End of NATO: Blowback from Ukraine and Iran

77 years after its launch, NATO—the most dangerous imperialist alliance in history—is on the rocks. NATO was never a “defensive alliance”: it was, from its inception, an aggressive counter-revolutionary cartel led by the US which aimed to “roll back” the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers’ states. But even at the height of the Cold War, NATO never entirely transcended the inter-imperialist tensions between its member states, as the French withdrawal from the integrated command structure in the mid-1960s dramatically illustrated.

After the capitalist counter-revolutions of 1989-91, NATO violated promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, by rapidly expanding into Eastern Europe in pursuit of dominance over the former Warsaw Pact. In 1997, imperialist strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski— previously US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security advisor—advocated chopping up Russia into several smaller, more easily dominated entities: “a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic.” NATO’s eastward expansion went hand in hand with aggression against Russian allies in Europe and West Asia.

In 1991 the US, with the participation of most of NATO’s major components, including France and Britain, attacked Iraq. The 1999 attack on Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, marked German imperialism’s first military aggression abroad since World War II. Two years later, in 2001, NATO invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and impose a puppet government to ensure control of energy pipelines projected to connect Central Asia and Europe.

In 2003, the US launched a second invasion of Iraq with the intention of eventually securing a stranglehold on the vast energy resources of West Asia and thereby cementing America’s status as the world’s only super-power. Unlike the invasion of Afghanistan, the attack on Iraq was carried out by a “coalition of the willing” rather than NATO, because of French and German opposition.

At an April 2008 summit in Bucharest, when George W. Bush proposed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy mildly dissented on the grounds that it was unnecessarily provocative towards Russia. A few months later, when US-aligned Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili launched an attack on peacekeepers in the separatist province of South Ossetia, NATO stood aside as Russian forces quickly crushed the Georgian military and then withdrew.

NATO used the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings as a pretext for an aggressive attack on Libya which overthrew Muammar Gaddafi’s government and devastated the country. Around the same time the US, Britain and other NATO heavy hitters provided substantial support to a military campaign spearheaded by ISIS and al-Qaeda against the secular Baathist government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria which was backed by Russia and Iran. In December 2024 the Baathist regime finally fell and the US and its Turkish NATO ally installed Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a top ISIS cadre, as the new leader of the shattered country.

The global capitalist crisis & its effect on NATO members

After the 1991 triumph of capitalist counter-revolution in the Soviet Union, the US and its imperialist allies began to outsource lower-end manufacturing to “developing” economies, particularly China which provided workers to be exploited by corporate transnationals. US planners expected that China’s integration into the world market would undermine the collectivised property system and result in a social counter-revolution similar to what had taken place in the Soviet bloc.

But that is not how things worked out. China’s impressive domestic economic growth and its willingness to build major infrastructure projects and provide financing for neo-colonies of the Global South on far more favourable terms than the imperialists provide, led the Obama administration to proclaim a “Pivot to Asia” in 2011. This chiefly consisted of increasing US military presence in the region while attempting to create an anti-China axis composed of Australia, South Korea, Japan and India.

In a 2021 paper the German government noted that the geopolitical terrain was gradually shifting towards multi-polarity as many dependent-capitalist and neo-colonial countries became less dependent on Western governments and financial institutions. Last February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio obscenely lauded Europe’s brutal colonial history at the Munich Security Conference and declared US intentions to replicate it.

China is America’s most important rival to US global domination. To contain it Washington is currently pursuing a policy of “strategic sequencing” by weakening two key Chinese allies—Russia and Iran. The imperialist-engineered 2014 Maidan coup transformed Ukraine into a NATO proxy whose first action was to launch a murderous assault on the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas region. When Moscow’s attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically were rebuffed, the Kremlin launched its “Special Military Operation.” While Russia’s hopes for a quick victory proved illusory, the imperialists’ expectations that a combination of draconian sanctions and the provision of advanced arms, as well as logistical and intelligence support from NATO to Kiev would soon bring Russia to its knees has turned out to be a very expensive miscalculation.

