We Need To Talk About NATO

Mission Creep and the Possibility of Unintended National Destruction

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] has long been one of those ideological commitments unquestioned in Britain. It was a defining issue, alongside nuclear disarmament (a quite separate issue) in struggles between the Labour leadership and left-wing activists This ‘problem’ was apparently solved by turning NATO into an arm of the type of liberal imperialism that Gladstone would have recognised, splitting the Left into its socialist and liberal wings (and a lot of confused people who cannot see the difference).

The Great Transition – Socialism Dies So That Liberalism May Live

Following the collapse of the Soviet Empire and in association with that peculiar ‘beacon on a hill’ in Washington that so often guides the traveller into treacherous marshlands, NATO, a ‘conservative’ collective security arrangement, limited in aims to the defence of mostly West European liberal democracies, has become transmuted into an agent for the outward global extension of liberal (certainly not socialist) values.

Initially this was a largely peaceful (excepting the Balkans in the 1990s) process of offering security to immature post-Soviet nations in return for their not reverting to the vengeful politics of the interwar period.  The mess in the Balkans with its revival of ethnic massacring speaks to the success of this mission elsewhere insofar as Balts and ethnic Russians avoided slaughtering each other, let alone everyone having another crack at any remaining Jews.

Such a transition was necessary. An entire empire was crumbling at a ferociously fast rate, faster than the British and Roman empires and closer to the events of 1918. The prospect was even held out that the surviving part of that empire, Russia, as a liberal democracy, might itself join the collective Western project in a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’. So much for the utopian theory.

The role of NATO in the East was, however, essentially not idealistic but centred on a realism cloaked in idealistic language. Political classes always need to believe that what they have been doing for special interests that they often imperfectly understand is actually done for some higher purpose yet we can count on the initial project as a success even if, without consultation, the British public now found itself at risk of nuclear immolation if countries no bigger than a large English county decided to tweak the nose sufficiently hard of a future resurgent Russia.

Having had its young slaughtered twice for the apparent interest of Belgium and Poland respectively, one would have thought the better educated population of the very late twentieth century might have raised a query or two. But the British are not a very questioning lot and were perhaps more trusting of their Prime Ministers then than they are today.

Nevertheless, the expansion of NATO was pleasing to the soft pro-European Left of the West which was then busy triangulating its way out of socialism and into a globalising post-communist project.  This centre-left was trying to soften the Reagan-Thatcher era neo-liberalism that had apparently triumphed over Communism and which (at least until 2008) had promised continuous growth and ‘trickle down’. The argument was that markets now worked, if only because the main alternative’s collapse had proved that socialism did not.  

If traditional socialism was doomed (as it seemed at the time to many people on the Left), the Left had better preserve what ideals they could by becoming liberals. No social democrat party today is socialist. Every party of the European centre left is indistinguishable in ideological outline from the progressive wing of the US Democrats, albeit adapted to local conditions. Even the term liberal-left now relates solely to the left-wing of such parties. They are (to be most accurate) the left faction of centrism, the dominant ideology across Europe.

This model of the universe looks a little dodgier now with the devastating effect of a radical market economy in the mid-1990s on Russia, the crash of 2008, subsequent economic sclerosis in ‘centrist’ Europe and the success of a revised version of Communism in China. The loathing in the neo-liberal and neo-conservative West of Putin and XI is the loathing of leaders who have stopped the theory of the ‘West’ in its tracks. It is not that Putin and XI are threatening to be ‘right’ (since no one dare admit that) but only that they exist as dangerous alternatives with the former an undoubted influence on many populists.

The Transformation of NATO – Mission Creep

With the collapse of the Russian economy becoming a matter of disinterest when it should have been central to Western strategy and to the secure incorporation of the bulk of the old Soviet European empire into the Western sphere of influence, we might say that, by the late 1990s, the transformation, or is it ‘mission creep’, of NATO that had begun with the moral adventurism in the Balkans started in earnest.

From a disciplined democratic collective security arrangement, backed in the UK by the Labour Right and the Conservative Party alike against the Left (whose primary fear was of inept leaders losing control of the total situation and turning Airstrip One into a nuclear desert), NATO had been transformed into a control mechanism for the inclusion of potentially unstable re-emergent and often previously fascistic small nations.

