NATO, expanding, shows its cracks

By

John Catalinotto

Feb 18, 2008

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, at a NATO meeting in Munich on Feb. 10, threatened the European population with alleged terrorist threats to their security. Gates insisted that the Europeans should be ready to send their youth to be cannon fodder in U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia.

7,000 protest Security Conference (SiKo) in Munich Feb. 9 as Defense Secretary Gates demands more troops to Afghanistan. Photo: Indymedia-Germany

At the heart of Gates’s comments is the contradictory relationship between U.S. imperialism and its European imperialist allies regarding the future of the NATO military alliance.

“I am concerned that many people on this continent may not comprehend the magnitude of the direct threat to European security,” Gates said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy as 7,000 anti-war activists, most of them Germans, protested outside. To the hall filled with defense or foreign ministers from 40 countries, he added: “So now I would like to ... speak directly to the people of Europe. The threat posed by violent Islamic extremism is real and it is not going to go away.”

Gates’s heavy-handed message was aimed especially at the people of Germany, who are reluctant to send their youth into combat in southern Afghanistan. Germany’s 3,500-troop contingent in the war has been operating in the relative quiet of northern Afghanistan. The German government has presented its troops’ intervention in the North as limited to reconstruction work, but 25 German soldiers have died there.

Gates even acknowledged, seemingly without hostility, that Europeans oppose the U.S. role in Iraq. He tried to separate the military occupation of Afghanistan from that of Iraq, in the hope of winning over more European popular support.

In an ARD German television poll held Feb. 4 and 5, only 13 percent of those polled backed sending combat units to Afghanistan. Protesters in the streets of Munich who said they wanted no German participation against Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran were obviously closer to public opinion than German officials were.

Split in NATO?

At a high-level NATO conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, held Feb. 7-8, Gates had also argued vehemently for more German and other European NATO participation in Afghanistan. He spoke of a “split in NATO” between “those who are willing to fight and those who are not.” The rightist Canadian regime—which has sent troops to fight and die in southern Afghanistan—has said that if others in NATO don’t join the effort, it will pull out.

Currently the German government—a “grand coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats led by rightist Chancellor Angela Merkel—is ordering a “quick-reaction” combat unit of 250 troops to northern Afghanistan to replace a Norwegian unit. She is also asking the Bundestag (Parliament) to approve the German presence in Afghanistan until 2010, so the issue won’t arise during the next national elections in the fall of 2009.

A report in the news magazine Der Spiegel that up to 4,500 German troops will soon be in Afghanistan was denied by the government.

The German ruling class and its government are caught between the overwhelmingly anti-war population and their own imperialist interests. Germany is the world’s largest exporter. Its ruling class at present depends on the military strength of U.S. imperialism to maintain stability—that is, the oppression of the poor nations and the working people of the world.

Now some of the German corporate media are trying to convince the population that “sooner or later Germans have to send troops to southern Afghanistan.” They are demanding sacrifices from the masses so Germany can be a major imperialist player in the world. (Cologne Stadt-Anzeiger)

Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, made U.S. demands on Germany even clearer in an article in the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung. “We will be urgently requesting all our allies, including Germany, at the NATO summit in Bucharest [Romania] in April to match us soldier for soldier, euro for dollar,” she wrote. (Deutsche Welle, Feb. 9)

NATO’s April meeting

With the downfall of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance, NATO lost its historic role of confronting the socialist world on behalf of Western European and U.S. imperialism. In a NATO meeting in April 1999, while Pentagon bombs were destroying Yugoslavia and underscoring U.S. military dominance, Washington laid out its plans for NATO. It was to remain under U.S. leadership and be a worldwide intervention force if necessary to keep both the former socialist countries and the neo-colonies of the West in line.

More and more frequently, U.S. imperialism, while losing its economic advantages to competitors in many areas, has been relying on its global military superiority to impose its demands on other imperialist powers.

Attending the summit in April will be a dozen new NATO members from Eastern Europe and the former USSR—most of them client states lined up with Washington. NATO is actively intervening not only in the former Yugoslavia but in far-off Afghanistan.

The issues to be discussed in Bucharest represent a danger to the world’s people: Afghanistan; NATO expansion to the East, with the placement of U.S. anti-missile weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic; the secession of Kosovo from Serbia. There is even a proposal by five former NATO commanders that NATO adopt a strategy allowing first use of nuclear weapons. Many of these issues involve direct provocations against Russia as well as a threat to Iran, North Korea and other countries that refuse to bow before imperialist orders.

U.S. policies threaten new wars.

At the same time that NATO is discussing this military expansion, the success of resistance forces in stopping the Pentagon in Iraq and pinning down NATO in Afghanistan has exposed the cracks in NATO’s foundation. Economic competition among the NATO powers will only grow as the U.S. economic crisis spreads around the world. More important, popular resistance to being used as cannon fodder for U.S. and European imperialist interests can put the expansion on hold.