On NATO

An Introductionary Discussion

Morning Comrades.

This dispatch has very little to do with the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization turned 75 this year and everything to do with what a comrade asked. For context, whilst visiting said comrade back in April we ended up having a conversation about NATO and disagreed and I promised to articulate why I was so staunchly against NATO. They reminded me the other day so here it goes - on that note, if anyone ever has a question or topic that they want me to tap into, by all means, please ask and I will do my best to get into it, this is a two way street after all.

As far as I can remember, one of the earliest lesson I was taught on this road was a principled anti-NATO position, an anti-war position to be clear and not one to be confused with pacifism. That is now well over 30 years ago and my opinions haven’T changed, sharpened of course, but the baseline is still there. NATO represents the material militaristic reality of European / North American Capitalism that is responsible for atrocities without words and has to be attacked at all times.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), is a collective security pact that was formed 75 years ago in 1949. Nato’s founding members were the United States, Canada, and ten states of Western Europe, including the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. The alliance’s first secretary general, Baron Hastings Ismay, described its purpose bluntly: ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’

Britain, France and Belgium had already signed a similar pact, but even together they could not match Russia or, in the future, a resurgent Germany. Each a colonial empire, these declining powers needed an alliance with the USA, post-1945, the greatest world power, in order to retain their own status as world powers.

In the immediate aftermath of victory in World War Two, they were worried also that Washington wanted to strip away their colonial empires; the wartime administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt had used anti-colonial rhetoric and made open its support for Indian independence. Two things ensured that post-war, the new US President, Harry Truman, would not follow through on that.

The first was that, through the Breton Woods Agreements, it got what it most desired: free trade (America could undercut any of its rivals). Britain, for instance, had to dismantle its Sterling Bloc, in which the UK, its Empire and Dominions and countries like Argentina had created a protected market, to the annoyance of the US. Free trade was guaranteed by new American-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and GATTs, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

The second change was the onset of the Cold War with Russia. At the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945, Europe had been partitioned between the US and UK on the one hand and Russia on the other. In the Far East, the USA effectively kept both Britain and Russia out of its successful war with Japan, and took control of it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Russians had entered the Korean peninsula and Washington had to agree to its partition.

Tensions soon grew.

One of the USA’s wartime goals had been to open up China for free trade; previously, various European powers physically controlled its coastal cities. But the 1949, the Chinese Revolution ended that. Then in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, starting a long, bloody war involving America and its allies and, after American armies reached the border with China, the People’s Army.

In Western Europe, Communist Parties had joined coalition governments in 1945 in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. By 1947, the USA had run a successful campaign, orchestrated by the CIA, to get them out of office.

In order to prevent the supposed threat of Communist takeovers in Western Europe, Nato created, in 1949, a number of top-secret underground armies, the Gladio network, stay-behind cells which would keep fighting after a Russian invasion.

These were largely made up of far rightists who began targeting Communist Parties in countries like Italy. In the 1970s, as part of creating a ‘Strategy of Tension’ in Italy, they became involved in far-right bombings aiming at provoking a military coup. Earlier, the Greek Gladio and special-forces networks joined the 1967 Nato-backed coup that installed a military dictatorship. Meanwhile, in Malaya, Britain was fighting a vicious colonial war against Communist-led pro-independence guerrillas, as was France in Indochina.

Against that background, Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary in the 1945-1951 Attlee government took the lead, sensing the shift in Washington. That government, lauded now for creating the NHS and the welfare state, was prepared to fight to maintain the Empire, and while, economically bankrupt, saw an alliance with the USA as the way to cling on to great-power status.

The US realised that it did not have a single nuclear weapon that could reach the Soviet Union. It needed nuclear bases in Europe and Turkey. The creation of Nato, reflected by the Warsaw Pact signed in 1955 between Russia and its Eastern European satellites, led to the militarisation of Western Europe. The USA already had some 50,000 troops in Germany and the huge Ramstein air base there (used today to supply Ukraine and Israel).

With the creation of Nato, Washington secured nuclear bases in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey, today home of up to 200 US B61 nuclear missiles. Britain had already signed a separate treaty granting the US nuclear bases in the UK. Today, the alliance rejects a policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons. In other words, Nato would be prepared to use nuclear weapons in a first strike.

From the start, Nato was a nuclear alliance. At the 2018 Brussels Summit, Nato reaffirmed that the fundamental purpose of its nuclear forces is deterrence, and that, as long as nuclear weapons exist, Nato will remain a nuclear alliance.

At the Summit Declaration, Nato criticised the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), saying it ‘risks undermining the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons), and is inconsistent with the Alliance’s nuclear deterrence policy.’ That same year, in its Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump Administration reaffirmed its commitment to have ‘nuclear weapons forward-deployed to Europe, to the defence of NATO.’

Currently, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is modernising the non-strategic warheads deployed in European Nato countries. NNSA is refurbishing and replacing components of the aging B-61-3 and B-61-4 warheads, converting them into the updated B61-12 model, which are due to be deployed this year.

The Cold War ended with fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. That same year also saw the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. But the US was determined to retain Nato.

A History lesson to get into some detail: