Nato was founded in 1949 to unite and centralise the military-political power of western imperialism under the leadership and domination of the US (which had emerged from the second world war as the strongest imperialist power) – as a weapon against the USSR and other European socialist countries.
In response to the integration of West Germany into Nato in 1955, and seeing through Nato’s obviously aggressive designs, the Soviet Union, along with other east European socialist countries, founded the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955 – as a defensive bulwark against imperialist military threats.
Although it was formed much earlier, the lying propaganda of Nato countries asserted to its peoples that Nato was a defensive alliance to counter the Warsaw Pact and to stop the allegedly aggressive designs of the Soviets on western Europe!
When the USSR and the eastern bloc collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded, the fig leaf for the existence of this neo-Nazi warmongering alliance was suddenly removed. Nato, left without an official role, appeared positively redundant and overdue for the scrapyard.
Now, the new tune of US imperialism was that Nato must exist precisely because the Warsaw Pact was gone – to ‘ensure peace’, naturally!
The ‘new world order’
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US outlined its objective of world domination in brutally clear terms. In its 9 March 1993 document, it stated that it wanted to ensure that “no rival power is allowed to emerge in western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union”, and that “no collection of nations can aspire to regional dominance because that would put them on the path to global rivalry with the American superpower”.
And so, instead of the post-cold war peace dividend promised by imperialism’s statesmen and other hired servants, what Nato actually brought to workers all over the world in the post-cold war era was more military spending, endless wars, and the encirclement of Russia.
It is no coincidence that the first war actually fought by Nato – against Yugoslavia in 1999 – took place after the disbandment of the Warsaw Pact (on 1 July 1991) and after the collapse of the eastern bloc of socialist countries. Nato waged that war using cynically false and nauseatingly hypocritical phrases.
Fought on the pretext of ‘stopping ethnic cleansing’, Nato’s war against Yugoslavia was a gigantic exercise in ethnic cleansing. In the name of stopping a genocide, Nato perpetrated precisely such a genocide. Alleging a desire to ‘avert a humanitarian disaster’, Nato created the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe since the end of the second world war. Posing as protectors of ‘human rights and democracy’, the Nato Nazis actually perpetrated an extraordinary violation of human rights and democracy.
The truth is that it was a war of rapine, whose aim was to seize territory, spheres of influence, markets, raw materials, and avenues for export of capital. It was a war to establish – through the imposition of puppet regimes in the constituent republics of former Yugoslavia – an oil monopoly stretching from the Middle Eat to the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas. It was a war to establish military bases, and a war to isolate Russia and force Yugoslavia to cease claiming the right to an independent and sovereign existence.
In other words, it was an imperialist war for domination – an opening shot in US imperialism’s new strategy of intervening on the flimsy and false pretexts of defending ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, in the affairs of any sovereign state that might refuse to go along with the its diktat. It was a harbinger of the subsequent predatory wars, from Afghanistan to Libya, and set the precedent for the use of Nato as an instrument of imperialist war and aggression, in Europe and elsewhere; as a tool for gaining world supremacy – stamping underfoot the fundamental principles of international law governing relations among sovereign states.
Nato made 35,000 sorties over Yugoslavia and dropped 20,000 bombs containing 80,000 tonnes of explosives. It targeted schools, hospitals, farms, bridges, roads, railroads, television stations, historic monuments, museums, factories, refineries and residential areas. For 78 days, a coalition of 19 of the richest countries in the world, with a population of 600 million, a combined GDP (then) of $12tr a year and a combined military budget in excess of $500bn a year – a colossal economic, technological and military force, unprecedented in the annals of history – waged total war against tiny Yugoslavia to force her to submit to the imperialist ‘new world order’.
The enemy within
With the odd honourable exception, the Yugoslav war, just like the first imperialist world war, revealed the moral depravity, political corruption, mercenary cynicism, and utter shamelessness, not only of the bourgeois journalist fraternity, but also of the so-called labour movement and most of what passes for the ‘left’ in Britain and many other imperialist countries.
Robin Cook, Labour foreign secretary, called for a rewriting of the UN Charter so as to allow outside interference in the internal affairs of states and, displaying his proclivity for sick jokes, declared that Nato had become a “major humanitarian agency”.
