Ascension of American military primacy creates systems of exploitation through global markets and basing

[Pawel, “NATO and the Long War on the Third World,” The Monthly Review, January 1st 2023, , Accessed 6/20/23, JCP – PL]

NATO and the Counterrevolution

Like the fascist project, NATO was forged in anti-Communism. The ashes of the Second World War had not yet settled in Europe, and the United States was busy rehabilitating fascist dictators, from Francisco Franco in Spain to António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. (The latter became a founding member of the North Atlantic alliance.) The United States and Western Europe absorbed thousands of fascists into institutions of power through amnesties that violated Allied agreements on the return of war criminals. This included figures like Adolf Heusinger, a senior Nazi officer and associate of Hitler. Heusinger was wanted by the Soviet Union for war crimes, but the West had different designs. Heusinger became head of the West German military in 1957 and later served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. Across Europe, covert “stay-behind” operations cultivated a new generation of militants to thwart left-wing political projects—beginning in at least 1948, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funneled millions in annual funding to right-wing groups in Italy alone, and made it clear that it was “willing to intervene militarily” if the Communist Party seized power in the country. Hundreds were massacred in attacks carried out by these groups, many of which were pinned on the left—part of a “Strategy of Tension” that terrorized people into abandoning their loyalties to the rising Communist and socialist movements. NATO’s mandate derived explicitly from “the threat posed by the Soviet Union,” and the rising popularity of Communism outside of the USSR fell within its purview. In this way, NATO constrained democratic choices and undermined security within its member states, resolving political contradictions in favor of the capitalist order and its right-wing servants.14

NATO’s dark mandate did not stop there. If Trotsky saw in the First World War a cynical ploy to engage the colonized world in the project of its own submission, Walter Rodney recognized the same forces at work in NATO’s violent enterprise on the African continent: “Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union.… Time and time again, the evidence points to this cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation.”15

Along with projects like the European Union, NATO transformed the imperialist order. If the first part of the twentieth century seemed destined for endless inter-imperial conflict over the spoils of colonialism, by the 1950s a new, collective imperialism was in formation. Increasingly, global trade agreements and lending infrastructures engineered by the old colonial powers would see the spoils of imperial extraction shared among them. They also pooled their instruments of violence. In 1965, the Guinean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral described how the aggregate brutality of the West flowed into Africa through NATO, supporting the Salazar regime’s wars against Portugal’s colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, and Cabo Verde:

NATO is the USA. We have captured in our country many U.S. weapons. NATO is the Federal Republic of Germany. We have a lot of Mauser rifles taken from Portuguese soldiers. NATO, for the time being at least, is France. In our country there are Alouette helicopters. NATO is, too, to a certain extent, the government of that heroic people which has given so many examples of love of freedom, the Italian people. Yes, we have captured from the Portuguese machine-guns and grenades made in Italy.16

Today, weapons of war reflecting the full diversity of the “free world” litter all the front lines of imperialism, from Ukraine and Morocco to Israel and Taiwan. That violence would find its engine in imperialism’s central node, the United States, which had long held its sights on total hegemony—an aspiration that the demise of the Soviet Union made irresistible. On March 7, 1992, the New York Times published a leaked document containing the blueprints for U.S. hegemony in the post-Soviet era. “Our first objective,” the Defense Planning Guidance said, “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.” The document, which became known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine after the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy who co-authored it, asserted U.S. supremacy in the world system. It called for the “leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order” that would prevent “potential competitors” from seeking a greater role in the world. In the wake of the leak, the Wolfowitz Doctrine was revised by Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and became the doctrine of George W. Bush, leaving a trail of death and sorrow across the Middle East.17

At that time, the contours of U.S. imperial strategy were most forcefully articulated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the leading architects of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. In 1997, he published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. The fall of the Soviet Union, he wrote, saw the United States emerge “not only as the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power…the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” Beginning in 1991, U.S. strategy would seek to entrench that position, arresting the historical process of Eurasian integration. For Brzezinski, Ukraine was an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard”—critical in tempering Russia’s “deeply ingrained desire for a special Eurasian role.” The United States, Brzezinski wrote, would not only pursue its geostrategic goals in the former Soviet Union but also represent “its own growing economic interest…in gaining unlimited access to this hitherto closed area.”18

That project would be realized in part through NATO. The alliance’s expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious military-industrial complex that underpins much of its economy and society.19 The umbilical bond between NATO membership and neoliberalism was expressed clearly by leading Atlanticists throughout the alliance’s eastward march. On March 25, 1997, at a conference of the Euro-Atlantic Association held at Warsaw University, Joe Biden, then a senator, outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO. “All NATO member states have free-market economies with the private sector playing a leading role,” he said. Furthermore,

The mass privatization plan represents a major step toward giving the Polish people a direct stake in the economic future of their country. But this is not the time to stop. I believe that large, state-owned enterprises should also be placed in the hands of private owners, so that they can be operated with economic, rather than political interests in mind.… Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized.20

Membership in the imperialist alliance calls on states to surrender the very material basis of their sovereignty—a process that we see replicated with precision all along its violent path. In a recent proposal for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, for example, the RAND Corporation lays out what could properly be described as a neocolonial agenda. From “creating an efficient market for private land” to “speeding privatization…in 3,300 state-owned enterprises,” its proposals add to a broad raft of liberalization policies implemented with foreign influence and under the cover of war, including legislation that deprives the majority of Ukrainian workers of collective bargaining rights. In this way, the mission of NATO expansion is inseparable from the cancerous advance of the neoliberal model of globalization, which hardens within NATO member states into a condition of perpetual exploitation. States within the alliance are required to siphon a substantial portion of their social surplus away from housing, jobs, and public infrastructure toward voracious military monopolies, the largest of which are based in the United States. In the process, they strengthen the domestic ruling class, which, as in Sweden and Finland, is the primary cheerleader for accession to NATO and stands to be its main beneficiary. These factors gradually foreclose anticapitalist and antimilitarist political alternatives: there can be no socialism within NATO.21

Beyond the economic havoc, NATO accession carries with it the moral stain of the collective West’s violence. When my native Poland acquired its junior seat at the imperialist table, it became a vassal and a collaborator following the model of Vichy France. We were a nation that, under socialism, had helped channel our experiences in post-war reconstruction to the Third World. Our architects, urban planners, and builders helped envision and construct mass housing projects and hospitals in Iraq. Decades later, we sent troops to lay siege to the cities we helped build. At the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base in northeastern Poland, we hosted a clandestine U.S. prison, where detainees were viciously tortured—a clear violation of our national constitution. Budimex, a company that once drew up a development plan for Baghdad, has now completed building a wall along Poland’s border with Belarus—a buffer against the Middle Eastern refugees that, in the words of Poland’s ruling class, infect our nation with “parasites and protozoa.” If fascism is a tool for shielding capitalism from democracy, NATO is its incubator.22