Paris accord is part of U.S. drive to destroy workers state  

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
"Russia's transition to democracy and open markets is as difficult as it is dramatic," said U.S. president William Clinton as he signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act May 27 in Paris. After six months of negotiations, Clinton launched a tour of Europe to seal the agreement.

In signing the accord, Clinton declared, "NATO will promote greater stability in all of Europe, including Russia." In fact the opposite is true. The NATO agreement reflects a shift in Washington's policy since the early 1990s, when substantial layers of the capitalist class in the United States, Germany, and other imperialist countries hoped the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would open the door to reestablishing capitalist property relations and imperialist domination in that region. As their initial euphoria has worn off, it is becoming clear to growing layers in the imperialist ruling circles that they will have to use military might to accomplish this goal. That's what expanding the NATO alliance eastward toward the Russian workers state is aimed at.

Standing at the lectern in the Élysée Palace during the signing ceremony Russian president Boris Yeltsin declared, "I'll be frank and honest with you.. Russia still views negatively the expansion plans of NATO." He said the agreement poses an "obligation to nondeploy on a permanent basis NATO's combat forces near Russia."

In fact, while the accord states that NATO has "no intention, no plan, and no reason" to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of prospective members - Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic - or build military bases there, it leaves the door open to do so if the imperialists deem necessary.

In a supposed good-will gesture, Yeltsin announced that "all nuclear warheads aimed at NATO countries will be taken off combat duty today."

Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Yeltsin's spokesman, later clarified that the "president meant the warheads will not be targeted at the states which have signed the Founding Act" - not that the warheads would be dismantled. This is in line with a 1994 pact Yeltsin negotiated with Washington, Paris, and London to deprogram Moscow's long-range nuclear missiles aimed at NATO countries. Such missiles can be reprogrammed in minutes.

A week before the summit in Paris, Yeltsin told a meeting of the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, that the NATO pact was a "balanced document. We haven't surrendered on any of the key issues."

Communist Party member and Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov backed the deal, saying it "appeared to take into account all Russian demands."

Gennady Zyuganov, who ran against Yeltsin for president last year, didn't raise a fuss over the agreement, and in fact praised the administration for the union treaty signed with neighboring Belarus May 23. The Belarus treaty "will be a strong move against NATO's expansion," Zyuganov said.

Other political figures in the Kremlin expressed disagreements. "By making this problem a matter of bargaining, Yeltsin actually gave his go-ahead to NATO eastward enlargement," said Viktor Ilyukhin, chairman of the Duma's security committee. Ilyukhin assailed Yeltsin for trying to deceive the Russian public that Moscow had received advantages from the deal. "NATO will never give us anything!" he declared.

"What can we do? NATO will expand, and we lost the opportunity to stop it five or six years ago," stated Sergei Markov for the Carnegie Moscow Center. "Yeltsin can use this agreement to say NATO gave a promise there will be no military expansion, but in fact it was postponed into the future."

Broken promises on NATO expansion
The May 25 New York Times published an article by Michael Gordon in the Sunday "Week in Review" section, which was headlined, "The anatomy of a misunderstanding: Why Russia feels cheated by NATO. And why it still matters." Citing both Russian and U.S. government sources, the article describes a 1990 "pledge" to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev by Bush administration Secretary of State James Baker that there would be no expansion of NATO.

" `There would be no extension of NATO's current jurisdiction eastward,' Mr. Baker said, choosing his words with lawyerly precision," Gordon wrote. In return, the Soviet government acquiesced in the inclusion of a reunified Germany in NATO. "More than seven years later," the article continued, "that meeting casts a shadow over Russia's dealings with NATO as the military alliance prepares to expand to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Evincing a bitter sense of betrayal, former and current Russian officials say the expansion flatly contradicts Mr. Baker's assurances."

Similar "pledges" by Washington are also at the heart of the recent agreement on NATO that Yeltsin and Clinton signed in Paris. Yeltsin, like Gorbachev a few years earlier, is following in the footsteps of former Soviet premier Joseph Stalin in believing he has somehow "wrung" meaningful "pledges" from the imperialists by means of skillful diplomacy. In 1941, for example, toward the end of Stalin's pact with German dictator Adolph Hitler, Stalin flew into a rage against Soviet intelligence agents who reported precisely accurate information about the impending German imperialist invasion of the Soviet Union in breach of the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact.

Clinton began moving toward the current NATO expansion plan at a 1994 meeting in Brussels, which set up the so- called Partnership for Peace military cooperation program as a sop for the Kremlin to accept the imperialist military enlargement. In June 1994, Moscow joined NATO's "Partnership for Peace," and in September, Yeltsin visited Washington, where Clinton broached the idea of enlarging the alliance. Yeltsin suspended Russia's participation in the military cooperation program six months later at an international conference in Budapest, where he denounced the idea as a risk of changing the "Cold War" into a "cold peace."