However, from there, its remit shifted to applying what it had learned to failed states or states that were deliberately failed because they were not liberal. NATO at the end of the twentieth century was pleasing both old-style Atlanticists looking to Washington as nuclear guarantor of European security and liberal-leftists who wanted international institutions to effect progressive change. The latter were filled with liberal imperialist joy at having to hand an organisation whose operating rhetoric seemed ready made for back-up intervention against oppressed minorities and tyrants. 

In the event, while the US and its Coalitions of the Willing may have done the heavy-lifting, there was no hiding that NATO personnel and assets were being selectively integrated into post-war imperial peace-keeping and that the organisation shared the ideology of the more active front in the ‘war on terror’ (which insanely has morphed into support for obvious terror tactics against the terrorist organisations that history had previously known as ‘national liberation movements’).

A division of labour appeared. Western nation states acted as ‘powers’ but then made use of NATO as resource whenever it was legally possible, ensuring the right people administered NATO and shared the same broad ideology. This made the system flexible to say the least: as all lawyers know, the art of law lies in interpretation.  By 2001, NATO was engaged in Afghanistan ostensibly because the US had been attacked from that country. By 2005, it was undertaking relief efforts in Pakistan. By 2009, it was dealing with piracy in the Red Sea. It was involved in Libya in 2011 and back in Afghanistan in 2015, not leaving until 2021. By 2024, NATO was ‘partnering’ across the Indo-Pacific.

A combination of American imperial defence (which, to be understood properly, is not a matter of territory acquisition but of commercial dominance and bases for policing world order in every part of the world) and the liberal or progressive desire to improve the world by eliminating bad people and managing bad situations transformed American imperial power and so NATO into extensions of the ambitions of both with an interesting new parallel ideological transformation.

This was the construction of an idea of the ‘West’ (shades here of Spengler) where defence (without any serious public debate) became defence against faraway non-state actors and then economic competitors to the US as well as defence of countries that were not part of the alliance but in which Washington (now reinvisioned as capital of the West) had an interest. This interest shifted from deposing dictators and regimes (Iraq, Libya and the failed attempts on Syria, Iran, Venezuela and others) to defending ‘frontier’ members of the West whose origins were considered dubious by many but which had adopted sufficient liberal democracy and Western values (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan). Assessments of gender or sexual orientation rights suddenly became a clear marker for whether a country was inside or outside the West.

The Left and Neo-Conservatism

The associated British political situation is not easy to understand. The Western liberal-left tended to approve action against dictators but then began to have doubts, expressed in the major demonstrations against the Iraq War, only to be drawn back into line on Ukraine (having a very shallow understanding of the history of the conflict) and then to be alienated once again by the disproportionate response of Netanyahu to the Hamas assault on October 7^th last year. Although there is a certain consistency of moral outrage, intellectually the average British liberal internationalist is all over the place, excitable and largely impotent.

Politically the British Left is confused because it is intellectually incapable of deep analysis. It is driven at every stage by an inchoate moral outrage that would have been familiar to liberals in the nineteenth century horrified by the behaviour of the Turks in the Balkans. We have socialist anti-imperialists, the confused morally outraged and de facto neo-conservative liberals competing over the same ground from Kosovo to the South China Seas. As to ‘neo-conservatism’, it is a complex animal with hard right conservative and Stalin-hating Trotskyist historical components yet it is best seen as a harder edged version of liberal imperialism, not only not incompatible with softer liberal internationalism but closely allied, using whatever tools are at hand and with the same enemies.  Such an alliance might fall apart on Iraq only to re-form on Syria and probably Taiwan.

From this perspective, elites have a relatively easy job to do in isolating traditional socialists (and nationalists) and allowing impotent outrage to do its thing which they think they can then safely ignore as they did and do to major demonstrations - a day out for the activists perhaps and part of the legend of protest but making little impact on the political decision-making that matters. It is the rising populist critique that now worries elites far more with its own often incoherent support for (say) Israel and Taiwan along Trumpian lines but also a determination, in some quarters, to remove the liberal utopians from the game and cut deals with dictators if necessary.

