BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS

"The U.S. will continue to be involved in all the crises NATO will face in the future," said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. "The U.S. considers itself to be a European power." Burns made these comments after the June 3 meeting of the foreign ministers of NATO member countries, which took place in Berlin.

The gathering highlighted the strains among the competing imperialist states in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as Washington asserted once again its political and military domination in Europe. Headlines in the big-business press tried to paint a picture of a "refashioned" and perhaps more united NATO as a result of this meeting. But what one can point to in the aftermath of Berlin are the ongoing attempts of a declining British empire to hang on to Washington's military coattails in Europe to confront a fledgling Franco-German bloc led by Bonn.

The Berlin assembly, and other international gatherings that dealt with similar questions this spring, also confirmed that the initial euphoria of the exploiting classes over the post-1989 attempts to re-establish capitalism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union evaporated long ago.

Giving the appearance of concessions to French demands, Washington agreed in Berlin that NATO may occasionally supply the Western European Union (WEU) -which Paris and Bonn are pushing as the emerging military arm of capitalist powers in western Europe - military forces and equipment for European-only actions. But this U.S. military hardware can only be used to carry out "humanitarian relief" and "search-and-rescue" operations, and low-intensity "peacekeeping" missions.

`WEU not suitable for combat'
"I don't see any serious possibility that the WEU could be suitable to carry out a serious combat-related task," commented British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind.

All 16 NATO member states will have to approve NATO participation in any operations initiated by European governments, which means the Pentagon maintains its veto power. An article in the June 4 Financial Times said the agreement states that "the U.S.-led bloc would `keep under review' the way its assets were being deployed." Furthermore, any military mission must be directed by NATO's commanding officer, always a U.S. general.

French foreign minister Hervé de Charette made it clear after this meeting that his government will not fully rejoin NATO's military structure until Washington allows its allies in Europe a greater role in organizing military operations.

In a recognition of U.S. dominance in Europe, Paris announced six months ago it will begin the process of rejoining NATO's military wing. France pulled out of NATO in 1966, under Charles de Gaulle's presidency, over U.S. rejection of giving any real decision making power to European governments within the Atlantic alliance.

At the same time, the recent NATO meeting helped spur closer military cooperation between Paris and Bonn. During a Franco- German summit on June 5, just two days after Berlin, French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Helmut Kohl pledged to a give a "new push" to their military alliance "in a European perspective." This will include new elaboration of joint military strategies and a possible upgrade of their 27 bilateral arms programs.

Battle focused on Central Europe
While in Berlin, Charette insinuated that Paris wrested concessions from Washington by threatening to block attempts to enlarge NATO. The U.S. government has strongly supported admitting the former Warsaw Pact members in Central Europe - Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic - to the Atlantic alliance. "I don't see how enlargement could progress on the basis of rejection of Francés proposals," the French foreign minister said.

Probes by Washington to incorporate these workers states into NATO have also run into fierce opposition by Moscow.

During a visit to Prague in mid-March, U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher said NATO enlargement was "on track and will happen." General Pavel Grachev, Russia's defense minister, responded a week later that NATO expansion was the biggest threat to his country's security and called for a coordinated campaign among the former Soviet republics against enlargement.

The day after the Berlin meeting, Kohl urged other members of the Atlantic alliance to take into account Moscow's concern over the possible establishment of NATO structures near Russia's borders. "We want solutions which Russia, Ukraine and our [eastern] neighbors can accept," the German chancellor said.

U.S. and British representatives pushed in a different direction, a stance that is bound to exacerbate conflicts with the Russian government. Prominent conservative politicians from Britain and the United States were among the main sponsors and participants at a May 10-12 conference in Prague dubbed "New Atlantic Initiative." Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, topped the list of honored guests. Thatcher, in particular, pushed for integration of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic into NATO. Her remarks in Prague echoed the themes of a speech she gave earlier this spring in the United States.

No `New World Order' but instability
While the real conflicts between the imperialist powers and the long-term stakes are often veiled, Thatcher dealt with them with characteristic bluntness in her U.S. speech. She spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 9. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the address by her predecessor Winston Churchill on the same site.

In that talk, misnamed the "Sinews of Peace," Churchill declared that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe. He was referring to the Soviet victory in World War II and the subsequent establishment of workers states in Central and Eastern Europe that closed off large hunks of the continent to capitalist exploitation. Churchill called for a "special relationship" between London and Washington that would form the core of an imperialist military alliance in Europe to contain any extension of the revolutionary overturn of capitalist property relations. The British prime minister also advocated maintaining a monopoly of atomic weapons within North America and the United Kingdom.

