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Capitalism is going through a stage of growing crisis and confrontation. NATO is surviving and rearming itself as the military arm of Western imperialism. The recent summit in The Hague confirmed the European support for Trump, the abandonment of Ukraine and an increasingly warmongering and anti-social orientation. We revolutionaries distance ourselves from these policies and fight them.
By Ruben Tzanoff
When imperialists settle accounts
The summit was held on June 24-25 in The Hague, the Netherlands. It made a commitment to raise military spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, (3.5% for core defense spending and 1.5% for infrastructure, cybersecurity, logistics and military innovation).
This commitment, which will be reviewed in 2029, would imply additional expenses of millions of euros per year, if it is fulfilled.
In addition, Article 5 of the collective defense agreement with the U.S. was reaffirmed.
Another relevant fact is that they avoided explicitly mentioning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and put the brakes on the idea of new direct military aid to the attacked country.
Reassembled without discordant voices
At the rearmament summit, “Europeanists” and “Eurosceptics”, “progressives” and “ultra-rightists” coincided, aligned within the limits of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Social democrats, greens and reformists endorsed military spending and assume a “patriotic” role functional to reactionary nationalism.
Friction persists over the easing of Spain, the silence on Ukraine and doubts about the real commitment of the United States, but NATO has gained survival with more military spending.
Servility, more militarism and less social spending
A letter from Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, anticipated the outcome of the summit: “Europe will pay BIG”. Subsequently, the structure, agenda and silence on Ukraine showed that the governments designed it to satisfy Trump, gave in to blackmail and thus ratified US leadership within NATO and as an enemy of Russia and China.
The acceleration of NATO’s rearmament does not provide a European shield against the deliberately overstated “Putin threat”; on the contrary, the expansionism advocated by NATO turns the Old Continent into a US platform, exposes it and contributes to escalating tensions.
At the same time that it will bring millions in profits to arms manufacturing corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, among others, it will mean more debt for the states, more taxes and more social cuts.
The true face of the Atlantic Alliance
NATO, created in 1949 against the USSR, continues to exist despite its disappearance and has expanded with new “enemies” and “global missions”. Contrary to official versions, it does not defend peace or democracy. Among a long list of facts, we can mention that it bombed Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Libya (2011) and supported authoritarian regimes in Turkey (since 1952) and Saudi Arabia (since 1990).
When there was no consensus in NATO to intervene, some of its powers acted, such as the US and the UK in Iraq (2003) or through covert operations, as in Syria (since 2011).
In the epoch of decadence of the dominant power, wars and war aggressions are not exceptions, but a necessity of the system because “Imperialism means the militarization of the economic and political life of the capitalist countries” (The Transitional Program, 1938).
NATO is a powerful armed tool of Western imperialism to guarantee and expand its geopolitical dominance under U.S. command.
NATO is not the “savior of Ukraine”.
U.S. imperialism did not support Ukraine to win the war, but to wear Putin down without defeating him. Now it is reducing support, humiliating it and trying to force a peace with concessions and the EU is aligning itself with that policy.
The illusions in NATO as the “savior” of Ukraine are mistaken, as are the silence or the denunciations placed in the background, thus formulated by some sectors of the left. Supporting the Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s invasion, independently of Zelensky, requires to raise on the same plane NATO out of Eastern Europe!
Our lives are worth more than your rearmament
We repudiate the NATO summit and its rearmament to settle the inter-imperialist dispute for hegemony. We denounce Western imperialism and the new Russian and Chinese imperialisms. In this sense we propose: Dissolution of NATO and the CSTO!
No to arms spending: tanks, drones, missiles! The available money should not be spent on weapons, tanks, drones and missiles, it should be spent on housing, health, education, wages and social welfare. Let the trade union leaderships call strikes against rearmament for imperialist wars!
To the warmongering, exploitative, oppressive and anti-human project of the EU, we oppose that of a Europe where the workers rule in the framework of the free federation of European socialist states.
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