The differences in the base for foreign policy action were, until recent years, only ones of emphasis. Neo-conservatives (which we count as part of the alliance driven by ‘Enlightenment’ values) were closer to military-industrial and corporate interests as well as those who were not afraid to see the West as an imperial idea. The liberal internationalists retained their utopian and romantic vision of a world free of dictators and genocide. But they were both bound by common enemies which were always deliberately mis-analysed in simple rhetorical narratives based on their worst forms – extremes of socialism and nationalism. Both were threats to global markets and privatisation but equally to the more radical definitions of human rights and democracy as understood by political activists (rather than populists). In the UK, the socialists may still be marginalised or overseas but the nationalists are returning and picking up the vote of people who used to be reliable as Left voters. 

The situation is complicated to say the least but it is important to understand the environment in which NATO operates because NATO’s own existential survival is now at stake … but from the Right and in Europe rather than the Left or the Anglosphere (despite Trump’s assertions) and under conditions where NATO has psychological warfare skills to deploy and sufficiently close links to the liberal or centrist political class to turn inwards and become a serious threat to freedom within the West. This may give us the potential paradox of an organisation initially designed to defend the conditions for the survival of Western values being a potential agent for the destruction of those values in order to ensure its institutional survival as defender of the same values it may be unravelling. The current centrist attack on a free social media is only the beginning of a process that is the definition of ‘internal contradiction’.

Back to NATO – The Inevitability of Its Current Condition?

We had moved on from NATO to the ‘imperium’, that is, to the idea of the West as a coherent set of values and ideas because the total values system is what has captured the organisation. These values are said to embrace neo-liberalism in economics (softened by the Blairite universe of public-private partnership), federalism and shared sovereignties, institutional technocracy and liberal democratic values. The latter is essentially rule by circulating elites from a self-organising political class entrained into the ruling value system much as you only get promoted in the corporate world if human resources has vetted you.

The move here was not inevitable. NATO might have remained what it was intended to be – an entirely defensive collective security arrangement of notionally equal sovereign partners (with the US as primus inter pares) designed to defend nation states against a countervailing empire in Moscow or any other possible emergent empire directly threatening the North Atlantic.

Unfortunately for the military-industrial system whose very meaning relies on there being a threat, the collapse of the Soviet Union threatened NATO more than its existence had done. Once Europe was settled after the collapse, then there would be no threatening empires to be concerned with (except theoretically the US one day). The European federalists seemed to have already cracked the problem of internecine great power militarised conflict in the region. The Anglosphere’s strategic concern (prior to Trump’s intervention in the debate) was now to stop Europe developing an independent military-industrial capability that was not under the de facto control of the London-Washington axis.

One of the reasons why the London elite were so committed to the European project was that, strategically, the United Kingdom was determined that it would halt the French plan for a Paris-dominated European Federal Army which would have detached Europe (potentially) from the North Atlantic alliance. It is no accident that the pro-European Keir Starmer was quick to raise security issues with his European counterparts in order to help re-establish control of the European security agenda or that London has taken such a strong line in support of the former Soviet satellites and in support of Ukraine.

Ukraine as current emergency is driving forward continental dependence on NATO and military-industrial integration. Indeed, it could be argued that drawing technically advanced Sweden and Finland into NATO (decisions which are undoubtedly popular in those countries) with Sweden very close culturally to the UK, adds to the pressure to make NATO and not the European Union the main vector for continental security. You can be supportive of this master plan if you like but equally be aware that much of it is predicated on a British concern to protect its arms industry rather than a concern to contribute to world peace.

Of course, what we have actually seen develop (notably out of Anglosphere narratives) are a) the wholly exaggerated and hysterical threat of terrorism that emerged with 9/11, b) the revival of Russia (which has only revived on its own terms because of the way the West treated it as a constant prospective enemy after its collapse), c) the problem of nuclear proliferation (where we are now in the absurd position of having made the acquisition of nuclear weapons a rational strategy for mid-sized powers faced with Western pressure) and, most recently, d) the defence of non-EU border proxies (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan) who are not actually in NATO. In these latter cases, there are no treaty obligations with NATO, let alone the EU. The emergent crises derive from the behaviours of the proxies themselves because they feel protected despite those lack of obligations!