In early 2025, NATO’s Dutch Secretary General, Mark Rutte, remarked that Russia produced four times as many weapons per year as all NATO countries combined. On 15 February 2024, the British Guardian newspaper observed that Russia’s munitions industries operate as public-private joint ventures that put a priority on the utility of their products rather than maximising profit. After four years of war, the corporate mainstream media has come to recognise that NATO’s Ukrainian proxy is being defeated. This prospect has undercut NATO’s pretensions to be the world’s most powerful and advanced military machine and likely contributed to the reluctance of most of America’s imperialist allies to get involved in the Iranian morass in which Washington is now floundering.

A few months into the Ukraine conflict, after blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and thereby cutting off the flow of cheap Russian energy to West Europe, the US blithely offered to supply its NATO allies with much more expensive American liquefied natural gas. They have been doing so, but this has not prevented the Trump administration from extricating itself from supporting the Ukrainian war effort beyond selling munitions to its European allies (for a profit) which they can pass along to Kiev.

Trump recently aptly described the US Navy’s seizure of Iranian oil tankers as “piracy”, a term which also applies to the kidnapping of Venezuela ’s president and the cruel attempts to strangle Cuba. But major US military ventures in recent decades (with or without NATO) have produced a string of embarrassing defeats. Twenty years after invading Afghanistan, American forces were forced into a humiliating exit, while the conquest of Iraq turned into a strategic nightmare. NATO’s Ukrainian proxy, which has been draining its patrons’ resources, is clearly losing that conflict. Military coups in West Africa, from Mali to Niger, represent setbacks for French, German and US forces, while Yemen’s Ansar’allah successfully defied US and British attempts to lift the Red Sea blockade it imposed in response to the Zionist holocaust in Gaza.

Tensions within NATO rose sharply when Trump introduced his capricious tariff programme designed to “Make America Great Again” at the expense of its subordinate allies and vassals who were instructed to shift manufacturing activity to the US. Trump’s subsequent belligerent threats about seizing Greenland from Denmark sent relations in the NATO alliance to an all-time low.

The apparent strategic defeat of the US/Israeli aggressors in Iran, which could easily trigger a major global economic depression, has further fractured the NATO alliance. Spain’s social democratic Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Italy’s rightist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have both restricted US military access to their airspace, while even Germany’s normally subservient transatlanticist Chancellor Friedrich Merz complained that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran were ‘completely unnecessary’ and ‘a dangerous escalation’.

Washington’s failing attempt to retain its status as global hegemon at the expense of its NATO “partners” has led many of them to try to shift from US suppliers to domestic arms manufacturers. While Poland, the three Baltic states and others in the EU who fear German domination are trying to tighten their links with the US, the Slovakian and Bulgarian regimes have broken ranks by criticising NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and calling for the restoration of access to cheap Russian energy.

NATO was initiated as an anti-Soviet alliance but after the 1991 triumph of counter-revolution in the USSR it continued to operate as an agency of imperialist aggression against neo-colonial and dependent capitalist countries deemed insufficiently subservient to the directions of the “rules-based international order” headquartered in Washington DC. The American Century is over. There will be no return to the status quo ante. Russia’s successful military intervention has effectively countered NATO’s challenge in Ukraine while also exacerbating pre-existing stresses between America and its European imperialist allies.

Iran’s successful military resistance to the Israeli/American aggression has put it in control of the Strait of Hormuz and elevated it to a central role in West Asia. Russia’s global status has been enhanced by its ability to grind up NATO’s Ukrainian proxy as well as by the military/technical support it has provided, along with China, in Iran’s confrontation with the US/Israeli axis of evil. China is now beginning to displace the US as the pre-eminent economic power in the world. The rise of China, alongside its Russian and Iranian allies, mirrors the decline of the US and the counter-revolutionary NATO alliance it has led for three quarters of a century.

Class conscious workers understand the link between NATO’s imperialist military adventures and declining popular living standards. Rather than sacrifice their futures and those of their children and grandchildren, for the sake of corporate profits and to fund massive investments in preparations for more future predatory imperialist wars, European workers, like their North American sisters and brothers, must struggle to rid humanity of the capitalist cancer through socialist revolution which alone can open the road to a secure, peaceful and egalitarian future for all of humanity.