"Just as Churchill had broken the euphoria and warned of dangers in the aftermath of the Second World War his heir [Thatcher]... warned of dangers in the aftermath of the Cold War," noted an article in the April 8 National Review, a right- wing U.S. magazine.

"The long twilight struggle of the Cold War ended five years ago," Thatcher said. "It ended amid high hopes of a New World Order. But those hopes have been grievously disappointed. Somalia, Bosnia, and the rise of Islamic militancy all point to instability and conflict rather than cooperation and harmony.

"The international bodies, in which our hopes were reposed anew after 1989 and 1991," said the right-wing politician, referring mainly to the United Nations and the European Union, "have given us neither prosperity nor security. There is a pervasive anxiety about the drift of events."

The period known as the Cold War was enunciated by U.S. president Harry Truman in a 1947 speech launching a massive military aid program to the rightist regime in Greece, which was threatened by a worker and peasant uprising. The policy outlined in that speech, which became known as the Truman Doctrine, sought to prevent the spread of anticapitalist revolutions like those that took place in Yugoslavia in 1945-46 and later in China.

During that period Washington devoted huge resources, both economic and military, to exert pressure on the workers states of Eastern and Central Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. An integral part of this effort was Washington's second militarization drive, the first being the U.S. military buildup in World War II. With the second interimperialist slaughter barely over, the U.S. rulers, who emerged supreme with Japan's surrender in 1945, felt the need to put back together a military force that could be used against the struggles of workers and peasants the world over.

NATO was founded in 1949 with this aim, codifying Washington's immense economic and military superiority in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, a string of ground and air military bases across western Europe, and the U.S. sixth fleet based in the Mediterranean remain today the cornerstone of U.S. dominance in Europe.

Capitalism not re-established in Russia
The crumbling of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR at the onset of the 1990s marked the end of the cold war. These events have created problems for imperialism by producing "violence" and "instability," Thatcher said.

"Market reforms" by Russian president Boris Yeltsin and other pro-capitalist politicians in Eastern and Central Europe have not led to re-establishment of capitalism and bourgeois democracy but to a lowering of the standard of living that is despised by most working people.

"The absence of the legal and customary foundations of a free economy led to a distorted `robber capitalism,' " she said, "with little appeal to ordinary people."

Thatcher's warnings were reminiscent of statements by former U.S. president Richard Nixon four years ago. "The United States and the West risk snatching defeat in the cold war from the jaws of victory," wrote Nixon in a 1992 memorandum entitled "How to Lose the Cold War."

Nixon assailed the administration of George Bush for meager aid to Yeltsin, whom he called the most pro-Western leader of Russia in history." U.S. aid and investments in Russia, he said, are "pathetically inadequate." He proposed pouring in aid funds in the range of $20 billion a year for a five-year period.

Nixon's calls went unheeded. While capitalist investments continued to trickle into Russia, they have been very low compared to those in Eastern and Central Europe. From January 1991 to October 1995, foreign investments in Russia, with 148 million people, amounted to $4.9 billion. Hungary, with 10 million citizens, received twice as much in the same period.

Meanwhile, conditions of life and toil for working people in Russia have continued to worsen. Life expectancy for men dropped from 63.8 years in 1990 to 58 years in 1995. The mortality rate per 1,000 people soared from 11.2 in 1990 to 15.7 in 1994. Unemployment has risen from 7.5 percent to 8.2 percent, while real wages for Russian workers plunged 13 percent last year. Millions of workers are frequently not paid on time, while prices of basic goods have soared. More than 500,000 teachers went on strike last September to protest unpaid wages and low pay.

In his election campaign against Yeltsin, Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov has been exploiting the resulting discontent among working people in Russia. Thatcher described attitudes of workers opposed to the effects of "market reforms" as "an irrational nostalgia for a totalitarian order without totalitarian methods."

Moscow is increasingly becoming hostile to Washington, Thatcher warned. "Whoever wins the forthcoming Russian elections will almost certainly institute a more assertive foreign policy, one less friendly to the U.S."

"A revival of Russian power," she stated, "will create new problems - just when the world is struggling to cope with problems which the Soviet collapse has itself created outside the old borders of the USSR."

"The world remains a very dangerous place," Thatcher said, "menaced by more unstable and complex threats than a decade ago." The future, she added, "might look like 1914 played on a somewhat larger scale." 1914 was the year that the first world war broke out.