In all these cases, the West itself has triggered its own crisis – its post-imperial dabbling in the Middle East, its refusal to treat Russia with respect except on radical neo-liberal terms, its hypocrisies over nuclear weaponry and its interferences, encouragements and ‘strategic ambiguities’ in the case of its ‘border provinces’. In each case, a lack of intellectual discipline, moral courage and imagination created the conditions for crises to emerge that now threaten global conflagration and are involving immense diplomatic efforts to contain problems of the West’s own making. We do not expect a repeat of 1914 but only because it is Washington (not London, Tallinn or Tel Aviv) which understands the importance of maintaining back channels to Moscow, Tehran and Beijing and collaborating to keep issues contained. In another paradox, it seems to be Washington which, having created most of the problems through its past policies, is now protecting us all from their consequences.

To summarise at this point, the ‘ideology’ of European liberal internationalism had found itself sucked into Republican neo-conservative and more amenable American progressive strategies for maintaining the American imperial system’s priorities through transforming NATO into something it was never intended to be. It was, however, very suitable for the career prospects of bored military men, the profits of the industrial interests closely aligned to them and the need for a support asset for Washington as global policeman. NATO had become a jumped up PCSO and the next stage is for it to become a launderer of public money into the arms sector.

NATO had found itself becoming indirectly complicit in a disastrous re-ordering of the Middle East and in trying to clear up the mess left by neo-conservatives (notably in the failed two decade intervention in Afghanistan), has acted as costly back-up to American adventurism in Ukraine that pushed Russia into becoming the apparent threat to Europe that it clearly had never wanted to be at the start of the century and has even been dabbling far from its own continent in rather dangerous security dialogues with America’s Pacific Rim allies such as South Korea and Japan in order to feel part of the ‘Western’ family.

The London End of Things

The United Kingdom, despite its very serious social cohesion and infrastructural problems at home, has reversed decades of slow and necessary withdrawal from military and security engagements on a global scale and so back to the North Atlantic. It has been sending battle ships to the Pacific and creating and promoting defensive alliances on the other side of the world. Under lightweights like the recent Tory leaders and Keir Starmer, it seems to be desperately trying to re-position itself as Airstrip One, first target in any nuclear confrontation not merely with Russia but possibly with China.

Putting aside the very weird London obsession with Russia as threat (no unwanted Russian boot has ever landed on British soil but unwanted British boots have at least twice landed on Russian soil in the last two hundred years), the really really weird aspect of all this is why we would want to make an enemy of the largest new consumer market for our goods and services in the world – China.

China has funds to invest, huge markets wanting our expertise (although that prospect dies off with each passing decade of British Government ineptitude), is on the other side of the world and has only one direct threat to international order (Taiwan) related to it. Taiwan is honestly not of strategic importance to us so long as we are intelligent about the semiconductor supply chain. China as trading nation and potential nuclear threat is of much more importance.

The only explanations for this strange state of affairs are ideology and alliances. Both need now to be questioned. The questioning applies as much to our commitment to NATO as it does to these wider global policies. The first ideological principle to contest is the idea of the unique moral virtue of the West. We can leave others to fight that corner for us. The second is that the resources (military and material) of this uniquely moral universe should be deployed to expand the ideology of this intellectual fiction called the West into any vacuum in the international system as it appears.

Debates about ideology are for another occasion but what is being promoted from Washington, London and Brussels, with NATO as one of the tools-at-hand to enforce matters, is simply the latest stage in a middle-class intellectual fantasy whose origins lie in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. This got used to deploying force for ends both good and evil during the British Empire. It was the world (to its credit) of anti-slavery campaigns but it was also the world of the Poor Laws, Malthusianism, the Irish Famine, the forced migration of working-class people to outlying parts where they slaughtered ‘savages’, earnest missionaries destabilising China, the conquest of India and so on and so forth. Tory imperialists and moralising liberal imperialists are two sides of the same coin. Their heirs are still to be found in our two main parties today.

In the US, under similar middle class quasi-religious impulses, we saw the progressivism that gave us prohibition and other ‘reforms’ … and so, because of the lack of interest in consequences, the most developed organised crime structures in the world and the American prison gulag emerged as response. This is the problem with emotive left-liberalism, it thinks that to act is a good in itself without regard to thinking through consequences. Liberals would (rightly) free slaves and serfs only to abandon them to sharecropping and the market.

