AMERICAN IMPERIALISM AND NATO

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the foreign policy of the United States of America (USA) in its main defense organism, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the role that it is playing for the North American position in the international system. Seeking to answer whether the expansion of NATO motivated the conflict in Ukraine, and for what reasons, this research uses a critical methodological approach to the debate between agency and structure that exposes the way social forces relate to reality and the impacts that these relationships cause in the international system. For this, the core of the research is the assessment of the US role in NATO. Through the history of the development of modern capitalism, the formation of the US power and the development of neoliberalism will be exposed, later, presenting NATO, its history of action and critical evaluation and, finally, identifying the theoretical arguments in neorealism that will tell how the expansion of NATO led Russia to invade Ukraine.