NATO and the European Court of Human Rights

To counter evolving security threats in Europe, particularly from mass migration, NATO should refocus on its core mission and adopt new policies, such as making NATO membership incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. International security must take into account domestic stability to address the consequences of mass migration, which is eroding free speech, social solidarity, and internal security. Alliances are built on trust between leaders and between leaders and their people, who must believe that an alliance defends and protects them.

Last year, I found myself in Sarajevo at a NATO-affiliated Security Conference. I, young and dumb, walked among generals, German and American, and a whole slew of foreign affairs wonks and lanyards. I wandered among the aging crowd, spotted a State Department Gender Equality Officer, and then went to get my Sarajevo tote bag. A huge range of topics were covered in various panels: China, the Red Sea, Hamas, the Houthis, gender equality, so on and so on. Did I learn anything? No. If you have ever opened Foreign Affairs you know enough already.

At this NATO-affiliated conference, one would think NATO states would discuss how their countries are doing in terms of political stability and domestic security. They did not. It was a given that Europe was fine. Europeans discussed needing bullets from Bosnia. They did not discuss the still-ongoing Islamist terror problem, economic reliance on cheap migrant labor that undermines European industrial policy, the limits on free speech that come with mass migration and which have torn a rift inside NATO, and the way that domestic terror and restrictions on free speech make NATO seem distant, alien, and irrelevant to the actual security of day-to-day life for regular people. What is NATO for if there are barriers at Christmas markets after twenty years of war on terror?

NATO and Migration Policy

In 1949, the twelve original parties to the NATO treaty articulated the objectives of their alliance, writing that they sought “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” Since 1949, twenty more nations have joined the NATO alliance. Consider Sweden, which joined NATO in 2024 in the shadow of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2025, Sweden experienced a bombing almost every day in January. Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson declared, “It's abundantly clear that we do not have control over this wave of violence.” Did Russia invade and bomb Stockholm?

No. Sweden is wracked by gang violence as a result of mass migration. This led the state to aggressively pursue voluntary repatriation, which is also referred to as “remigration,” through legal and financial means. The problem of gang violence in Sweden is not 100% the result of mass migration; after all, a few young Swedes join gangs; nevertheless, a well-known gang leader is named Ismail Abdo. Sweden was once a model nation with world-class healthcare and gender equality, two core values of the left, now Sweden is pursuing “remigration,” a comprehensive emigration policy that includes voluntary return and reintegration (AVRR) services, financial support for repatriation, and, in cases involving criminal or terrorist activity, the revocation of citizenship. Secretary Rubio’s Department of State is considering forming an Office of Remigration. 

The reason there are so many migrants in Sweden is simple. Aging Swedes leaving the workforce were replaced with poor Muslim migrants and anti-migration policy was considered, beginning with the Syrian Refugee crisis, hypocritical and illiberal. Thus, migration, on a scale heretofore unknown in human history, was permitted, resulting in widespread demographic change. Vast numbers of people who were not Syrian poured into Europe from every corner of the world, and the liberal governments of Europe—primarily elected on anti-war and anti austerity platforms—were unprepared.

As a result, many other European states, like Britain, are undergoing a massive demographic transformation that no one ever voted for. Britain has been wracked by anti-migration riots in Ballymena and Southport over the past year—adding a dangerous new dimension to a still simmering ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland. Integration has been widely proclaimed a failure, with Labour’s Kier Starmer, quoting the late Enoch Powell, proclaiming the UK is “an island of strangers.” The “Grooming Gangs scandal,” which involves race-based rape and sexual violence against English girls by mostly Pakistani men and which was covered up by the police to preserve social harmony, has pushed British right escalating tension with ethnic minority communities that are desperate to hold onto their place the UK. A key promise of the surging Reform Party has been to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, while the British Homeland Party—alongside the AfD in Germany and Chega in Portugal—is advocating for remigration.

Barriers to Rational Migration Controls

Even as some governments across Europe are trying to move towards a more reasonable immigration policy the European Convention on Human Rights is stymying them. As The Critic has reported, British Courts using ECHR guidance have ruled that drug dealers cannot be deported because of their right to family life, Kurds cannot be deported if they have tattoos, and an Islamic-State supporter cannot be deported because his home country may torture him, and a Pakistani pedophile cannot be deported because this would “harm his children.”

