[News] If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations? The 
Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2023)
View this email in your browser 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=856e2446f5&e=d206d0a40d> 


*If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations? 
The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2023)*


Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019.

Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), /Symphony of Death 1/, 2019.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0d826158c8&e=d206d0a40d>.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 
11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the 
first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a 
statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. 
A look at the latest military spending figures 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=47fe439dbf&e=d206d0a40d> 
shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely 
allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual 
global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess 
state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more 
destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO 
countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military 
might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya 
(2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive 
alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It 
is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a 
‘defensive alliance’.

Currently, NATO has thirty-one member states, the most recent addition 
being Finland 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a6ffbe62b5&e=d206d0a40d>, 
which joined in April 2023. Its membership has more than doubled since 
its twelve founding members, all countries in Europe and North America 
that had been part of the war against the Axis powers, signed its 
founding treaty (the Washington Treaty or the North Atlantic Treaty) on 
4 April 1949. It is telling that one of these original members – 
Portugal – remained under a fascist dictatorship at the time, known as 
Estado Novo (in place from 1933 until 1974).

Article 10 of this treaty 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=ebf6e0e254&e=d206d0a40d> 
declares that NATO members – ‘by unanimous agreement’ – can ‘invite any 
other European state’ to join the military alliance. Based on that 
principle, NATO welcomed Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), 
and Spain (1982), expanding its membership at the time to include 
sixteen countries. The disintegration of the USSR and communist states 
in Eastern Europe – the purported threat that compelled the need for 
NATO to begin with – did not put an end to the need for the alliance. 
Instead, NATO’s increasing membership has doubled down on its ambition 
to use its military power, through Article 5, to subdue anyone who 
challenges the ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), Strolling Couple, 2017.

Nino Morbedadze (Georgia), /Strolling Couple/, 2017.

The ‘Atlantic Alliance’, a phrase that is part of NATO’s name, was part 
of a wider network of military treaties secured by the US against the 
USSR and, after October 1949, against the People’s Republic of China. 
This network included the Manila Pact of September 1954, which created 
the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO), and the Baghdad Pact of 
February 1955, which created the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). 
Turkey and Pakistan signed a military agreement 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c49986d5ce&e=d206d0a40d> 
in April 1954 which brought them together in an alliance against the 
USSR and anchored this network through NATO’s southernmost member 
(Turkey) and SEATO’s westernmost member (Pakistan). The US signed a 
military deal with each of the members of CENTO and SEATO and ensured 
that it had a seat at the table in these structures.

At the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 
1955, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reacted strongly to the 
creation of these military alliances, which exported tensions between 
the US and the USSR across Asia. The concept of NATO, he said 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=5c4fee6f6c&e=d206d0a40d>, 
‘has extended itself in two ways’: first, NATO ‘has gone far away from 
the Atlantic and has reached other oceans and seas’ and second, ‘NATO 
today is one of the most powerful protectors of colonialism’. As an 
example, Nehru pointed to Goa, which was still held by fascist Portugal 
and whose grip had been validated by NATO members – an act, Nehru said, 
of ‘gross impertinence’. This characterisation of NATO as a global 
belligerent and defender of colonialism remains intact, with some 
modifications.

Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), The Flag, 1983.

Slobodan Trajković (Yugoslavia), /The Flag/, 1983.

SEATO was disbanded in 1977, partly due to the defeat of the US in 
Vietnam, and CENTO was shuttered in 1979, precisely due to the Iranian 
Revolution that year. US military strategy shifted its focus from 
wielding these kinds of pacts to establishing a direct military presence 
with the founding of US Central Command in 1983 and the revitalisation 
of the US Pacific Command that same year. The US expanded the power of 
its own global military footprint, including its ability to strike 
anywhere on the planet due to its structure of military bases and armed 
flotillas (which were no longer restricted once the 1930 Second London 
Naval Treaty expired in 1939). Although NATO has always had global 
ambitions, the alliance was given material reality through the US 
military’s force projection and its creation of new structures that 
further tied allied states into its orbit (with programmes such as 
‘Partnership for Peace’, set up in 1994, and concepts such as ‘global 
NATO partner’ and ‘non-NATO ally’, as exemplified by Japan and South 
Korea). In its 1991 /Strategic Concept/, NATO wrote 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=8899b8d3f9&e=d206d0a40d> 
that it would ‘contribute to global stability and peace by providing 
forces for United Nations missions’, which was realised with deadly 
force in Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2003), and Libya (2011).

By the Riga Summit (2006), NATO was confident 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0973969df7&e=d206d0a40d> 
that it operated ‘from Afghanistan to the Balkans and from the 
Mediterranean Sea to Darfur’. Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem 
anachronistic now, but in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt 
the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key 
anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two 
concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.

Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Kaska, Dance of War, 2020.

Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), /Kaska, Dance of War/, 2020.

