I’m Calling It. Time for a New NATO

Two great institutions, created in the mid-20th century, are dying.

One is the United Nations. The other is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Together they created a rules-based international order that lasted from 1945 to 2025. But for at least the last quarter-century, both institutions have weakened.

The UN has been moribund for decades. Its resolutions are ignored. Its emergency sessions, like the one held on Monday after the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, change nothing. Wars rage on in Myanmar, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen. The UN has little or no effect on them.

NATO, by contrast, seemed in reasonably good health until Vladimir Putin launched his first attacks on Ukraine in 2014. NATO’s response under then-U.S. president Barack Obama amounted to sanctions and scolding. Even after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, most of the NATO nations were willing at least to arm and finance the Ukrainians.

Then Donald Trump returned to power in 2025. With the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife on Saturday, the rules-based world order imploded and we now find ourselves in a global anarchy like the 19th century, but with nuclear weapons.

In the past year, Trump has criticized European policies as risking “civilizational erasure,” while threatening NATO members like Canada and Denmark. NATO has now begun to look very fragile.

‘Everything would stop’

As Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen observed Monday, “If the United States decides to militarily attack another NATO country, then everything would stop — that includes NATO and therefore post-Second World War security.”

If NATO goes, and Trump’s United States changes from global superpower to regional bully, we will see the world carved into three spheres of influence: the United States in the Western Hemisphere, Russia in Europe, and China in the Indo-Pacific. As regional powers, the Big Three will compete for the resources of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, fighting wars against weaker nations or funding proxy wars between each other’s client states.

Canada, for all our elbows-up talk, is a weaker state. Trump might not even have to invade to dominate us. He could simply blockade our ports, seize oil tankers and cargo vessels alike and shut down cross-border commerce for a few weeks.

The threat of attack by a powerful neighbour was precisely the reason for founding both the UN and NATO in the first place. So we might consider creating a fourth sphere of influence by founding a new alliance to discourage the United States, Russia and China from economic attack. The alliance would, like NATO, treat an attack on any of its members as an attack against all.

A globe-spanning alliance

The obvious candidates for this new alliance would be most of the NATO nations, those with fairly elected democratic governments. That would exclude Hungary and Turkey. But new allies should also include Mexico and other democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean like Brazil, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica and Jamaica. Ukraine as a full member? Of course.

The alliance would cross the Pacific to include Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, plus Malaysia. Three other countries might prefer the new alliance to being trapped by China or the United States: the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand.

The Big Three would dislike a new alliance rich and strong enough to go its own way. But I recall the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Newly liberated nations decided that they preferred neutrality to being recolonized by either the West or the Soviets. The new alliance would be something like that, but richer and better armed.

Life as a new alliance member nation would not be a bed of roses. Canadians and their allies would feel the burden of military spending, big standing armies and political pressure from the Big Three. The world’s longest undefended border would be no more, and Trump or his successors might think it funny to round up all the Canadian residents in the United States and dump them at the border.

We and our new allies could also expect endless harassment, espionage and hybrid warfare: cyberattacks, violations of Canadian airspace, high tariffs on Canadian goods (especially oil and gas) — not just from the Americans, but from the Russians and Chinese as well.

A porcupine strategy for defence

The new alliance would likely adopt a “porcupine” strategy, making any invasion of its members simply not worth the cost. We could learn a lot from the Finns in this regard, preparing the whole country for anything from a collapse of the electrical grid to an outright invasion.

The new alliance would not always be overtly hostile to its adversaries. We could still maintain “correct” diplomatic and trade relations with the Big Three and their client states. Sometimes, if a Big Three power changed its government, we might enjoy a thaw in relations. China after Xi Jinping might really prefer trade deals to dominating the western Pacific. A post-Putin Russia might be content to stay within its borders and rebuild its economy. The United States after Trump might restore its old institutions and try to become a good neighbour again.

Those would all be welcome developments. But just as the original NATO didn’t shut down with the fall of the Soviet Union, the New Alliance Treaty Organization would maintain the independence and sovereignty of its member nations.

And we might also be open to admitting brand new nations, just as the Bandung Conference did. If Siberia breaks away from Russia and elects a democratic government, welcome the Siberians. If California or New York secedes from the United States, we would be happy to admit such rich and powerful democracies to the new alliance.

Creating and sustaining a new world disorder is easy, as Trump has shown. Building a new world order based on democracy is much harder; after all, it took the worst war in human history to get the survivors to form the United Nations. The new alliance would have to work hard to prevent another such war, while also contending with climate disasters and economic upheaval.

But the alternative would be worse: to be ruled and exploited by the likes of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, and to function as nothing more than sources of raw materials for their economies and militaries.

The old order is over. If we do not find allies to help us build a new one, we will have to accept overlords instead, and with them will come their forever wars and their endless oppression.