Back in the UK, liberal progressivism transmuted into the British liberal-left’s utopian vision of a world of several billions of people who could be managed into the lifestyle of a Bloomsbury salon. It is, in short, proof-positive that education and culture cannot be automatically equated with intelligence. Wherever this radical universalism operates, making contingent use of the brute force of empires, you tend to see more misery, more wars, more horrible acts and more chaos for the very simple reason that activism of most types is generally inadequate at analysing its own consequences in complex systems. This was, of course, to be as much a failure of Lenin as Harriet Martineau.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The paradox is that liberal utopianism presents itself as realism in its deployment of force for idealistic ends yet it is merely a thin veneer on deeper forces concerned with asset acquisition, commercial profit and political ambition. The realism I would propose is the means to an actual moral universe. A deeper discussion of this can wait until another day but what do we about NATO in the meantime? Well, I have no power to do anything and you probably, dear reader, do not either. If you did, you would almost certainly have an institutional interest in not doing anything at all even if you agreed with the analysis.

It is about time we all accepted our essential impotence in the face of systems that have developed over centuries and which are self-reinforcing through the way they promote their leadership structures. Intelligent dissent on any issues usually means complete marginalisation as soon as it looks to be effective. Revolutionary approaches (we are back to Lenin here) fall rapidly into the activist trap of never calculating the consequences of actions.

Our species seems to have evolved to be competing cultural hives with dissenting bees only transforming the hive into another type of hive over a long period of time. Still, as a dissenting bee, I can throw what I have to say out into the system. Perhaps the debate of a few hundred will become a thousand and then ten thousand and eventually even the most dim-witted future ‘leader’ might start to see the sense (to change metaphors) of steering the creaking old ship of state away from the rocks. The first thing to recognise is that competing hives (states) are not nice. They are driven not by some moral reason but by advantage. If there is a vacuum in power, they will fill it. If they have superior stings, they will deploy them using some spurious moral claim to justify this if they are not wholly barbarous. Even the Nazis made a form of moral claim about their actions to their own people.

In other words, an individual, a household, a village, a nation (and the planet if alien spaceships appeared on the horizon) need a strong defence capability that does not depend entirely on the good will of anyone else. You may think you can depend on the State for your personal security but then the State may conscript your child for an imperial war.  You can go to the other extreme and think of having an arsenal in your home but such an arsenal would mean you would just be victim of the cleverer man with a bigger arsenal. In other words, there is no room for a pacifist or ‘turn your cheek’ strategy unless you are suicidal or stupid and there is no substitute for a socially-directed set of moral principles that permit existential defence and do not permit offence.

Of course, non-moral means are always an option when it comes to existential defence (which, I appreciate, could be seen to justify Israel if only it had not been constantly expanding at the expense of the Palestinians). Strong defence is a moral position if it is defence and not the seizure of the property and lands of others (which brings us back to the Palestinians who are clearly the ones defending more often than attacking). Strong defence has to be allied to an awareness of exactly what one is defending and its internally-directed moral purpose.

Instead of attacking with an apparent moral purpose that simply represents ‘interest’ (lands and profit) and which is the essence of ‘imperialism’, we should defend with full force and by all means to hand who we are and where we are and who we are and what we are should be strong and decent. The tragedy of both Israel and Ukraine is that their regimes (not their peoples) have long since become fundamentally ‘indecent’ because of their interpretation of what it means to be ‘strong’. As to its members, NATO is now defending weak and fragmenting societies - the UK, France and Germany are all deeply troubled for different if related reasons. For this reason alone, NATO is becoming absurd because our energy should be concentrated on making us strong and cohesive societies that can defend themselves directly.

There is thus a place for a non-pacifist defence-based collective security but it has to be crystal clear as to what is being defending and why. If a nation like ours (the UK) places its own people at risk, it can only be for the benefit of that people. Collective security must always meet that requirement. Any form of alleged collective or simple national security that places our people at risk or exists to serve, in effect, the interests of another nation or an abstract idea is the very definition of national insecurity.

NATO as National Insecurity – What Next?

Our involvement in NATO is an example of national insecurity. It places our people at risk on at least five grounds – nuclear destruction, collapse of social cohesion due to imperially-derived refugee movements, economic destruction, forced conscription (the possible deaths of our young) and the importation of asymmetrical warfare against our people from faraway ‘weaker’ actors. It is also a distraction of attention and diversion of resources from the more immediately pressing threat to the nation that is globalised organised crime.