NATO member states face serious obstacles in removing people from their territory who pose social and political threats, and some are now incapable of maintaining a domestic monopoly of force. This comes as they have growing populations with radically different political and cultural beliefs, including hatred of Israel, Jews, and the European heritage—liberal, conservative, religious and secular—that NATO was founded to defend. The large number of migrants have undermined the industrialized market economies of Europe, which have replaced advancements in automation and robotics with cheap labor, alongside establishing high-tax regimes to provide funds for migrant populations whose economic contributions, in the best-case scenario, are non-competitive with those of native residents. 

NATO was established as a defense treaty for weak but growing post-war countries, primarily organized by the United States. Now, in cases such as Sweden's, NATO serves as a guarantor of independence and external security from the threat of Russia, even as the migration threat from within actually undermines Sweden’s security. NATO's protective shield may have even contributed to European disinvestment in border security and defense policy. The situation in Sweden is so desperate, the Swedish state has considered using the army to fight the gangs, but Sweden can only deploy 20,000 men, which would—in addition to the 11,000 police officers—place them on equal footing with the gangs, which have nearly 30,000 members. Sweden could invoke Article V and receive the military aid the state requires to deal with the transnational gang and cartel problem, after all, collective defense means that “no single member country is forced to rely solely on its national capabilities to meet its essential national security objectives.” This long-term disinvestment in security, which had been for so long assured by NATO proximity before membership, has left Sweden defenseless and incapable. On the other side of Europe, in the United Kingdom, more Muslims joined ISIS as they joined the British military: the UK, a NATO member, now exports Islamist terror.

On the other side of Europe, in the United Kingdom, more Muslims joined ISIS than joined the British military: the UK, a NATO member, exports Islamist terror. Mass migration is empowering Islamists, leading to chaos and fears of civil war.

These are military and security crises. Yet, they are almost entirely ignored in international security. Last year, I had the privilege to attend the Sarajevo Security Conference, affiliated with NATO. A range of topics were covered: China, the Red Sea, Hamas and the Houthis. Speaking to NATO officers and German generals, one would conclude that, but for Russia, Europe was perfectly safe.

Drinking on a balcony after a ceremony at the town hall, which is a library destroyed by inter-ethnic violence in the 90’s, the generals chittered around me while the music played. An ex-CIA guy handed me a card for strategic communication services. Everyone knew each other. Everyone feared Russia. I was afraid of everything in front of me. I raised the migration issue; someone shushed me, and an old American army officer regaled a crowd with a story of Bosnia in the 90’s.

The Town Hall's surrounding blocks are clean and modern. At night, in the center of the city, Sarajevo is beautiful.

Down around a block, there are buildings still covered in gunshots. Plaster walls are still broken off. Visiting the city, the gunshots ask questions. They ask if they are a badge of Sarajevo’s pride—or a mark of Serbian shame. Or just leftover relics that don’t mean much to anyone, or there are so many, and people are so poor, it’d be bothersome to fix. Or they’re just there, finger-bone relics from a past many find difficult to forget but would like to live far and free away from in a bright future. They are impossible to ignore and hard to understand. They’re ambiguous, obstinate, and haunting.  Though downtown sparkles, the rest of the city rots, covered in tarp-window curtains. Restaurants on the street are discreetly tucked away, almost invisible to passersby.

It's easy to dismiss things like collapse and civil war as melodramatic, but they do happen. Often, they are entirely obvious with a rudimentary historical analysis. Do people trust each other and their government? Is there a functioning social contract? Are there ethnic or political factions with oppositional material interests? Do competing factions have claims to power perceived by large numbers of people as legitimate? Are weapons readily available? Are conditions such that a man, working a 9-5 in trucking, would consider killing his neighbor?

I don't think civil war is likely. I am sympathetic to the notion of waltzing into collapse. That's what the generals were doing. But collapse does happen and we should not pretend, arrogantly, that we are somehow greater than history, which has seen a hundred proud societies sewn into dirt.