In fact, this scoundrel was calling for the untrammelled and unrestricted right of the warmongering imperialist neo-Nazi alliance to interfere at any time in the internal affairs of other countries on the pretext of preventing ‘human rights abuses’. ‘Modern humanitarian law’, assert various scoundrels of the ilk of Robin Cook, now permits – almost requires – military intervention by the ‘international community’ to ward off ‘humanitarian catastrophes’ anywhere in the world.
Under this Hitlerite doctrine, championed among others by Labour party social democrats, there is no international law other than what US imperialism and its junior partners say it is. Under this new ‘law’, imperialist powers reserve the right to invade any country if they judge that it is in danger of being overwhelmed by a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ – ie, a country where the interests of imperialism are threatened.
Thus the books on international law can be burned, and professors of international law can be made redundant. Never before have the Hitlerite aims of world domination pursued by the neo-Nazi Nato alliance, and especially by US imperialism, been so clear; and never before has the need for progressive humanity to fight against and frustrate this attempt at world domination been so urgent.
The Yugoslav war furnished new proof – as did the later wars waged by imperialism against Iraq, Libya and Syria – of the rottenness and bankruptcy of the Labour party and trade-union leaders, and all the rest of the ‘liberal’ warmongers and stock-exchange ‘socialists’ who pretend to have some concern for the working class and some affinity with its interests.
When imperialism says jump, that is exactly what these ‘working-class leaders’ do. Instead of opposing Nato’s blitzkrieg of Yugoslavia, most of them fell over themselves to reinforce media lies that painted Yugoslavia’s leader as a ‘new Hitler’ and the barbaric bombing as a ‘humanitarian intervention’.
For the vast majority of the careerist spivs who mislead workers in Britain, no crime is bad enough to make them question their subservience to our rulers. Their comfortable careers and lifestyles are paid for out of loot that comes from British imperialist plunder of the whole world – and their services in keeping British workers on side are well worth this small bribe.
That is why we communists always point out the urgent need to fight such opportunism in the working-class movement. We will get nowhere in our struggle for freedom until we have kicked such traitors out of our ranks. Never before has the need to fight opportunism in the working-class movement been so urgent!
Revealing its true colours, barely two weeks preceding the start of the Yugoslav war, Nato admitted to its membership Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Since then, nine other east European countries have been incorporated into Nato – three of them being constituent republics of the former Soviet Union, namely, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The purpose all along has been to bring Nato to the borders of Russia in order to encircle and enfeeble it, thus eliminating any possible challenge to imperialist domination. (Leaving aside the secondary question of safeguarding the capitalist rulers of the former socialist countries, through Nato intervention, against any revolutionary movement that might threaten them.)
This is precisely what lies behind the current dangerous crisis in Ukraine. In response to Nato’s relentless advance, however, Russia has in no uncertain terms served notice on the warmongers, saying: this far and no further.
Emboldened by the collapse of the European socialist bloc, its appetite whetted by the prospect of getting its mitts on the vast territory of the People’s Republic of China, and ceaselessly driven by its incurable economic crisis to find new markets, raw materials and avenues for the export of capital, the neo-Nazi Nato alliance is limbering up for new and unprecedentedly dangerous ventures, which are only too likely, unless prevented by proletarian revolution, to plunge the world into a war of monstrous proportions.
It is clear that US imperialism dreams of using Nato to subjugate Russia, overwhelm China and achieving world domination. It is equally clear that it will ultimately be no more successful than were the original Hitlerites.
As surely as the Nazis of yore came a cropper, US imperialism is travelling at breakneck speed towards the buffers. The people of the world will give the US and other imperialists a joyous burial.
We workers in the imperialist countries have a duty to fight for the disbandment of this predatory, warmongering, neo-Nazi alliance, which brings death, destruction and misery to our brothers and sisters all over the world. We have a duty to give fraternal support to the people of the oppressed countries in their struggle for liberation form imperialist oppression and exploitation.
We must fight for the removal of all foreign military bases and refuse to cooperate in any way with the imperialist war machine. Above all, we need to fight for the complete overthrow of imperialism, which has for so long drenched humanity in blood.
