NATO WAS CONCEIVED IN 1949 AS A WAR MACHINE DESIGNED TO COMBAT AND DESTROY THE SOVIET UNION.
22.6.2022
When Nato was launched, its general secretary, the Belgian Paul Henri Spaak exclaimed: “We are afraid of the USSR”. It was significant at the time that “partigiano” Sandro Pertini[1] could object to NATO in the Italian parliament: “… we voted ‘no’, because NATO is a reactionary military organisation made to attack the USSR – the country that freed us from Nazism”. In reality, the post-war governments of the victorious capitalist countries were seeing in the USSR not only a competitor, but an existential “systemic” enemy. A superior social, economic and political regime, the Soviet Union, was throwing them out of history. That was their essential alarm.
Those who gave NATO its characteristics were the United States (US). The same US that came to be first in making the atomic bomb and the only one so far in having launched it. The US did not drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August 1945) to force Japanese advance. It did it to stop the advance of the Soviet army towards Japan. It dropped the bomb after the end of the war had been signed[2], obliterating two Japanese cities, producing in the civilian populations hundreds of thousands of dead, of crippled and of contaminated people for life. Around these actions, the initial US special and commanding squads were staffed by former Nazi leaders, and collaborators of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes whom the US had rescued from the various tribunals trying to bring justice to a devastated Europe.
From its creation in 1949, NATO never stopped “expanding”. It grew from 12 Member States to the current 30 – and soon 32 if you count Finland and Sweden that recently applied. NATO is under US command, and as such it never stopped organising or supporting wars and coups around the world; from the Korean War, to Vietnam, to Yugoslavia, to the annexation of the former ‘socialist countries’ of Europe. NATO’s military presence in the main European countries – via bases, soldiers and spies – provides basic support to right-wing terrorist formations. NATO provided evident support to the dictatorships in Portugal (Salazar), Spain (Franco) and Greece (with the colonels). In Italy, dozens of judicial inquiries have uncovered NATO’s participation in various coup attempts, in attacks and in the persecution of Communists, Socialists and trade unionists. Some 5,000 are estimated to have fallen victim of the “Strategy of Tension“[3] in the 1960s and 1970s.
The very worst seemed reached with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It looked like the end of history. The newly formed Russian Federation headed by Yeltsin asked for, and obtained, a NATO partnership. Dissolved was now the Warsaw Pact, which had included USSR, GDR, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia. NATO was supposed to do the same.
Instead of dissolving NATO, the United States and the main Western countries saw to its continuation instead. Its continuation and increased development, reiterating plainly how much NATO had always been an anti-people instrument, opposed to the left, opposed to the Communists in Europe and the world.
Today, the military of the main capitalist countries regroup in the NATO Alliance where they are ranked in subalternity to North American leadership. Their relative “unity” allows for some diversity and competition between their economies, but they all agree to face down the “external enemy”. On each occasion, this enemy is re-defined to suits the US and some of its closest allies like the UK and France. If NATO had to do with the Malvinas in the Southern hemisphere (Falkland Islands), that was to keep them safe for the British who had purloined them from the Argentinian Republic. In the same way, NATO went to sort out Gaddafi’s Libya guilty of organising the dismantlement of what remains of French colonialism in Africa.
A few months ago, some leaders of the NATO member states declared NATO “obsolete” (Trump) or “brain dead” (Macron). This came notably after the failure and defeat of their adventure in Afghanistan which they had to flee from, leaving arms and supplies behind.
The conflict in Ukraine seems to have revived Nato however. The world’s most powerful imperialist sector, the United States, is now seeking new wars and a monstrous arms race. Behind itself, It drags the weaker imperialist sectors (like the European Union) into new conflicts and rearmaments, like Germany, which is complying. All the NATO member-countries are raising their military contribution to the minimum 2% GDP. They re-organise their armies, weapons and logistics in a common accord of encirclement and eventual destruction of Russia and China.
From their “Atlantist” Military Alliance’ to the International of Death
Riddled with internal conflict, the capitalist system finds itself totally incapable of surmounting its crises. It cannot bring social progress to the populations of the world. The covid-19 pandemic gave the clearest example of this, with fatal consequences for the poor whilst immensely unfair income distribution advantages multinationals and banks.
Throughout the world, the exploited and the impoverished masses rebel constantly against social injustice. They relaunch the struggles for social transformation. New revolutionary breakthroughs are being made, in all the continents.
Gustavo Pedro and running mate Francia Marquez won the presidential election in Colombia.
The NATO summit of 2020 last year had received the Colombian president Ivan Duque with full honours. The historic event was Colombia having become first in Latin America to attend this high-level meeting and joining the NATO military Alliance [4]. Those attending were the bane of the present left-wing presidential candidates in Colombia: Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez[5]. The latter have been persecuted although they turn out to represent the majority of the country[6]. By standing in the presidential race, they were taking their lives into their hands. It was emblematic of the situation that, at the close of the electoral campaign, they had to address the public from behind huge anti-projectile shields.
