called an electoral autocracy. Can this alliance hold when the very values at its heart are no longer commonly held in the way that perhaps they once had been?

A: I’m not sure I would completely subscribe to all the assumptions in your question. …

Q: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently refused to rule out military intervention in Greenland. You’ve said before directly to President Trump that you don’t want to drag NATO into this. But Greenland is governed by Denmark, a member of NATO. So what do you do when one NATO country is talking about attacking the territory or taking over the territory of another?

A: Sorry for the boring answer again, but when it comes to these issues between NATO allies, I can never comment about them in public.

Q: It’s this overarching question about what is the alliance really about and if these 32 members are still united by a common vision.

A: And they are, and we are.

Q: So it doesn’t concern you that Trump has also talked about annexing Canada, for example, also a NATO member?

A: When I’m not commenting about discussions between individual allies, of course I will not comment on that. No, I can’t. …

Q: So you think NATO will last with America at its heart?

A: Absolutely. I have no doubt of America being the leader in the world and also within NATO, with the Europeans taking their fair share in terms of the burden, and that’s only good. That makes NATO stronger and fairer and more lethal — exactly as we should be.

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I should especially note here that his fundamental assumption that the aggressor who started the war in Ukraine was Russia (Putin) and not the U.S. (Obama) is false — false ‘history’. That overwhelmingly documented (as I did there) historical fact is particularly important to note in this context. Anyone who is unaware of that historical fact should click onto that last link to see the evidence.

Douglas Macregor, whom I believe if he were the Presidential candidate of any third political Party in the U.S. would be the only one who even possibly might win, has placed into a 100% truthful context what has been documented here, the issues concerning Israel and Iran:

However, at 50:44 he says there that “The foreign investment we need in order to sustain ourselves is not coming in,” and he thereby displays ignorance of the following facts:

Under President Trump’s now-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” transferring trillions away from health, education, welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and infrastructure, into the U.S. Defense Department (to produce more weapons) and the Homeland Security Department (especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “ICE” to keep the poor out and to collect on tariffs so as to fund continued growth in America’s armaments-purchases), America’s current #2 position in the rankings of nations that are drawing the largest investments from foreign billionaires and centi-millionaires, is likely to become #1: Trump’s policy is to bribe them to acquire U.S. residency and to invest in American commerce — to add themselves to the billionaires who aready contol the U.S. Government. As that last link proved, America’s billionaires DO control the U.S. Government. Although (as I myself have argued several times such as here and here) Israel’s Government controls America’s Government — which Macgregor likewise believes), what has been PROVEN is only that America’s billionaires DO control the U.S. Government. However, THAT fact is something which Macgregor ignores. He instead refers to “economic elites,” which is an undefined phrase, which would include not only the super-rich but also their agents, as-if those agents aren’t THEMSELVES being controlled by the super-rich upon whom they are financially dependent — which would be false; those agents ARE controlled by those individuals. His “economic elites” refers actually only to the billionaires.

Other than that unnecessary vaguery, Macgregor’s analysis is profound, though he offers no proposed means of solving the problems that he discusses. I have proposed such a means, here. Whereas Macgregor doesn’t recognize that in order to solve the problem of the super-rich corrupting and suborning the Government, a way must be proposed that would terminate the power that billionaires have to corrupt and suborn the Government. Recognizing this fact (that logical dependency — the fact that terminating the billionaires’ control over the Government is essential in order for a country to be able to BECOME a democracy) provides the basis upon which a possible means of solving the fundamental problem can be proposed. Obviously, the means won’t be easy or quick to achieve, but great endeavors never are easy or quick. They are extremely difficult to achieve. But that desn’t make them impossible to achieve.

Here is an American-Ukrainian couple whose wife’s mother was fired from her Ukrainian Government job and whose property was taken away because she spoke no Ukrainian but only Russian and so had to escape. These people are among the millions of victims of the U.S.-and-allied billionaires, who are making money hand-over-fist from the U.S. empire’s forever wars. And they keep their agents employed while wrecking the entire “The West” — which they pretend to be protecting. My proposed method for ending the cause of these mega-crimes is here.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.