International League of Peoples' Struggles
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle condemns the 2024 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit as one of the most dangerous war summits in recent memory. This year’s NATO Summit risks bringing the entire world closer than ever since the late 1930s to all-out world war in the imperialist’s vain attempt to escape the economic and political crisis they themselves created.
In its “Washington Declaration,” NATO leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., repeated the lie that, “NATO is a defensive alliance,” and, “does not seek confrontation.” But the US-NATO leaders have shown time and time again that their objective is to provoke conflict and war to further the gains of US-led imperialism.
The NATO declaration singled out Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security,” and celebrated Sweden joining Finland as the most recent NATO members, allowing the alliance to militarily checkpoint Russia in the Baltic Sea and high Arctic. In a bold move, outgoing Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenburg stated that Ukraine’s eventual membership was “irreversible,” named a NATO Senior Representative for the country, and promised “a minimum baseline funding of €40 billion [from NATO members to Ukraine] within the next year.” Exercise Steadfast Defender, which mobilized over 90,000 joint troops across Europe in the largest drills since the Cold War was also praised in the declaration as a show of strength against Russia. By reaffirming its Mediterranean Security Dialogue, NATO gives its members, especially those on its so-called “Eastern Flank,” justification to arm themselves to the teeth with skyrocketing military spending. Bases and military infrastructure are being expanded in the Mediterranean, such as the British and joint NATO bases on Cyprus currently used as staging grounds for deadly airstrikes against Yemen while the island continues to be occupied by NATO-member Turkiye. This all proves that US-NATO is willing to risk all of our lives to potential nuclear annihilation in a vain attempt to weaken Russia and retain the US’s superpower status.
NATO’s declaration supports “Ukraine’s right for its independence and sovereignty,” but the US-backed Kiev government has thrown its people into the meatgrinder of war all for the benefit of Western-funded agribusiness and military company executives. The Zelensky regime is not fighting for its independence, despite the aspirations for independence of the majority of the Ukrainian people. The regime is fighting for the chance to be a US satellite state akin to Zionist Israel on NATO’s frontier region. Genuine sovereignty must come from a people whose political leaders truly fight for their people’s ability to self-determine outside the machinations of any foreign power. The people of the Donbas rose up to seize this sovereignty in 2014, and Kiev crushed it brutally. Now over 320,000 Ukrainians and Russians have paid the price for this vain war of US-planned fraternal slaughter.
The Summit also proved that NATO’s strategy goes far beyond the North Atlantic. NATO hosted the leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the puppet Republic of Korea in discussing the iron web of military agreements signed in the last few years alone between NATO members and Pacific states. Many have called this the beginning of a “Pacific NATO” and it is already being used to send nuclear-armed submarines to Australia and Korea, build new military bases in the Philippines, Australia and Japan and enact terrifying military exercises through the Taiwan Strait, across the Korean Peninsula and even train Pacific nation soldiers for bloddy urban warfare. NATO leaders also agreed to open a Liaison Office in Amman, Jordan, which comes months after Jordan supported NATO members in protecting Zionist Israel from Iran’s Operation True Promise missile strikes in its attempt to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestine. NATO is global and it is everywhere, closing in its ranks for a catastrophic world war.
NATO even had the gall to hold a Women, Peace and Security Forum in which is claimed that women’s involvement in the alliance was a boon to gender equity. The forum also celebrated the supposed work that NATO has done to help women in conflict zones. But NATO’s aggression uproots families from their land, severing women’s autonomy and power in their communities and society, and 75% of those displaced by war are women and children. NATO is therefore anti-woman because it is anti-people.
Finally NATO bragged that, “more than two-thirds of Allies have fulfilled their commitment of at least 2% of GDP annual defence spending,” while some exceeded it (“defence expenditure by European Allies and Canada has grown by 18% in 2024, the biggest increase in decades”). It further proclaimed that, “expenditure beyond 2% of GDP will be needed in order to remedy existing shortfalls and meet the requirements across all domains arising from a more contested security order.” By a more contested security order, they mean a multipolar world in which new adversary states vie with the US for superpower status, and US-NATO is willing to plunder the public funds of entire countries to bankroll their military advernurism while the masses suffer in economic ruin.
NATO’s war summit foreshadows a serious deepening of the worldwide crisis of imperialism, one in which US imperialism is forced to double down on its familiar tools of domination like the NATO alliance as new powers arise to redivide the world’s spheres of economic and political influence. But NATO’s actions have already meant war for the people of the world, especially the working people, who struggle every day just to survive under capitalist and semi-feudal exploitation. The people yearn to be free. But by declaring that “Terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, is the most direct asymmetric threat” to the alliance, NATO can paint a target on anyone’s head whose struggle for liberation threatens its existence.
The ILPS represents the broadest unity of the toiling and oppressed people struggling against imperialism and all reaction. This is why ILPS members directly opposed NATO’s Summit in Washington, D.C., by launching and leading the Resist NATO Coalition to mobilize nearly 400 to a counter summit, over 400 on a mass march to the White House and a final mobiliztion at the gates of the Summit itself while President Biden was addressing the alliance. The League will continue to expose and oppose NATO and all tools of US imperialism as we fight to defend peoples’ struggle for rights and liberation all over the world.
Len Cooper,
ILPS Chairperson