The Duque government[7] was the spearhead that imperialism used to attack Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and other progressive governments in the region. It is to police this “US backyard” that NATO coordinates the forces of the right-wing there: paramilitaries, drug gangs and structures like the OAS (Organisation of the American States).
The Pacific Ocean is now a theatre of war for NATO’S new operations and conquests. Japan and Australia have added their weight to a new NATO Defence Pact tasked with trying to contain the powerful growth of China. (Japan has adopted a posture of “heightened engagements” via the QUAD – Australia, India, Japan and the US – as well as the EU-Japan strategic Partnership Arrangements and ASEAN+3, all under NATO leadership. Edit note). [But] the first steps of NATO in the Pacific showed the fragility of this unity based on divergent interests that are bound to grow with the number of countries joining it. The acceleration and intensification of imperialism’s war policy are bound to signify – for each of its component parts – a limitation to its interests, to its rights and to its sovereignty.
Sweden and Finland should think hard before renouncing their already very relative neutrality. For President Mattarella of Italy, and Prime Minister Draghi, the way they were elected laid bare their “Atlantist loyalism”. They should have been loyal to the National Constitution, won in the war of liberation from fascism, ratified by the communist, socialist and catholic “constituents”. It is no longer possible to be elected president like Sandro Pertini in 1980 (to 1986) on his anti-NATO credentials, or on his call ‘to empty the arsenals and fill the barns of the world”.
As NATO stands as single bulwark against the mobilisations and rebellions of the world masses, one cannot expect it to dissolve all on its own. As it spreads its tentacles on all the continents instead, it will have to be destroyed; for it is the United States and their closest allies who determine in the choice of battlefields.
After the fall of the USSR, the US and its allies chose abstract targets like “international terrorism” and “Islamist terrorism”. These aims were progressively replaced, and in the last few years, the orientation of imperialism and of NATO pivoted against China and Russia. This became more marked when these two countries elaborated common programmes of economic, social and military development. The Chinese program around the ‘New Silk Road’[8] broke completely with the world hegemony of American imperialism. In this gigantic development programme, the poorest countries acquire an authentic role of protagonists. This (from China) is not socialism because it stays in capitalist functioning – but it is a serious attempt at wealth re-distribution. It involves important countries and the members of associations like the Shanghai Pact (Cooperation Organisation), the BRICS, Unasur, Alba. You can call this “multilateralism” as opposed to the old “unilateralism” that the United States claim for themselves.
Capitalism carries war like the cloud the thunderstorm:
What you observe on the part of the Yankees is not a simple caprice or delusion of hegemony; it is a necessity for their continuing existence as capitalist regime.
The US State incurs a debt and a cost for the maintenance of its social relations – it is colossal. Unable to coexist with Europe or with Japan, the US would eliminate them both. Even less able, it is, to freely subscribe to a “New Silk Road”. At the recent Davos meeting in May, the US posed the need for a reduction in the world’s population “that would have to be contained” to below the 3 billion mark – of human beings that is! As Jean Jaurès[9] used to say: “capitalist society carries war like the cloud the thunderstorm. Beyond a certain point, the US would break in a thousand pieces, 20 States would confront each other in merciless civil war, etc.
Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, NATO has been concocting plans to isolate Moscow. It escalated the provocations and tried to break cooperation between Russia and the capitalist countries. Where NATO became most active in this line was in the former Workers States, the Baltic, Poland, Hungary and Rumania.
Since the 2014 coup in Ukraine organised by the United States and NATO, the latter kept focussed on Ukraine, ideal country if you want to hide a conflict behind a “national” issue. Add to this the unresolved problems inherited from Tsarist times, the original weakness of the Bolshevik Revolution and the harmful way Stalinism exacerbated Russian nationalism. Poland now takes the side of the US and their interests. It even it speaks of its intention to push the war in Ukraine to its most extreme consequences “to teach Russia the lesson of never to try this sort of adventure again”.
Ukraine was part of the USSR until 1991. Now NATO wants to expand there, what it calls “its” territory. It keeps an eye on China too, but it knows that the military power to tackle first is that of Russia. NATO entrenches its position deep inside Ukraine therefore. It deploys there its military bases along with supplies of long-range nuclear weapons and missiles. It restructured a Ukrainian army from top to bottom. Having provoked the 2014 State Coup, the civil war and the massacre of the Donbass populations, it placed clown Zelensky at the head of a government. Each of the richly remunerated Zelensky speeches is used for videoconferences to parliaments, to the EU, to the United States, to the Davos conclave. Each speech a clarion call for the reconquest of Crimea, the retaking of the Donbass, the multiplication of the economic sanctions against Russia, to weaken Russia, to destroy it.
