- by William Briggs
- The Guardian
- Issue #2108
Photo: Av C. Valverde/Nato. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The 75th anniversary of NATO has concluded. At its recent Summit, Ukraine was top of the agenda, and it is clear that its proxy war against Russia will drag on. The assembled warlords spoke of how their organisation promotes stability and holds “autocrats” at bay and to account. Such an anniversary allows for reflection on the history of the pact and a view of how it sees the world and its role.
NATO’s birth came just as the Cold War was beginning. In 1946 Churchill made his infamous iron curtain speech. In 1949 NATO was created, ostensibly to provide ‘collective security against the Soviet Union.’ In fact the Warsaw Pact was not formed until 1955 and was created to act as a defensive bloc against NATO. As someone said, NATO existed to solve the problems caused by its existence.
In 1991 when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the end of the Cold War should have meant that there was no longer the need for such blocs. Since then, NATO has got bigger, more aggressive and now threatens to expand into the Asia-Pacific area.
Michael Carpenter, senior advisor for Europe at the US National Security Council spoke to the media, at the beginning of the NATO Summit, saying that “today, our Alliance is larger, stronger, better resourced, and more united than ever before … Our alliances make us safer and stronger … Over the past few years, NATO has also enhanced our global partnerships.”
This was in reference to new partnership arrangements with Australia, Japan and South Korea as a forerunner to an Asian expansion of NATO, designed to further threaten China, as well as the closer integration of Ukraine as its membership of NATO gets closer. He stressed the importance of this because, ‘the global threats and challenges we face, including from authoritarian actors and terrorist organisations, are all inextricably linked.’
While the scope of this belligerent group has grown, so too have the military budgets of its member states. Twenty-three NATO states now spend in excess of two per cent of total GDP on their militaries. Carpenter expressed his personal satisfaction and that of the USA which has repeatedly urged sometimes-reluctant allies to spend more, even as their economies crumble.
He was also happy to report that, “our allies are not just spending more on defence, they’re also spending more to ensure Ukraine has what it needs to prevail on the battlefield.” Those few words sum up the way the US views the world.
When any representatives of a major capitalist economy speak of defence, the defence of their economies is never far from their minds. The crisis in capitalism leaves little room for developments in economic growth, beyond the promotion of the arms trade and the manufacture of weapons.
A driving factor behind the talk of ‘defence’ was revealed by Carpenter when he said to the assembled media that the increased spending by NATO states, “is helping to revitalize production lines across the Alliance, including here in the United States. We’re manufacturing weapons that improve our military readiness and make the United States and Allies more secure while at the same time strengthening our economies.” The needs of government and capital go together.
The additional military spending has been demanded by the US, which uses NATO as a front organisation. When President Biden speaks of ‘running the world’ and alarms, the world and his Democratic Party apparatchiks, he is simply telling the world and his ‘allies’ how things are!
The NATO Summit produced a 38-point joint statement. The most significant elements of this statement revolve around Ukraine and NATO’s war with Russia. Moscow was declared to be the major threat to the security of all NATO members. Any doubts about Ukraine joining the military bloc were removed. The declaration was unequivocal in stating that Ukraine’s “future is in NATO” and that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.”
The declaration also turned its attention to China, which was described as a “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine” because of its “large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base.” The US and its allies say this a lot, but that doesn’t make it true. Beijing denies it.
NATO leaders also made it clear that Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are in their sights for “fuelling Russia’s war of aggression” by providing direct military support to Russia. For NATO, sovereign rights only apply when they fit with the demands of the USA.
The declaration also boasts that NATO has undertaken the biggest reinforcement of its “collective defence” in a generation. That means the capacity to shift its sphere of operations and influence to any part of the world, and to target any state that dares not accept the dictates of the US rules-based-order.
NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, was quick to promote the importance of what he described as the most “comprehensive defence plan since the Cold War.” The plan includes having 500,000 troops “at high readiness” and spending more on air and defence missile systems and “defence industry cooperation.”
The NATO meeting announced what it coyly described as a “further integration” with Ukraine’s military. It has pledged an additional US $60 billion for the next year and has promised F-16 fighter jets. Stoltenberg said defensively that NATO didn’t want to “prolong a war,” which would be more convincing if they hadn’t been prolonging one for years.
When NATO was born 75 years ago, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set the hands of the ‘doomsday clock’ at three minutes to midnight. The dubious reason for NATO’s creation no longer exists and yet the militarisation promoted by NATO in Europe and increasingly world-wide continues. The hands of the doomsday clock are now at 90 seconds to midnight.
Activists protest NATO Summit in Washington
Demonstrators representing a diverse coalition of anti-imperialist and anti-war organizations staged a mobilization ahead of the NATO summit, held in Washington, DC from 9 - 11 July. This protest was organised by the Resist NATO coalition, which includes organisations such as the International League of Peoples’ Struggles, the Resist US-Led War Movement, and BAYAN-USA, which engages diaspora Filipinos in the struggle against imperialism.
“NATO’s 75th summit is occurring during Russia’s counter-aggression strategy against US-NATO military escalation and NATO territorial expansion, which has enabled NATO to call on its members to provide billions in weapons and military aid. The summit is also occurring when NATO is building military partnerships with Indo-Pacific countries to counter the influence of China,” said organisers from the Resist NATO coalition.
Organisers also pointed out that Washington and NATO partners “supply the means for the state of Israel to conduct its genocidal war on Palestine.”
