The End of NATO

BT speech at RedMed’s Anti-NATO conference, 4 July

The EEK [The Workers Revolutionary Party, Greece] and the DIP [Revolutionary Workers’ Party, Turkey] hosted the event with participants ranging from Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela to India, Romania and Russia.

Thank you for inviting me.

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.

[The Chinese deformed workers’ state] 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.

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 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.

Marxists of course welcome the fracturing of NATO—our policy for the imperialist military has always been “not one person and not one penny”. 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.

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.

Thank you, comrades.