BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The U.S. government drive to expand NATO into Eastern and Central Europe is pushing Moscow to recoil from agreed to reductions in its nuclear arsenal. At the same time, a European tour by U.S president William Clinton is adding insult to injury in Washington's military provocations against Russia.

On May 27, Clinton is scheduled to join 15 officials of European governments at the Elysee Palace in Paris to sign an agreement with Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The deal, which the Russian government grudgingly accepted two weeks earlier in Moscow, outlines NATO expansion on Washington's terms. The accord leaves open the possibility that NATO may deploy nuclear weapons and build military bases on the soil of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic - the prospective member countries. In the case of Poland, this could bring NATO troops up to the border with Russia.

The Paris visit will be one of several public appearances in Europe and the United States where Clinton will speak on his plan for NATO enlargement, which Moscow vehemently objects to.

On May 15 - the day after the NATO-Russia deal was announced - Ivan Rybkin, head of Yeltsin's National Security Council, said that NATO's decision to expand eastward has made it difficult for Moscow to push for ratification of the latest treaty it had negotiated with Washington calling for reduction of strategic nuclear weapons.

Rybkin said that ratification of the Start 2 treaty by the Russian parliament is now "almost impossible."

"In addition to all the current problems we have with the Duma," Rybkin stated, referring to the lower house of parliament, which is dominated by deputies of the Communist Party, "there is the problem of NATO expansion."

Start 2 calls on each of the world's two largest atomic powers to reduce their nuclear warheads to between 3,000 and 3,500. Washington currently has about 8,100 nuclear warheads and bombs, while Moscow has about 6,700.

An article in the May 16 New York Times said that many deputies in the Russian parliament insist that the accord "locks in American strategic superiority and compounds the insult of NATO expansion. More specifically, hard-liners assert that the agreement requires Russia to give up its most fearsome and cost-effective weapons system, the multi- warhead SS-18 missile, at a time when Russian conventional forces are getting progressively weaker."

Moscow's rejection of the treaty "would almost certainly prompt the United States to delay the arms cuts," the Times article continued, "putting both sides in the awkward position of retaining cold-war arsenals."

In a May 19 broadcast on Russian TV, Yeltsin said Moscow would "reconsider its relations" with NATO, laid out in the accord set to be signed in Paris, if NATO invites any republics of the former USSR to join. "Of course we cannot forbid them, we cannot go to war against them," the Russian president stated, "but we can try to assure a maximum of security for Russia in one way or another."

Washington's campaign of provocations against the Russian workers state is causing a reaction throughout the former Soviet republics and the entire Asian continent. In recent months, the Russian government has announced it is pursuing stronger economic and military relations with Belarus and possibly other former Soviet republics. In April Moscow signed a strategic partnership agreement with Beijing opposing U.S. domination and calling for stronger economic ties between Russia and China. Yeltsin met with the head of the Iranian parliament the same month, later announcing stronger ties between the two governments.

During elections in Mongolia on May 18, the opposition Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, the former ruling Communist Party, won a decisive 61 percent of the vote.

Marshall Plan
After Paris Clinton plans to travel to the Hague, Netherlands. There he will participate in a celebration by government officials of the 50th anniversary of the launching of the so-called Marshall Plan.

On June 5, 1947, George Marshall, U.S. secretary of state at the time, gave a speech at Harvard University announcing the European Recovery Program, named after the speaker as the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the U.S. rulers provided through that program billions of dollars in long-term loans that were used to rebuild the foundation for renewed industrial production and stabilization of capitalist Europe, ravaged by World War II.

The Marshall Plan was a well thought-out scheme of U.S. imperialism to bend ruined Europe to Washington's needs, exert further economic and political pressure to hem in the Soviet Union, and realize U.S. hegemony of the continent.

"Granted, Marshall aid was not charity," commented an editorial in the May 19 New York Times, praising that U.S. initiative. "It generated a thriving market for American exports, and its deeper motive was political, to shore up the European center-left and to contain the Soviet Union."

The plan was announced as the U.S. rulers emerged supreme with Japan's surrender in 1945, but were forced to recognize that the eastern half of Europe had been definitely torn off the capitalist world market. There was no way for them, short of war, to breach the line between capitalist Europe and the countries where the wages system had been overthrown.