The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern European communist state system 
transformed Europe’s reality. NATO quickly ignored the ‘ironclad 
guarantees’ offered 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=93ae4d97ee&e=d206d0a40d> 
by US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard 
Shevardnadze in Moscow on 9 February 1990 that NATO’s ‘forces would not 
move eastward’ of the German border. Several states that bordered the 
NATO zone suffered greatly in the immediate period after the fall of the 
Berlin Wall, with economies in the doldrums as privatisation eclipsed 
the possibility for their populations to live with dignity. Many states 
in Eastern Europe, desperate to enter the European Union (EU), which at 
least promised access to the common market, understood that entry into 
NATO was the price of admission. In 1999, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland 
joined NATO, followed in 2004 by the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and 
Lithuania), Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Eager for 
investments and markets, by 2004 many of these countries waltzed into 
the Atlantic Alliance of NATO and the EU.

NATO continued to expand, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009, 
Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. However, the breakdown 
of some US banks, the waning attraction of the US as the market of last 
resort, and the entry of the Atlantic world into a relentless economic 
depression after 2007 changed the context. No longer were Atlantic 
states reliable as investors or as markets. After 2008, infrastructure 
investment in the EU declined 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c92a25fd2b&e=d206d0a40d> 
by 75% due to reduced public spending, and the European Investment Bank 
warned 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=d64aefe5d5&e=d206d0a40d> 
that government investment would hit a twenty-five-year low.

ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha 
Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid 
Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and 
Nadima Rustam), The Unseen Afghanistan, 2021.

ArtLords (including Kabir Mokamel, Abdul Hakim Maqsodi, Meher Agha 
Sultani, Omaid Sharifi, Yama Farhard, Negina Azimi, Enayat Hikmat, Zahid 
Amini, Ali Hashimi, Mohammad Razeq Meherpour, Abdul Razaq Hashemi, and 
Nadima Rustam), /The Unseen Afghanistan/, 2021.

The arrival of Chinese investment and the possibility of integration 
with the Chinese economy began to reorient many economies, particularly 
in Central and Eastern Europe, away from the Atlantic. In 2012, the 
first summit between China and central and eastern European countries 
(China–CEEC summit) was held in Warsaw (Poland), with sixteen countries 
in the region participating. The process eventually drew in fifteen NATO 
members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, 
Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, 
Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (in 2021 and 2022, Estonia, Latvia, and 
Lithuania withdrew from the initiative). In March 2015, six then-EU 
member states – France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the UK – 
joined 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1af879e9f3&e=d206d0a40d> 
the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Four years 
later, Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road 
Initiative (BRI). Two-thirds of EU member states are now part of the 
BRI, and the EU concluded 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a018fec9a3&e=d206d0a40d> 
the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment in 2020.

These manoeuvres towards China threatened to weaken the Atlantic 
Alliance, with the US describing 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=a2599817ac&e=d206d0a40d> 
the country as a ‘strategic competitor’ in its 2018 /National Defense 
Strategy/ – a phrase indicative of its shifting focus on the so-called 
threat of China. Nonetheless, as recently as November 2019, NATO 
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c6b6fb5a2e&e=d206d0a40d> 
that ‘there [are] no plans, no proposal, no intention to move NATO into, 
for instance, the South China Sea’. However, by 2020, the mood had 
changed: a mere seven months later, Stoltenberg said 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=e0c421d526&e=d206d0a40d>, 
‘NATO does not see China as the new enemy or an adversary. But what we 
see is that the rise of China is fundamentally changing the global 
balance of power’. NATO’s response has been to work with its partners – 
including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – ‘to address… 
the security consequences of the rise of China’, Stoltenberg continued. 
The talk of a global NATO 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=0a27cadacb&e=d206d0a40d> 
and an Asian NATO is front and centre in these deliberations, with 
Stoltenberg stating 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1011c4f647&e=d206d0a40d> 
in Vilnius that the idea of a liaison office in Japan is ‘on the table’.

The war in Ukraine provided new life to the Atlantic Alliance, driving 
several hesitant European countries – such as Sweden – into its ranks. 
Yet, even amongst people living within NATO countries there are groups 
who are sceptical 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=8e4ea1a432&e=d206d0a40d> 
of the alliance’s aims, with the Vilnius summit marked by anti-NATO 
protests 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=306e28f949&e=d206d0a40d>. 
The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and 
sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=bb5489cbd3&e=d206d0a40d>, 
for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and 
values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO 
countries but the entire international order 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c8ffb3fa7e&e=d206d0a40d>. 
Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, 
suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the 
arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. 
This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, 
seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries 
(whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder 
why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

Facebook 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1ba68f5352&e=d206d0a40d> 


Twitter 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4cb58343f2&e=d206d0a40d> 


Instagram 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=044d5a798d&e=d206d0a40d> 




Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research · Shadipur · New Delhi, 
New Delhi 110008 · India
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20230720/35508016/attachment.htm>