[ Russia should withdraw its troops, there should be a cease-fire,
and negotiations. Writer David Bacon wrote this in response Michael
Kazins earlier piece, "Reject the Left Right Alliance Against
Ukraine," after Finlands admission to NATO.]
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SHOULD LEFTISTS CALL FOR ENDING NATO?  
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David Bacon
April 4, 2023
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_ Russia should withdraw its troops, there should be a cease-fire,
and negotiations. Writer David Bacon wrote this in response Michael
Kazin's earlier piece, "Reject the Left Right Alliance Against
Ukraine," after Finland's admission to NATO. _

Map of NATO, following Finland becoming the 31st country to join.,

 

Prolonging the war in Ukraine, however, is US policy. That makes it
important for people on the left to understand the sources of this
policy, and particularly the purpose and role of NATO, as the debate
highlighted in Michael Kazin's article "Reject the Left Right Alliance
Against Ukraine
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demonstrates.  Kazin repeats ideas about NATO and the U.S. role in
the world that are historically wrong, and which lead to support for
an increasingly war-oriented U.S. foreign policy.

In the first paragraph of his article, Kazin states:  "When, twenty
years later, American Communists backed the Soviet Union’s crushing
of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, they shoved their party firmly
and irrevocably to the margins of political life, which opened up
space for the emergence of a New Left that rejected imperial
aggressors of all ideological persuasions."  It is an important
statement because Kazin is, in fact, taking us back in history to the
era in which NATO was formed, and to the costs of the Cold War to the
left.  This is a necessary journey.

At the time of the Hungarian uprising, the U.S. Communist Party had
already been decimated by waves of repression.  Its leaders were in
Federal prison, and its activity was virtually illegal.  Many of its
members who remained had chosen, wisely or not, to go underground.
 The events in Hungary did lead some members to leave, state
repression had already made support for socialism and communism in the
U.S very dangerous.  It was this repression that led, a decade after
Hungary, to an opening for organizing a New Left.  It also led to a
left marked by a combination of support for radical social change and
fear of communism and the Soviet Union.  Opposing NATO was not on the
agenda of the New Left, at least not in the U.S.

As left activists, we often ignore our own history as it led to this
period, and that has fostered illusions about the nature of NATO and
the intent of U.S. foreign policy.  At the end of World War Two the
U.S. intensified its historic effort to stop the advance of communist
and socialist parties.  After the war they were very popular, having
led the resistance to Nazism, and in Asia and Africa, the resistance
to colonialism.  In European countries, especially France and Italy,
the US fought to keep the left out of power, setting up anti-communist
unions, parties and intelligence projects.

As communist and socialist parties became governing ones in the parts
of eastern Europe under Soviet control, the U.S. instituted the
Marshall Plan to reestablish the capitalist economies of western
Europe.  In 1949 the U.S. formed a military alliance against the
Soviets - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.  Its
purpose from the beginning was to roll back socialism as it existed in
the USSR and eastern Europe, and to prepare for war.  In an even
larger sense, its purpose was to protect capitalism as a system, and a
world order in which the U.S. corporate elite was dominant.

In the U.S. the labor movement split on the issue of war or peace with
the Soviet Union.  When Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party ran
for President on a platform of peace in 1948, many leftwing unions and
union activists supported him.  They passed resolutions opposing the
Marshall Plan, and after NATO was established, against a war policy.
 It is no coincidence that the expulsion of the left led unions from
the CIO, and the destruction of most, took place at this time.
 Opposing the Marshall Plan and NATO were key accusations used to
drive the left out of our labor movement.

For the next 40 years, until the Soviet Union fell, NATO heightened
the war danger in Europe.  Its military strategy was directed at the
containment and eventual rollback of the Soviet Union, and NATO faced
widespread popular resistance.  Putting Pershing missiles in Europe,
for instance, was met with demonstrations of millions of people in the
streets there, and here in the U.S. too.  At the same time, the
policy of encirclement of the Soviet Union, and then China, led to
creating other alliances, like SEATO and CENTO, organized with the
same purpose.  The U.S. used containment alliances to fight the wars
in Korea, Vietnam, Malaya the Philippines and other countries, and
those wars all had a clear class purpose.

NATO from the beginning has been an instrument of class power - the
corporate class of the U.S., with its partners in Europe.  While
military budgets and wars are certainly profitable, NATO's purpose
hasn't just been lining billionaires' pockets.  Military power has
been the ultimate guarantee of political and economic power.

After the Soviet Union fell, NATO strategy changed, but not its
purpose of maintaining the class power of those who have historically
controlled the alliance.  It provided a useful vehicle for conducting
wars to maintain and project their power - in Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq,
Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Today's NATO strategy is ultimately
directed at war with Russia and China, its historical targets for
encirclement.   Such a war would lead to the deaths of millions of
people, and conceivably lead to a nuclear exchange and the end of
human life on the planet.

During the Cold War the prevention of nuclear war rested on the idea
of the mutual coexistence of two social systems - capitalism and
socialism.  Even in that era, NATO's purpose of containment and
rollback contradicted that goal.  Now Russia is no longer a socialist
country, and China's hybrid system is not the socialist antithesis to
capitalism of decades ago.  In this context, has NATO become the
vehicle for protecting the interests of one group of capitalists in a
world where their control is diminishing?  A movement for peace in
the United States has to come to grips with this question in order to
prevent war and create the space for social transformation, in this
country and internationally.

Later in his piece Kazin states that "In the aftermath of the Soviet
Union’s demise, the expansion of NATO may well have been too hasty.
But not one of its newer members has done anything to threaten
Putin’s regime."  The problem of NATO is not whether it expanded
too quickly, but its purpose.  Why did it expand to begin with, as
countries that once had been part of a socialist USSR became
independent capitalist states?  This should have been a fundamental
question for the left here in the U.S., where this system of alliances
was established and where it is still controlled.  The continuing
impact of the Cold War on the left helps explain why this expansion
took place with virtually no outcry or discussion.

The possibility of much bigger wars than Ukraine is on the horizon.
 U.S. and NATO generals openly call for preparing for war with China,
and for continuing their policy of encirclement.  NATO controls the
military machine that would be the vehicle for waging that war.
Calling for ending NATO, because of its purpose and use, is a
legitimate demand.  It has a long history in the left in the U.S. and
Europe, and the reasons for making this demand come from the rhetoric
of NATO itself.  An uncritical assumption that NATO really has no
class purpose, or that it poses no danger to people seeking
fundamental social change, does not square with its history.
 

* NATO
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* Russia
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* Ukraine
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* Ukraine war
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* U.S. military policy
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* the Left
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* anti-imperialism
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* peace movement
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