The Marshall Plan was unveiled barely two months after then U.S. president Harry Truman gave a 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 talk, which became known as the Truman doctrine, enunciated the "Cold War." The Truman doctrine, along with the Marshall Plan, sought to prevent the spread of anticapitalist revolutions like those that took place in Albania and Yugoslavia in the mid-1940s and a few years later in China.

During that period Wall Street devoted huge resources, both economic and military, to exert pressure on the workers states of Eastern and Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. An indispensable 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 hardly over, the U.S. rulers needed to put back together a military force that could be used against the struggles of workers and farmers around the globe and for containing and eventually overthrowing the workers states, if the opportunity arose.

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.

Half a century later, and six years since the breakup of the USSR, Washington and its imperialist allies in Europe have still been unable to reestablish the complete domination of capitalism anywhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They are increasingly resorting to the use of their vast military power to accomplish this goal.

`Erase dividing line'
An article in the May 22 Washington Post said that the NATO expansion plan Clinton will outline during his European tour "will help erase the line that divided the continent during the Cold War - `a sweeping, broad, historic, strategic objective,' " in the words of national security adviser Samuel Berger.

Clinton's tour itinerary is full of calculated symbolism. On May 26, prior to his departure for France, Clinton plans to pay a Memorial Day visit to the grave of George Marshall at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. And the day after the trip to France, Clinton will take part in the event exalting the virtues of the Marshall Plan.

This celebration will take place in The Hague, seat of the international tribunal formed at Washington's initiative that is conducting "war crimes" trials against those it deems responsible for the slaughter in Yugoslavia. The current drive to enlarge NATO is built on Washington's emergence as the main capitalist power occupying parts of the Yugoslav workers state. The U.S. rulers fueled the 1992- 95 war and then pushed aside their imperialist competitors like Bonn and Paris, which first sent their military advisers and troops into Yugoslavia.

U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright will visit Bosnia the same week of Clinton's European tour to push for implementation of the Washington-crafted Dayton accords, which laid the basis for partitioning Bosnia and for the deployment of the NATO troops there. The U.S. government is worried that after 18 months of occupation it is far from accomplishing its objectives in Yugoslavia. NATO forces in Bosnia, now numbering 30,000 led by 8,000 U.S. troops, will add nonmilitary tasks to their duties, Albright said May 22. "We hope to show over the next year and beyond that the people who go along with Dayton will live better, and those who do not will live worse," an Albright aide told the Washington Post.

As the July conference in Madrid, where NATO will issue formal invitations to new members, draws nearer, some prominent spokespeople for the U.S. ruling class are growing nervous about the implications of the administration's course.

The May 19 New York Times editorial on the Marshall Plan expressed reservations about Clinton's policy course. "The planned eastward expansion of NATO mimics the grand strategies of the earlier era but seems misplaced at a time when the consolidation of democracy in Russia is paramount," the Times editors said.

The same issue of the liberal daily carried an op-ed piece by columnist Thomas Friedman, who has been regularly polemicizing against NATO expansion, arguing that Washington has won the Cold War, rendering Clinton's policy irrational. Friedman proposed instead to leave NATO as is and pick off the pieces as Russia continues to weaken. NATO should work with Moscow, he said, "to stabilize conflicts along Russia's frontiers and you focus on doing everything possible to help Russia ratify Start II. This way, NATO's core would remain solid, Europe would have a stable security structure without being redivided or alienating Russia, and our real priority, getting rid of Russia's heavy nukes, would be in reach."

"It's now clear that NATO expansion is the Whitewater of the Clinton foreign policy," Friedman wrote. He was referring to the years-long investigation of the U.S. president, his wife Hillary, and their associates on allegations of illicit enrichment in a real estate deal in Arkansas and subsequent payoffs to a former official of the Justice Department to keep his mouth shut in a related case. The Clintons recently appealed to the Supreme Court to stop investigator Kenneth Starr from getting notes related to their involvement in the so-called Whitewater scandal.

Friedman is the second prominent New York Times columnist to imply possible wrongdoing by the president since A.M. Rosenthal essentially called for Clinton's impeachment for alleged lies related to this scandal. Friedman's column, titled "NATOwater," is another sign that the administration is in trouble at home as Clinton wields the NATO expansion club across the Atlantic.  
 
 
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