All of those may be a risk or a price that we might be prepared to pay collectively under extreme conditions of existential threat but it has to be extreme existential threat both to the nation as place and people. It should not be a threat because a bunch of neo-nationalists at the other end of Europe poked a wasp’s nest to please their less educated voters, because a longstanding squabble on the other side of the world requires us to maintain some sort of liberal global order or because a Middle Eastern country can deploy an ethnic lobby group to demand action on its behalf.

All those risks are real. It has been calculated that just 12 carefully placed tactical nuclear missiles could create a devastating humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom under conditions where the State has to become a brutal tyranny or collapse (probably both). It may not at all be necessary for any US citizen to die from anything at all while we burn – that is the price of being an imperial airstrip. 

Refugee movements have turned into criminally organised economic trafficking operations but the business model started with imperial adventurism in North Africa and the Middle East. Every time the West dabbles in promoting its utopian ideology, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee creating untold human suffering.  Of course, not all of these horrors are down to us or our allies in the West but we certainly are not doing much to stop those we can – blocking peace deals in Kiev and supplying armament to Israel without stringent conditions on their use suggests the darker side of Western policy.

Small and attritional wars seem (perhaps depressingly) to be good for economies in the short term. One of the tragedies of our hive nature is that war works, at least temporarily, as economic and technological driver. Sanctions and war seem to have created an economic boom in Russia – so much for sanctions theory! Existential total war is, however, expensive if there is no large resource hinterland as the United Kingdom was to find in 1918 and 1945. Perhaps it can be argued that entry into war in 1939 was existentially necessary (though that and the timing is arguable for reasons we can debate) but the imperial war of 1914-1918 did more damage to the old British Empire than the continental victory of the Kaiser would probably have done (another debate for another time).

If we want economies boosted by killing, maybe NATO’s potential dabbling in small wars is good for us but do not forget that moral base of which I wrote.  Our street morality with its awareness of consequences has to be better than the theoretical and abstract morality of our rulers and activists. But more immediate concerns about our foreign and defence policy should centre on the state slavery and social control implicit in social militarisation and the risks to our population of asymmetrical warfare (terror acts) being brought home because of actions overseas.

Conclusions

The issues here are complex. Nothing is not debatable here. I am sure that I will be challenged but a real question now hangs over our national leadership and our involvement in NATO as it exists today. No longer part of a system of collective defence in an armed confrontation between empires where, rightly or wrongly, the consensus in political society was that we belonged in one imperial system rather than another, we are now in a completely different situation.

‘Our’ imperial system, without viable equal competition of sufficient scale (as Rome was challenged by the Parthians), has become global and imperialist and drawn us, as a nation, into dangerous conflicts that are not in our national existential interest. It has assumed that vacuums are opportunities rather than traps.

Collective security, in ceasing to be in our collective national existential risk, has become the interest of increasingly closed elites seeking to defend an ideology that, much like most previous ideologies, has failed precisely because it is an ideology and not a reflection of life as it is actually lived. The total system, of which NATO is a key part, is now detached from reality, inventing narratives of threat and anxiety and locked into stories that are mere propaganda to maintain institutional interests that have nothing to do with the lived situations of our people.

It is time to require one of two outcomes – either the United Kingdom should leave NATO (which is a political long game in which the special interests involved would play very dirty to avoid the outcome) or the United Kingdom should reaffirm its extremely limited nature as collective defence against actual threats in a very defined geographical area.

We should allow nation states to make judgements on their own military and foreign policy along democratically elected liberal, socialist or nationalist lines. In short, we should tolerate no more mission creep into imperial adventurism, destructive utopian liberal internationalism and tweaking the noses of powers with no strategic interest in harming Europe.

NOTE

There is an argument for a radical campaign to press the matter hard with the British establishment. There is no reformist campaign to our knowledge regarding the restoration of the original NATO mission but there is a radical one in No2NATO with which we have considerable sympathy as the only organisation raising these critical issues. I would encourage No2NATO because, as a non-pacifist national interest campaign, it will help crack the false narratives that NATO is both good and useful.

You can reach NO2NATO here and help fund their full-time organiser here through a Crowdfunder