NATO. Responsible taxpayers know that it is a mighty defensive alliance that protects us from tyranny and faraway brown people, but what does it actually do?

Now that the Red Menace has been taken care of, NATO has struggled over the last twenty-odd years to redefine itself. Maybe NATO could study the Kabbalah with Madonna, who also apparently suffers from a serious lack of purpose? No, unfortunately that wouldn’t sell nearly enough American fighter jets to countries that don’t need them.

Here is how a think tank described the expansion of NATO into central and eastern Europe in 1999: On the surface, central and eastern Europe presented a dream market for arms manufacturers...[but] a Pentagon official interviewed for this article said that weapons were not at the top of the new members’ priorities—yet. Without an improvement in Russia-NATO relations, a military build-up in the new NATO countries would amount to pouring oil on the fires burning between Moscow and the West.

Just to reiterate, this analysis was published by the Centre for World Dialogue in 1999. Could anything be more prophetic?

Recently, the center-left Danish newspaper Politiken ran an article which focused on how the U.S. has conjured up threats of Russian world conquest as a means to boost arms sales to its NATO “allies” in central and eastern Europe. According to top Pentagon officials who will soon retire and work as consults for Lockheed Martin, Russia could invade Baltics literally any minute now. What does this mean? Simple: Weapons are now at the top of NATO members’ priorities. Finally!

Of course, it’s purely coincidental that last year the Obama administration launched an ambitious arms dealing initiative which specifically targets NATO members:

The U.S. government on Wednesday announced a two-year project aimed at making it easier for NATO and member countries to share costs and buy weapons as a group as they struggle to stretch scarce defense budgets.

The program aims to keep U.S. foreign military sales competitive by adapting to changing business practices and being more flexible about purchaser requirements, statement said.

So to return to our initial question, what exactly is it that NATO “does”? Simple: It creates imaginary threats to world stability and then peddles weapons to defend against aforementioned boogeyman threats.

As Major General Smedley Butler once said, “war is a racket.”

We don’t need to spend more on military than the next 25 countries combined, and we don’t need an outdated “defensive” alliance that bombs defenseless nations and peddles American-made weapons to countries that have no use for them. NATO is a racket.