What caused president Putin to intervene in Ukraine was no sudden surge of “imperialist conceit”. No such thing came from him, his government, the Russian parliament (strong communist opposition included) or the army. The Russian intervention has not been the project of the oligarchs either. It represents the legitimate interests of the Russian people, in defence of their security, their territorial integrity and their rights. Rights that, in the history of the country, are indisputably linked to the experience of the Socialist Revolution and the USSR. Rights partially recovered in recent years after the chaos of the USSR’s dissolution. Russia is even more especially justified when you consider how the attack against it comes from an army that invokes Nazism openly, and from a totally anti-democratic Ukrainian government. That government wants EU membership while it tramples the Russian flag underfoot, the very flag that saved it from the mass terrorism of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.
In the USSR, at Stalingrad and Leningrad, more than 25 million gave their lives to defeat fascism. How expect the children and grandchildren of those heroes to remain quiet while, on their borders, old and new Nazi collaborators rampage freely, as in the Donbass, repressing and oppressing the populations of Russian language and origin?
United Front against the war regime, for social transformations and worldwide economic planning.
NATO’s new strategic concept no longer has “the fight against terrorism” as its main objective. Russia has become its “systemic” enemy instead, with China now added to the “systemic” enemy. The decisions to be adopted in Madrid[10]will present Europe with its new face of guardian of the interests of the multinationals, the banks and the military industry.
Following on from Russia’s association with “international terrorism”, it has now become “the immediate enemy’, a “New Strategic Concept” that places China too, equally in the sights.
Nato claims the right to the first strike, even with nuclear weapons.
Beyond the territorial arena of its traditional haunts, NATO claims competencies in media, large infrastructure and energy production, as well as in all questions to do with global warming.
All these issues and related arguments require coordination between national institutions and international organisations – in the United Nations particularly. But with its “New Strategic Concept“, NATO makes of the Organisation of the United Nations a simple co-enterprise guided by the “priorities” of the North Atlantic Alliance.
In the field of “Ecological Transition“, NATO has the competency to shield the multinationals from responsibility for damage already caused to the environment. The “unilateralism” that the US have been defending these last thirty years will impose itself by force at the coming NATO summit in Madrid. This is strongly challenged however by the growing number of new systems and centres already officially in place in various parts of the world.
We must organize a world front and propose the creation of a new world order which sets out democratic rules. We must dissolve NATO, abolish the partnerships of countries with this war machine, and close all the NATO and American military bases.
A joint world program is needed to plan the economies on the basis of what people need, through cooperation, solidarity and social transformations.
The Posadists – 22.6.2022
[1] Sandro Pertini, 1896-1990. Italian socialist, supporter of the PSU, Unitary Socialist Party. Joined the Partisans and the anti-Nazi Resistance in 1943. Pertini was President of Italy 1978-1985.
[2] The German army signed unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945, and Japan capitulated on 2 Sept 1945, all this happened before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
[3] The Strategy of Tension: (strategia della tensiones) – consisted in a government encouraging violent clashes to induce insecurity in people and the wish for strong government. Investigations revealed that in the 1960’s in Italy, those in power dabbled in terrorist attacks in order to blame the left.
[4] Colombia became Nato Partner in December 2021. As of June 2022, it is still not a full member of the Alliance.
[5] Presidential elections took place in Colombia on 19 June. The right-wing candidate – Rodolfo Hernandez, a magnate who befriends Bolsonaro of Brazil and for whom “Hitler is a great German thinker” – was defeated. Gustavo Pedro and his running Mate Francia Helena Marquez won the presidency. Ex member of the M-19 guerrilla, Gustavo stood for the left as part of the Alternative Democratic Pole. Him and his running mate Francia won the presidency, to the great shock of imperialism, and presumably Nato itself. Francia is a defender of the indigenous population and of the environment. In the earlier primaries, she won 783,000 votes, second only to Gustavo.
[6] Gustavo Pedro became President of Colombia on 20.6.22 with 50.5% of the vote cast.
[7] Ivan Duque has been the murderous pro-Nato president of Colombia since 2008. This article was article just before the election of Gustavo Pedro.
[8] About the New Silk Road, the Belt refers to the overland routes and the Road refers to the sea routes. The Belt and Road Initiative is a vast project that promotes inter-States cooperation for economic development.
[9] Jean Jaurès: French Socialist leader, 1859-1914. Was assassinated on 31.7.1914 at a time of war fever in France. The killer blamed Jaurès’ pacifism for playing into the hands of Germany.
[10] The Nato summit in Madrid took place on 28 June, a few days after this article was written. And the G7 met in Germany just before the Nato in Madrid. In the UK, these two summits dominated the news in a torrent of war propaganda against Russia. Liz Truss (foreign sec) and Ben Wallace (defence) praised the English volunteers going to fight in Ukraine against Russia. They declared the shoring up of Nato’s rapid deployment force and ordered a new fleet of F35s from Lockheed. They promised to Zelensky extra millions in aid and long range missiles. The Johnson government is busy with legislation to criminalise workers striking for wages to rise with inflation. The Welsh and Scottish governments objected to funds from Westminster, earmarked for their hospitals and schools, now being used to pay for the manufacture and dispatch of “more weapons for Ukraine”, “enough to defeat the Russians”.