Experts consider groupthink in foreign policy to be characterized by “group cohesiveness, structural exclusivity, a lack of impartiality, and a lack of norms for evaluating alternatives.” How else could one describe a party of ancient generals on a Sarajevo balcony? Sipping wine and gazing out at the sparkling canton they built from a high balcony, unaware that taxi drivers only work with cash because they're too low-trust for credit cards, ignorant or in denial about the fact that huge swathes of their people hate them.

Multiple European states are on a demographic path of mass population change. This is not a concern of culture, of what downtown restaurants a society has, but of the fundamentals of security and statehood. People will not fight for a government they feel has abandoned them.

As a responsible leader of NATO, the United States must expand NATO's focus on migration. Otherwise, more European states will go the path of Sweden, becoming helpless liabilities and dependents—no longer able to secure their territory or act as meaningful allies.

Policy

A first step would be for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to release a memo to NATO members stating that the United States will consider membership in the ECHR to be a notice of denunciation, which is the formal mechanism for states to exit NATO. After all, if a state cannot defend its borders, how can the United States expect that nation to defend others’?

States should be provided six months to comply before the United States recognizes their exit from NATO. Nothing else will shock Europe into action. They will, like Sweden, trudge on blindly, despite warnings, until grenades go off every day. Leaders in Europe and NATO have lost touch with what a “state” is, in the most basic sense: the monopoly of force. Ideally, under democratic control by a demos: a discrete people, naturally united by heritage, culture, and history. European elites live in a fantasy, with those in charge of domestic security showing no regard for factual reality. European states are one force among forces, tossed about like a ship at sea by the ECHR and waves of uncontrolled migration, incapable of righting themselves or even perceiving the tsunami on the horizon.

They will not comply with talking tough. President Trump and his allies have been talking tough on NATO for nearly ten years. With all of this talk, a third of NATO states are still incapable or unwilling to meet defense spending targets.

The United States should establish a basic migration control platform for NATO states, similar to NATO spending guidelines. This could include a requisite minimal 1.5% budgetary allocation for border security, the requirement that states turn back boats of asylum seekers (unknown military-age men), that states can revoke citizenship from terrorists and deport them, and that other conventions that act as barriers to a migration control policy, including but not limited to the ECHR, are exited. Rather than allowing border security to count as defense spending, which some NATO states have considered, they should be required to invest in both defense and border security.

One cannot be substituted for another. States without militaries are often states without borders, and states without borders can often not build militaries, because borders and militaries are built by competent elites, not out-of-touch elites. Elites that have lost touch with the basics of statehood are those that allow their militaries to atrophy and their borders to become porous; those elites are the problem, fundamentally, not funding levels or percentage contributions.

Bending NATO Back Towards Civilization

In the Balkans, there is a word, inat, which refers to a silent, hateful spite. Inat is a cultural practice, a way of being. Inat is why so many nice homes in Sarajevo are kept ugly on the outside: looking cheap means you don’t get robbed or targeted in violence. Nice restaurants look, from the outside, like anonymous homes. Beautiful courtyards are hidden. Much of this stems from Ottoman rule in the Balkans, but the war in the 1990s made permanent, like the broken Dayton Accords, this fractured, fragmented society of defensiveness and protection. As mass migration continues, Europe will have less social trust and will have more inat. What happens in Rotherham is not far from what happens at the NATO HQ. Alliances are built on trust between leaders and between leaders and their people, who must believe that an alliance defends and protects them.

The Trump administration has the opportunity not to end NATO but to bend NATO—back to its original purpose of safeguarding freedom, our shared heritage, and civilization. American lives are worth spending to defend our unique bond with Europe, our culture, faith, familial ties, and civilizational heritage. Are American lives worth paying to protect a government that has enabled Rotherham grooming gangs, covered up their crimes, and cannot deport them? In a crisis, will men sign up to fight, die, and be maimed for that government? These are not fantastic questions. These are the basics.

What bent NATO away from the basics may be the strange notion that speaking of “freedom, common heritage and civilization” was somehow outdated. After all, on the NATO purpose page, you will find no mention of “common heritage and civilization,” and only one mention of “freedom.”