75 years ago this week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded. It emerged in the wake of some of the most turbulent events in human history.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazi Germany. China lost over 20 million in a much longer war against the Japanese empire. The British had been blitzed; their colonies starved, partitioned, and abandoned. Europe was in ruins.
The United States, on the other hand, emerged economically stronger and, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shielded by the terrible power of the atom. It moved quickly to apply its newfound power to a project of global hegemony. “Preponderant power must be the object of US policy,” a State Department memo said in 1947.
NATO was a critical piece of that puzzle — founded on 4 April 1949 with the explicit mission of “deterring Soviet expansionism” and establishing a permanent “North American presence on the [European] continent.”
NATO insists that it is a force for democracy. But, from its inception, it has armed, protected, and elevated some of the most reactionary forces in European society. António Salazar's brutal Estado Novo regime in Portugal was a founding member of NATO — and remained a core member until it was toppled in 1974. Adolf Heusinger, a senior Nazi officer and close ally of Hitler wanted by the Soviet Union for war crimes, would become Chairman of its Military Committee.
NATO insists that it is a guarantor of freedom. But we do not have to look far back to find its fingerprints in attempts to crush popular aspirations for sovereignty. Pointing at NATO’s support of the Salazar regime and his colonial wars in Africa, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru condemned the Alliance at the 1955 Bandung Conference, calling it “one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism”. Indeed, every founding member of NATO was a major colonial power. And, by the 1960s, there were over a dozen NATO bases in North Africa — including a nuclear testing site.
NATO insists that it is a defensive alliance. But through the course of its history, NATO has destroyed and dismantled entire states. According to research carried out by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the post-9/11 wars that have been imposed on the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia have claimed 4.5 million lives, and forced tens of millions into poverty and involuntary migration.
Now NATO is going global. Its recent Strategic Concept referred to Africa and the Middle East as its “southern neighborhood”. And, at its 2023 Summit in Vilnius, NATO issued a communiqué that doubled down on the organisation’s strategic posture outlined previously: China’s “stated ambitions… challenge [NATO] interests, security and values” necessitating a NATO pivot from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
As NATO’s expanding ambitions raise tensions to boiling point on several fronts, it has become imperative to challenge its violent mission and dismantle the war machine.
That’s why this week, the Progressive International worked with partners around the world to call for a global day of action on NATO’s 75th birthday. Over the past week, activists in six countries — US, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Italy and Colombia — took a range of actions to challenge NATO and break through its propaganda.
Last month, we produced, alongside Jacobin magazine and Abby Martin, a video on the history of NATO. Please watch and share it here.
In solidarity,
The Progressive International Secretariat
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