On April 4, the NATO military alliance celebrated its 75th anniversary. It was founded in 1949, less than four years after World War II and in the early years of the Cold War, as an alliance directed against the Soviet Union. Today, it is pushing humanity into a third world war.

General view of the NATO-Ukraine Council roundtable at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, April 4, 2024. [AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert]

The anniversary was marked by a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels, dedicated to a major new escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine. Just weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron proposed sending ground troops to Ukraine to combat Russian forces, NATO is preparing to take control of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which coordinates aid to Ukraine. Ukraine’s war against Russia is becoming an operation commanded directly by NATO.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said NATO’s support for Ukraine was “rock solid” and promised that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland – Annalena Baerbock, Stéphane Séjourné and Radosław Sikorski – told Politico that the NATO powers had given Ukraine more than 200 billion euros over two years. “Our support will continue as long as necessary and as intensively as necessary,” they promised.

The alliance powers are currently supporting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which has already left more than 40,000 dead. An action which is part of an expanding world war.

“We know that our security is not regional, but global,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in his birthday speech. “The war in Ukraine clearly illustrates this. Russia’s friends in Asia are essential to the continuation of its war of aggression. China supports Russia’s war economy. In return, Moscow is mortgaging its future for the benefit of Beijing. North Korea and Iran supply significant quantities of weapons and ammunition. In return, Pyongyang and Tehran receive Russian technology and supplies that help them develop their nuclear and missile capabilities.

The assertion that NATO serves the “defense” and “security” of Europe is false propaganda dating from its creation. As the Trotskyist movement has always emphasized, NATO was from the start an alliance of the great imperialist powers for war.

When NATO was created 75 years ago, the magazine Fourth International, published at the time by the American SWP (Socialist Workers Party) under the leadership of James P. Cannon, declared: “The North Atlantic Pact is not just another military alliance. The immense significance of this event far exceeds its consequences on the “cold war”, for which it was immediately designed.

The crisis of the old imperialist powers of Europe – whose “efforts to “pacify” the insurgent peoples of the East are proving to be one of the most costly and colossal failures in history”, for whom “it has become virtually impossible to achieve “stability” internally with their resources alone” and who “are manifestly powerless without outside assistance, whether individually or collectively, to confront the power of the Soviet Union” – had “forced American imperialism to become the guardian of world capitalism.”

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“But it can only fulfill this role effectively on a global scale,” warns the editorial of Fourth International. “That is why we have always predicted that the path to world domination must be the path to world war.”

These lines are once again extremely topical. Seventy-five years after its creation, NATO has never been closer to triggering a third world war.

At its inception in 1949, when the division of Germany was sealed and the revolution triumphed in China, NATO pursued a violent and counter-revolutionary policy. The United States, France, and other imperialist alliance powers waged brutal colonial wars in Indochina, Korea, Algeria, and beyond. NATO then supported coups in Greece and Turkey, and against left-wing nationalist governments throughout Africa and Latin America, to push back the influence of the Soviet Union.

Within the American ruling elite, however, conflict arose over whether to fight the Soviet Union through “containment” or military “pushback,” risking nuclear war. At the start of the Cold War, advocates of containment gained the upper hand. However, American imperialism never gave up its long-term goal, which was to overturn the achievements of the October Revolution and destroy the Soviet Union.

The Cold War ended in 1991 when the Stalinist bureaucracy took the final step in its historic betrayal and liquidated the property relations created by the October Revolution, restored capitalism and dissolved the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union .

NATO, which had always justified its existence by the danger posed by the Soviet Union, did not dissolve. As written Fourth International in 1949, the creation of NATO “far exceeded its consequences on the “cold war”, for which it was immediately designed” and “the path to world domination” was “the path to world war” .

American imperialism saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to reestablish its world domination and reverse the defeats it had suffered in Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. Not satisfied that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and later Putin had opened the Soviet Union to the exploitation of international capital, they wanted colonial subjugation of Russia.

America’s European allies, pursuing their own imperialist interests, followed suit. NATO is the instrument through which they pursue this objective. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, NATO or its members have waged war virtually continuously.

The United States first attacked Iraq in 1990. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia without a UN mandate – in violation of international law – and forced Kosovo to secede. In 2001, NATO invoked the mutual defense clause, for the first and only time, and occupied Afghanistan, waging a war that lasted 20 years and ended with the destruction of the country and the return Taliban. Although subsequent wars against Iraq, Libya, and Syria took place outside of formal NATO structures, they were supported by most of the alliance’s member states.

Alongside the wars in the Middle East, NATO systematically moved closer to Russia and incorporated all of Eastern Europe and, with the Baltic States, part of the former Soviet Union. .

The world’s most powerful military alliance has grown from 12 to 32 members. Last year, it spent $1.3 trillion on defense, accounting for 60 percent of global military spending. The United States’ military budget alone was $905 billion, more than the next 15 countries combined. In contrast, China spent only $220 billion on defense and Russia $109 billion.

Since 2014, when the United States and Germany supported a coup aimed at installing a pro-Western puppet regime in kyiv, NATO has been systematically preparing for war with Russia. It relentlessly armed Ukraine, finally provoking the Putin regime’s desperate and reactionary attack in 2022. Since then, it has led a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine where it uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, a war which threatens to degenerate into a nuclear conflict.

The source of this madness lies in the insoluble contradictions of the international capitalist system. Private ownership of the means of production and the bourgeois nation-state that emanates from it are irreconcilable with the global character of modern production, which unites billions of workers in a single social process. The only response that imperialism knows is a new violent division of the world.

To wage this war, the imperialist powers of NATO must build fascist police states within their borders in order to suppress the growing opposition of a working class that must bear the enormous cost of militarism and the consequences of war. The rise of Trump, Meloni, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party and other neo-fascist parties is only the clearest manifestation of the rightward shift of all bourgeois parties.

But the crisis of the capitalist system also creates the conditions for a socialist revolution. The April 1949 editorial of the magazine Fourth International ended with these words: “The staffs have carefully calculated all the eventualities, all except one. That of the alliance of the peoples of the world who want, above all, peace. It is not the maneuvers of the Kremlin, but the class struggle in Shanghai and Indonesia, in Milan, in the Ruhr and in Detroit which will constitute the Achilles heel of this unholy pact of death, reaction and dictatorship”.

These words are as relevant today as they were then. Only an international mass movement of the working class combining the struggle against war with that against capitalist exploitation can stop the march towards world war and nuclear catastrophe.

(Article published in English on April 6, 2024)

2024-04-07 05:14:27
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