The U.S. rulers, who run NATO, lost the Cold War. They are now trying to use their empire's immense military might to accomplish through their armed forces what they have failed to do by other means: overturning the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers' states and reestablishing capitalism there. 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. That policy, 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.

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 around the world.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 with these aims. Its creation codified Washington's economic and military superiority in Europe.

With the crumbling of the Stalinist murder machines in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91, imperialism could no longer wage a "cold war" against the toilers in the workers states through pressuring the petty-bourgeois Stalinist regimes. Since then, Washington and its allies have been confronted with the task of directly trying to defeat the working class in order to reestablish capitalism. That's what the attempt to expand NATO and the imperialist occupation of parts of Yugoslavia by tens of thousands of NATO troops are all about. The existence of these workers states, horribly deformed and degenerated as they are, remains a huge obstacle to the prospects of imperialism to reverse the bosses' declining profit rates and lead the world capitalist system out of today's depression conditions into a new period of expansion and economic growth.

The drive for NATO expansion is built on the complete hegemony of Washington over its imperialist allies in Europe and is exacerbating interimperialist conflicts. The recent announcement by French president Jacques Chirac that Paris will not join NATO's military structures, as it announced earlier, unless Washington cedes control of the alliance's southern command is a case in point.

The aggressive moves by U.S. imperialism are setting uncontrollable forces in motion, making some among ruling circles, like George Kennan, nervous. They increase the prospects of military confrontation with Moscow and widen the rift between Washington on the one hand and Bonn and Paris on the other. And as recent events in Yugoslavia and throughout the Balkans have showed, deploying troops on the soil of a workers state doesn't mean reestablishing capitalism will be a piece of cake.

Hundreds of thousands of workers in Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia have taken to the streets in recent months to resist the disastrous effects of capitalist "market reforms" and oppose antidemocratic measures. The logic of the street protests in Serbia was objectively for reunification of Yugoslavia and against the imperialist attempts to carve up and swallow the workers state there. The resistance of these workers takes place alongside defensive battles of workers and farmers in neighboring Greece and elsewhere in Europe.

Before NATO can use its tanks and artillery to restore capitalist rule in that part of the world, U.S. imperialism and its allies will have to defeat not only the workers in Eastern Europe and Russia, but working people in capitalist Europe and the United States as well. Down that road, working people will have their chance to take power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and destroy imperialism's military might, NATO included.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home