Adam Riggio: Why we must fight for a socialist NATO
Photo Credit: (NY Daily News/Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
The popular image of NATO is as the trans-Atlantic military alliance that protected the Western democracies from being overrun by the armies of Soviet communism. Many progressives hold a similar view, however critical we are of particular decisions by the military alliance.
I write today to engage Canadians, and anyone else throughout NATO countries reading this, in an act of critical thinking. In particular, about how international military strategies of the last 70 years, no matter their application, affects the actual lives of ordinary people for the worse. It will require some systematic thinking, and twisting leftist orientations. As well, I also plan to do it in a four minute read.
Good luck there, Adam.
The Radical Progressive Critique of NATO
Here is the radical socialist critique of NATO: its purpose is to install and defend American business interests by maintaining capitalism in Europe, NATO organized secret military associations in its own member countries to prevent European socialism’s democratic political advancement, and is building a global network of alliances to defeat geopolitical enemies.
Marxist historians such as Vijay Prashad have argued that NATO’s main purpose as a military alliance was to secure lucrative investments by American businesses and government in the rebuilding of Western Europe’s infrastructure. Other researchers have uncovered more chilling NATO activities throughout Europe during the Cold War. Daniele Ganser’s research on Operation Gladio argues that NATO organized guerrilla groups and spies to provoke increased violence among radical left groups.
These secret NATO-supported groups facilitated crimes, murders, and even the total overthrow of socialist-minded governments throughout alliance members. Ganser has credibly accused one of NATO’s secret armed groups of kidnapping and murdering Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, to prevent him from inviting the country’s Communist Party into his parliamentary coalition.
Most progressives know how, in the twenty-first century, NATO has prosecuted the grinding horror show of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and given ample material aid to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. However, modern NATO operates on a much larger field than as mere assistance troops to America’s fever dream military imperialism. The Atlantic alliance has gone global, attempting to encircle the geopolitical powers of Russia and China.
The 29 current member states of NATO include many former Warsaw Pact states, an expansion this century that provoked Russia’s military destabilization of former Soviet republics, Ukraine and Georgia. But NATO also includes an outer ring of states that are affiliates in broader military alliances: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE are all part of a joint protection agreement; NATO holds bilateral military alliances with Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Colombia; Afghanistan and Iraq signed similar military alliances with NATO, when both countries were heavily occupied by American troops.
We Are the Casualties of Their Games and Greed
Admitting NATO’S crimes and anti-democratic effects is, however, only the first step to understand the actual bind in which we progressives are stuck. Too many among progressives and radical socialists are trapped in this stunted way of thinking because of how we understand neoliberal capitalism as a uniquely American project.
Movements for social progress around the world grow precarious in the shadow of the geopolitical games of our great state powers jockeying for military and economic influence and domination. The socialist left has long been well aware of the brutality and rapaciousness of capitalism.
Decades of research and journalism have demonstrated the central role of American military and economic policy in pressing capitalist development around the world. The intellectual tradition of studying how capitalism began with Karl Marx himself and continues through generations across a variety of disciplines. Many well-educated progressives have studied these traditions, whether in the formal settings of universities to our own learning. But much of this tradition focuses on the American role in promoting global capitalism.
We progressives today must face a terrifying truth: the American state is not alone in enforcing the brutal innovations in capitalism that have developed over the last generation.
Monstrosities of Mafia Fascism and Absolutism
Russia was once an ally of socialist liberation movements around the world, though their own revolution under Josef Stalin had collapsed into state-controlled capitalism and government by secret police.
Now, Vladimir Putin has restored totalitarian principles of government to Russia, as their domestic policy is the economic and political devastation of the Russian people. In other words, Putin facilitated the wholesale theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth from the Russian state and its industries to a clique of former bureaucratic and secret police apparatchiks, of which is he leader. Those oligarchs are also leaders and financiers in Russia’s international mafia. Putin has explicitly built his new Russian totalitarianism with significant influence from the fascist political philosophy of Ivan Ilyin.
Russia is emerging again as a major power in our century’s geopolitics, but the collapse and corruption of much of the American government under Trump, as well as their homicidal approach to COVID, has made China the most powerful military and economic state in the world.
For decades, the Chinese state has governed its people with brutal police enforcement of regime loyalty, even deploying concentration camps and ethnic cleansing to its conquered territories of East Turkestan and Tibet. More recently, Xi Jinping’s regime has been especially devoted to institutionalizing his absolute rule over China, and the country’s highest political leaders are themselves embedded in corrupt relationships with their most powerful billionaire businessmen.
One need only count the many murdered journalists in Russia who have investigated the details of Putin’s gangster regime to know that this geopolitical enemy of America is no friend of the progressive. The same goes for dissidents and whistleblowers who have defied Xi’s official truth: they rot in prison like Liu Xiaobo or disappear from humanity like Li Wenliang.
Three Militaries Against Democracy, Not Just One
Despite the destruction that the NATO military alliance has caused in Europe and Asia, we progressives face an uncomfortable truth: we need a military powerful enough to stand against the many threats that Russia and China pose to democracy around the world. As well, we must never let our opposition to the threat that America poses to global democracy make us patsies for Russian or Chinese control.
The most potent threat to our own democracies is the destabilization of our democratic societies. A foundation of modern Russia’s foreign policy is to aflame social conflicts inside of democratic polities, and use weapons of cyber-warfare, such as viruses and disinformation.
China has taken a more traditional route to global dominance. Chinese investments in massive resource extraction projects across Africa follow the model of the old British East India Company. Take almost all profit from mines and oil wells, while trapping their African partner states in unsustainable debt from project financing.
How do we progressive and other ordinary people escape this triple squeeze between three militarized, aggressive superpower states run by mafiosi and billionaire power brokers? Anti-capitalist, socialist, and democratic organization and agitation across the world is really our only answer.
We need NATO, but only because socialist and democratic movements are closer to taking some measure of control away from the corrupt in Europe and the Americas, pessimistic though even these prospects often feel. A socialist Europe and North America would stand against Russia and China as the weapons of war move to the internet and public political movements themselves.
If the NATO states of Europe and North America could unite in an aggressive cyberwar to encourage popular resistance to the brutal mafia totalitarianism of Russia and China, then we will have a chance for global democracy, socialism, a green economy, and a sustainable civilization on Earth.
Until those revolutions happen, we remain in our triple bind. But collapsing our military entirely, while geopolitical enemies expand and consolidate theirs, is a recipe for our enslavement. We remain slaves under neoliberal capitalism, our opportunities ground to dust.
But states with the power of Europe’s and North America’s, run on genuinely egalitarian socialist principles and policies, allied to fight for actual freedom and dignity of all people, will be a greater threat to the menace of totalitarianism than the cash-sick militarism of the old United States ever could have been.
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