April 4 this year was the 75th anniversary of the establishment of NATO. Marking this date the Foreign Ministers of the 32 NATO [1] members gathered in Brussels for a meeting. A NATO statement claimed that the alliance "has ensured peace, democracy and prosperity for its members...and one billion people on both sides of the Atlantic". In a Statement on April 4, Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also claimed on the anniversary that "75 years later, NATO has become the most successful alliance the world has ever known - and it continues to grow in size and strength... for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security". King Charles III also weighed in with a statement that day saying that "its core task endures: to protect the one billion citizens of our NATO Allies. This vital Alliance continues to thrive and adapt in the face of new threats and challenges."

Demonstration in Finland - Photo: Yorkshire CND

But what is the truth? Is NATO united, "growing in size and strength" and has it "ensured peace, democracy and prosperity for its members"? For a start, whose "peace, democracy and prosperity" does NATO and its leading nations stand for? There are 8 billion people in 195 countries identified by the UN not 1 billion and the 32 countries that NATO claims to defend. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the world's people and their countries are not represented in such a military alliance. NATO is outside the United Nations and the realm of international law administered by the UN and its meetings. Such an alliance acts as a military bloc of western countries led by the US, Britain and other western powers. NATO is also a political and military regime that operates across and outside of borders of the countries it represents. It usurps the decisions of sovereignty for citizens of not only member countries but also non-member countries, operating in Asia, Africa and across the world. Plainly speaking, NATO holds a gruesome record of war, violence, and colonialism without even consent of the peoples it claims to represent.

The fact that such alliances are not fit for the modern world can be seen without looking further than its role in present conflicts, let alone the conflicts and wars that NATO has been responsible for since WWII. Since last year NATO has made no statements condemning the criminal occupation of Palestine by Israel (neither are NATO members) which has led to the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the people of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel. When questioned about the hypocrisy that NATO only interferes between Russia and Ukraine (also neither are NATO members) the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, claimed that "Ukraine and Gaza are very different" but could not explain either the interference in Ukraine, or the disregard for the fate of Palestine and its people. Not one word has been uttered by NATO in support of the people of Palestine nor does NATO condemn its member states, particularly the US, Britain and other powers, who are arming Israel to the teeth for this slaughter. This should surely be a vital question for a military alliance that claims to "defend" people and claims to have kept the "peace" in the world. Not only that, but this is being done even though most of the NATO countries in the alliance formally oppose this vile slaughter of the people Palestine by Israel and are calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Also, it should be noted at the same time on this anniversary NATO is continuing to hold its "Steadfast Defender 2024" war games, currently taking place until May 31, featuring some 90,000 troops, from all 32 member states in Europe. On April 9, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced that the following exercise of the Lithuanian-German partnership is setting up the Panzerbrigade 45 which is set to include 4,800 soldiers when it becomes fully operational in 2027 alongside already large military bases of the US and British forces in Eastern European countries on the borders of Russia and Belarus. These Anglo-US NATO exercises which have continued every year, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, have been part of this expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe and the Balkans with the justification that there was allegedly confrontation with Russia and establishing military bases up to its borders.

Today, the peoples of the world desire peace, not wars following World War II. They desire an end to all the wars since then of the US imperialists and their allies in Asia, the Middle East and Africa for which the people have built powerful anti-war movements to oppose these wars over decades. For the people to further this objective for peace, it is necessary to speak out against the US/NATO expansion eastwards, which Russia has for many years been warning is unacceptable to the security of the Russian Federation and Russian peoples living in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. They demand friendly and not hostile relations. Russia engaged in negotiations for this end, such as with the UN-backed Minsk agreements. These diplomatic efforts and agreements were deliberately ignored by the Anglo-US-led NATO powers who instead did everything to provoke war between Russia and Ukraine.

Now NATO countries are behind funding and arming and sustaining Ukraine's war as a proxy NATO war against Russia, which Ukraine itself cannot sustain. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and others still claim it is crucial for the "West" to continue to support Ukraine in its war for "freedom and democracy" and "our values" against Russia "as long as it takes". No evidence, or course, is presented by any of the accusers to back these claims. Stoltenberg just rants that the only hope that the US/NATO forces have is to create the conditions for the war to go on for years, and they try and ensure that anyone working for a peaceful solution has no say in the matter. In other words, preparation for war and escalation of war once it starts is the raison d'être of NATO and the powers that lead it, not de-escalation and peace for all parties involved. This is a powerful reason why NATO should be condemned by the world's people and dismantled.

At the same time, the contradictions within NATO are also destroying it. According to reports at the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on April 3 and 4, the NATO countries are now pre-occupied not just with Russia and China but also with the internal political struggle in America. In their eyes the main casualty of this civil war in the US has so far been military aid to Kiev and the likelihood of Donald Trump's entering the White House. This is forcing Western European states to panic and consider the unthinkable. Will the United States abandon NATO altogether and shift its priorities? Of course, what is clear is that the US, even under Biden, is trying to shift the costs of NATO onto its European allies. Costs which are causing upsurges in protests of workers and farmers in Europe in opposing the diverting of the economy to war are affecting the livelihood of the people. Because of this, Britain's Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has been hysterically lecturing the public and European countries to increase the military spending by declaring pedantic contortions of phrase-mongering that we are no longer in a "post war" period but are now in a "pre-war" period.

For his part, Stoltenberg announced at the Foreign Ministers' meeting on April 4 a proposal for a new NATO "Mission for Ukraine", a mechanism to secure directly a five-year military aid package from all 32 members of the alliance of up to $108bn to supply "lethal weapons to Ukraine". Reports, however, say that "none of the details have been worked out" and it will have to be approved at the NATO summit in July. The proposal would give the NATO alliance control of the US-led Ramstein weapons support group [2] which is at present an informal group of countries supplying weapons to Ukraine from individual countries. However, such a move would further expose the Anglo/US NATO alliance as the sole weapons supplier and escalator of the war in Ukraine against Russia and not individual countries on a bi-lateral basis. Infighting and contradictions have again erupted as this is being seen as a method of "Trump-proofing" weapons supplies to Ukraine. The US would have to supply the money it is presently refusing to supply to Ukraine, but now would have to supply as part of NATO.

At the same time, as the NATO military alliance passes its 75th anniversary, it is also attempting to globalise itself to threaten China and the DPRK in East Asia. The US-led alliance is using pressure and deals to secure support and to ramp up threats to China by arming and sending special forces to Taiwan. However, the Anglo/US NATO old imperialist dream of trying to once again conquer Russia and reconquer China is driven by their morbid preoccupation with the defeat of their old world order that they hanker for. Along with the other imperialist powers of the old world, this might be the final move of NATO, as they cannot reconcile themselves to the new that is coming into being in the world.

This new world is one where its peoples are not undermined or intimidated by the disinformation that these imperialists can sort out any problem facing humanity. It is a world that is coming into being, where working people work out their own vantage point based on identifying and upholding their own principles and interests, not one that is based on the pragmatic calculations of these imperialists. It is a world where it is necessary to uphold the cause of international peace and draw warranted conclusions from the events in Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere over the past two years and more. NATO has no place in such a world.

No to NATO! Yes to Peace!

Notes
[1] Sweden became NATO's newest member on March 7, after depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States in Washington, DC. With Sweden's accession, NATO now counts 32 countries among its members, all under US command.
[2] The Ukraine Defence Contact Group (UDCG, also known as the Ramstein group) is an alliance of 56 countries (all 32 member states of NATO and 24 other countries) and the European Union which allegedly supports the defence of Ukraine by sending it military equipment in its conflict with Russia.

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