The US-led military alliance NATO has become a central point of contention between the Greens and Your Party in recent months. What is this all about? And why is it such a big deal?
By Matt Kilsby
Over recent months, the Greens have been riding high in the opinion polls, largely owing to Zack Polanski’s positive anti-austerity message in favour of a wealth tax, which has garnered mass support. However, where Polanski has unfortunately already backtracked is on the question of NATO. While he stated his opposition to the warmongers’ alliance during the Green leadership election in May, he has since backtracked. In a recent interview with the BBC, his stated position on NATO was of “remain and reform”.
By contrast, Zarah Sultana has taken a clear anti-NATO, anti-imperialist stance. Sultana clearly spelled this out at a recent rally in Manchester:
“On the Green Party’s own website, it says it recognises that NATO has an important role, ensuring that its member states can respond to threats to their security. I’m sorry, you cannot greenwash NATO. The socialist position is that we must leave NATO immediately.”
Socialist Alternative supports Sultana’s position and echoes the call for Your Party to take a firm policy of opposition to NATO. To explain why, we need to look at NATO’s real role and history.
Violent opposition to workers’ interests
Despite the claims of its defenders, NATO was never created to “defend peace”. Created in 1949, it was formed to help establish US global supremacy and set up an alliance of capitalist powers under US leadership. Faced with the spread of Soviet control over Eastern Europe after World War II, US imperialism and its allies were desperate to combat the Stalinist and non-capitalist bloc.
But that wasn’t all. They were also intent on trying to prevent socialist revolutions in capitalist countries. At the start of the Cold War, NATO set up paramilitary “stay-behind” organisations in every European member state, with the specific aim of derailing the socialist movement, and even democratically elected left-wing governments. In many cases, this included the use of terrorism to destabilise the workers’ movement.
Despite its bloody history, NATO claims to this day that its aims are to “promote democratic values”, enabling its members “to build trust and, in the long run, prevent conflict”. It also claims to be “committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes”. But the reality simply couldn’t be further from the truth. Its history is one of continual aggression and terror. Indeed, NATO powers have played a central role in the imperialist invasions and bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. But NATO’s bloody record applies to Ukraine just as much as elsewhere.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economy was on its knees and in complete chaos. Despite their promises to the contrary, US and European imperialism seized the opportunity to expand their markets eastwards in the 1990s. NATO has played a key role in supporting Western imperialism’s interests in Eastern Europe and regions that were previously within the sphere of Soviet influence.
In 1999, the former Warsaw Pact countries Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined the alliance. They were followed in 2004 by Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, thereby encircling Russia’s borders. Then at a conference in Bucharest in 2008, Albania and Croatia were accepted into membership whilst Ukraine’s and Georgia’s aspirations for membership were recognised, and it was agreed that those countries would eventually become members of NATO.
It’s in this context that Putin launched his disgraceful military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which has displaced millions and killed or wounded thousands of innocent people. While the main perpetrator of this war has been Putin’s anti-working-class dictatorship, we cannot absolve NATO of blame for helping to lay the groundwork for it. The people of Ukraine and the surrounding region are caught in the crossfire between the manoeuvres of the big powers.
Socialist opposition to NATO
There has been a long and legitimate tradition of opposition to NATO on the left in this country. Throughout the 1980s, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and much of the Labour left argued for NATO to be disbanded, along with the Warsaw Pact. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Corbyn argued that NATO should go too. Of course, as discussed in this article, the opposite has happened.
On the right wing of the Labour Party, there have always been those strongly wedded to NATO militarism. The socialist historian E.P. Thompson decried those Labour right-wingers who had a “fetishistic reverence attached to NATO and the American alliance”. That war-mongering fetishism for imperialism lives on in the likes of Keir Starmer, who has previously declared that Labour is “the party of NATO”.
When they were in opposition, Starmer and the Labour right embarked on an aggressive and successful assault against anti-NATO sentiments from the history of the labour movement, attacking any peace activists who held those views. After being elected, Starmer has ramped up that rhetoric and his warmongering government has committed to increase military spending by a huge amount.
Independent workers’ action is the only solution
As socialists, we condemn the ramping up of militarisation and any support for NATO. If we take the ongoing war in Ukraine as an example, socialists support neither side. As far as Russian and Western imperialism is concerned, their only interests are profit, power and prestige in their respective imperialist blocs. In this current power struggle, it will be working-class people in the USA, Russia, here and in Eastern Europe that will suffer.
That’s why Your Party must be firmly opposed to NATO and be truly internationalist and anti-imperialist. It should be at the forefront in building mass protests and demonstrations as part of building an international working-class movement against war and imperialism, in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere.
Working-class people can rely only on our own strength to offer a future free from all wars. At the heart of the capitalist system is nationalism, violence, oppression and exploitation. Only an international working-class struggle for a socialist society — where the wealth and resources of the world are collectively owned and democratically planned to meet the needs of all people and of the planet — can offer a decent, peaceful future for all.