Besides instability in Russia, she said, the break-up of the Soviet Union has accelerated proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in countries such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, China, and North Korea. "On present trends a direct threat to American shores is likely to mature early in the next century," she warned.

Thatcher said capitalist powers in North America and Europe must seriously consider "pre-emptive military strikes" against such governments. But she implied that the world relationship of forces makes such actions by imperialist powers difficult.

"Given the intellectual climate in the West today, it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove the source of the threat, as for example against North Korea," Thatcher said. Even in the case of Iraq, she added, "our success in destroying Saddam's nuclear and chemical weapons capability was limited."

Betrayal of the `West'
Thatcher assailed the European Union, dominated by Bonn, for its failure to incorporate the Central European countries into its structures and accelerate their integration into the world capitalist market.

As a result, Thatcher said, "The early enthusiasm for the West and Western institutions began to wane," in these countries. "Facing tariff barriers and quotas in Western Europe, the Central Europeans began to erect their own. And those politicians who had bravely pursued tough-minded policies of economic reform... found themselves left in the lurch when the going got rough."

The former British prime minister pointed out that in the last few years openly pro-capitalist politicians in Eastern and Central Europe have lost elections one by one "to be replaced by neo-communist governments promising the impossible: transition to a market economy without tears."

In Hungary, Poland, and Bulgaria, for example, parties that descended from the former ruling Stalinist organizations - which have adopted a social democratic posture and names - have won recent parliamentary elections. These parties support "market reforms" but at a slower pace. Millions of working people look at them as a lesser evil to the regimes that have tried to institute massive cuts in social services and whose policies have accelerated joblessness and other social ills. Even in the Czech Republic, touted by Thatcher and other capitalist politicians as the one country moving fastest toward capitalism, the pro- imperialist coalition of Vaclav Klaus lost its parliamentary majority in the May elections, while the social democrats gained more seats.

European Union doomed to fail
Thatcher also assailed those in the European Union who push for instituting monetary union among member states. Any such currency would have to be pegged to the German mark, the strongest in Europe, which the British bourgeoisie vehemently opposes.

"Across the continent businessmen and bankers increasingly question the economic need for a single currency at all," Thatcher said. "It is essentially a political symbol - the currency of a European state and people which don't actually exist, except perhaps in the mind of a Brussels bureaucrat."

The national interests of each capitalist class also determine foreign policy, Thatcher pointed out.

"Perhaps the best example of utopian aims is multilateralism," she said. "This is the doctrine that international actions are most justified when they are untainted by the national interests of the countries which are called upon to carry them out."

The military intervention in Somalia under the aegis of the United Nations did not solve any problems for imperialism, Thatcher said, "since America and the UN were unwilling to govern Somalia for 30 years." She also described the UN "peacekeeping mission" in Yugoslavia, led for a couple years by French commanders, as a "sorry episode." Only the massive NATO bombing campaign and subsequent intervention by some 20,000 U.S. troops at the end of 1995 may salvage the situation, she said.

In contrast to the United Nations and the European Union, Thatcher exhorted the virtues of the Atlantic military alliance dominated by Washington. At the same time, she pointed to the growing problems within NATO since the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact.

"NATO is a very fine military instrument" she said. "But an instrument cannot define its own purposes, and since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, Western statesmen have found it difficult to give NATO a clear one."

The `English-speaking' alliance
So what did Thatcher propose? Speedy expansion of NATO into Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic; extending NATO's role so it can "operate out of area," that is around the world, as long as U.S. generals call all the shots; and aiding Washington in developing a "ballistic missile defense" system that could shield imperialist powers from missile assaults from anywhere.

Carrying this out, Thatcher said, "raises, in my view, very serious doubts about the currently fashionable idea of a separate European `defense identity' within the Alliance.... Like the single currency, it would have damaging practical consequences."

The push by Bonn and Paris for such a "European" military alliance "contains the germs of a major future Trans-Atlantic rift," Thatcher said. And the capitalist powers in Europe are too weak militarily to challenge U.S. superiority. "Even a French general admitted during the Gulf War the U.S. forces were `the eyes and ears' of the French troops. Without America, NATO is a political talking shop, not a military force."

The right-wing politician claimed that "the English-speaking peoples of the West" offer the best example of prosperity in the world today. She reiterated Churchill's call for a special relationship between Washington and London, and said the essence of the Atlantic military alliance is, and must be, "America as the dominant power surrounded by allies which generally follow its lead."

Thatcher's blunt statements point to what was more veiled at the NATO meeting in Berlin: the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact has accelerated the disintegration of the Atlantic military alliance.  
 
 
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