The U.S.-led military occupation in Yugoslavia paved the way for the current NATO expansion drive. After years of fueling the war in Bosnia, Clinton authorized the U.S. military to lead NATO bombing raids over Bosnia in the summer of 1995, setting the stage for the U.S.-crafted Dayton "peace" agreement. This laid the basis for the partitioning of Bosnia, sending 20,000 troops there with Washington as the dominant imperialist power.

As part of the latest war preparations, the Clinton administration has set up a new office headed by Jeremy Rosner, a special assistant to the president and secretary of state, to publicly campaign for NATO expansion.

Washington is encountering some resistance among the officer corps in Hungary as it seeks to incorporate its military into the imperialist alliance. The armed forces chief of staff was fired in March for resisting authority. The Hungarian regime has sent troops as part of the imperialist occupation force in Bosnia and thousands of U.S. soldiers have been deployed at the Taszar airfield in Hungary, as a staging ground for the Bosnia operation.

The imperialist are pressing the Hungarian government to purchase up to $1.2 billion worth of NATO warplanes, but the country's finance ministry is reportedly balking at the price. According to the Christian Science Monitor, surveys conducted by the U.S. Information Agency indicate working people in both Hungary and the Czech Republic overwhelmingly oppose shifting funds from social programs to the military.

Meanwhile, the regime in Slovakia organized a two-day referendum May 23-24 to decide if it would attempt to join NATO. The ballot was a fiasco, since only about 10 percent of eligible voters participated.

Before he left for Paris, Clinton participated in Memorial Day Services at Arlington National Cemetery near the grave of Gen. George Marshall, the highest ranking U.S. Army general in World War II. "We must rise to Marshall's challenge in our day," he declared. As U.S. secretary of state in 1947, Marshall was in charge of setting up the European Recovery Plan, generally referred to as the Marshall Plan.

Linking the NATO enlargement to Marshall, Clinton said, "The world my predecessors dreamed of and worked for 50 years is finally within reach." He joined in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan in The Hague, Netherlands, May 28. On his return to the United States Clinton is scheduled to summarize the NATO proposal during a June 1 commencement speech at the West Point Military Academy.

Under the European Recovery Program, the U.S. rulers provided $13 billion in loans between 1948 and 1951 to rebuild the infrastructure and renew industrial production in European capitalist countries devastated by World War II. The Marshall Plan generated a thriving market for U.S. capitalist exports, and aimed to stave off further revolutionary struggles by working people in the region.

"We would not ask" the European governments what they want, declared George Kennan, at that time director of the State Department's policy planning staff, in a cable to Marshall. "We would tell them what they would get." Kennan was the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952 and helped formulate President Harry Truman's policy of "containment" of the Soviet workers state, which heralded the "Cold War."

The Marshall Plan was followed less than two years later by the founding of NATO in 1949, both of which were designed to exert maximum economic and military pressure on the Soviet Union, codify Washington's military dominance in Europe, and push back the struggles of workers and farmers around the world.

Under military pressures from imperialist forces the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow imposed a new regime on Czechoslovakia in 1948 - eight months after Marshall's speech. Washington denounced this as Soviet "expansionism" and an argument for the policy of "containment." But Kennan later acknowledged that the events in Czechoslovakia "were defensive actions on the Soviet side to the initial success of the Marshall Plan."

U.S.-Europe trade tensions
Clinton's trip to Europe to press the NATO expansion came in the midst of sharpening world trade conflicts among capitalist rivals, particularly in the airline industry. The U.S.-based Boeing aircraft company accused the European Union competition commissioner Karl Van Miert of provoking a "transatlantic trade war," the May 14 Financial Times reported. Van Miert voiced opposition to the $14 billion merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, which would create the world's largest aerospace and defense corporation.

He attacked Boeing's two recent contracts to become the exclusive supplier of American Airlines and Delta Air Lines for 20 years. A similar deal with Continental is in the works. "These agreements are totally unacceptable because they eliminate Airbus as a rival for at least the next 20 years," said Van Miert, who insisted that the EU has the right to stop the merger.

European Commission officials say they are considering imposing a 10 percent fine on the revenues of the merged group, expected to reach $48 billion. "It's obvious he wants a war," proclaimed Harry Stonecipher, the president and chief executive of McDonnell Douglas.

"Let the trade war begin," howled ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan, who jumped to the defense of the U.S. companies in his May 24 New York Post column. He derided the Clinton administration for allowing the "freeloaders of Europe, the `easy riders' on American defense" to "kill" rival U.S. companies. At the same time he blasted Boeing for "becoming less American" by "moving plants and jobs outside the U.S. as fast as it can" and doing business with Beijing.

Meanwhile, scandal clouds are following Clinton around the globe. While he was in Paris signing the NATO pact May 27, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, can proceed with her sexual harassment lawsuit against the president. Jones filed suit three years ago charging that Clinton made unwanted sexual advances toward her while he was governor of Arkansas in 1991. The Court rejected Clinton's claim of immunity, but left room in the decision for a lower court judge to delay the trial.  
 
 
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