The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated its 75th anniversary by meeting for three days in Washington D.C. with the hope of implementing long-term and strategic plans for so-called global peace and security. Various analysts fixated on the gaffes made by U.S. President Joe Biden, the reaction of other officials to President Zelensky being called Putin, and many other bizarre formalities. While these gaffes might offer entertaining details, the revolutionary masses of the globe should never lose their focus on the structural picture. That is, it is imperative to understand the course of action that will characterize the empire’s decline because this can tell us what dangers loom ahead. For one thing, the 2024 NATO Summit revealed, once again, that NATO remains a threat to humanity, as it seeks to expand its terrorist activities in different corners of the globe.
The Summit, in fact, took place at a time of heightened global tensions that are caused and enabled by NATO. In Western Asia, all the participating countries are directly complicit in genocide, either by exporting weapons to the Zionist entity or by bombing countries that actively support the Palestinians’ struggle, i.e., Operation Prosperity Guardian against Yemen. In Eastern Europe, NATO is fighting ‘until the last Ukrainian’ with the aim of breaking down Russia. Naturally, it takes a huge deal of propaganda to make sure that NATO’s terrorist pursuits are presented as a fight for democracy and peace. While the Global South has been seeking alternative forms of cooperation with other rising powers, as it knows NATO’s criminal legacy all too well, Europe continues to prove to the world that it has never learnt anything from its own history.
NATO: A Terrorist Organization
Since Russia launched its Special Military Operation in 2022, NATO has worked diligently to rebrand itself given its destructive legacy all over the world. For European leaders, from Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to French president Emmanuel Macron, supporting the fight for “democracy” in Ukraine is an unquestionable dogma. However, it does not matter how hard NATO tries to hide its terrorist activities, its criminal legacy of unprovoked invasions and destruction (for instance, in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya), as well as the direct undermining of alternative political projects to U.S.-led imperialism, tell us otherwise.
To understand the terrorist nature of NATO, one has to look back at the history of this military alliance and the impact it has had on the countries of the Global South, and beyond. After WWII, the world bifurcated into the Soviet Eastern bloc and Western capitalist bloc. For national liberation movements in the Global South, the main contradiction of their epoch entailed the fight against colonialism and neocolonialism, thus leading them to adopt an internationalist strategy of solidarity with strong Marxist-Leninist tendencies. By framing the question of national liberation as linked to an undoing of the economic-political hierarchy that maintained the international order, the strategy of regional solidarity became central. In such a context, NATO saw them as a threat to the West’s capitalist exploitation, and in an effort to stifle these movements, they began militarizing the African continent by: aiding Portugal in oppressing the peoples’ anti-colonial struggles in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique; arming and equipping apartheid South Africa to oppress the local population and launch an attack on neighboring countries’ liberation movements; and cooperate with the CIA to assassinate Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. These are among many other fascist actions by the alliance.
NATO’s terrorist imperialism is entrenched in its founding documents that sought to create a break between internationalist solidarity between the people of the Global South, especially African and Asian solidarity. When Nasser, Nehru, Tito and Nkrumah worked closely to create strong political bonds between Asian and African countries’ liberation movements in the 1950s, NATO saw this as a “threat of Communist-nationalist alliance against the West.” The Afro-Asian solidarity front was then attacked and smeared by NATO propaganda to cause division by: “ignoring the movement or, at most, harassing it, e.g., by obstructing the holding of conferences and unfavorable publicity” and when African countries met in Accra to discuss the notion of “African personality” it was thought that it is great to magnify the specific and overcome the general when it comes to national identity. In other words, NATO propaganda supported this discourse to highlight the differences between the concept and zeitgeist of the Afro-Asian bloc to wreak division within the movement. A policy of balkanization by NATO powers has always been central to its plan for a continued domination.
Let us consider NATO’s first operation in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the destruction of Yugoslavia. The case of Yugoslavia speaks to the barbaric history of the alliance, showing how NATO is a threat to any country that does not abide by the diktats of U.S.-led imperialism.
Yugoslavia was a country that sat at the forefront of the Non-Aligned Movement, supporting national liberation struggles, and transferring technology from North to South, thus aiding in the development of many newly independent states beyond the Cold War logic. NATO bombs shattered this historical legacy, instead destroying and balkanizing the country through the active support of reactionary and obscurantist political groups, ranging from right-wing Christian fundamentalist parties to Muslim Wahabis.
From Yugoslavia in the 1990s to Libya in 2011, the goal of such military interventions is to bring countries to their knees, stripping them of their national sovereignty and political autonomy, while forcing their subordinate integration into the global economy. As the then NATO Commander, General Wesley Clark, stated, “demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure of [Yugoslavia]”. Yugoslavia was balkanized and reduced to smaller, docile republics with de-industrialized economies. Once pro-Western reactionary forces and puppets were installed, these entities metamorphosed into a perfect locale for the extraction of cheap minerals, overexploitation of labor, and the expansion of NATO’s military footprint.
In such campaigns, NATO also uses the most sophisticated weapons, including chemical ones, in complete disregard for the environment and its long-term, generational impact. Wherever NATO has intervened, it used depleted uranium, a carcinogenic material that resulted in skyrocketing birth defects and cancer rates (see Fallujah, Iraq for example). Since NATO knows that such terrorist crimes are committed, it forces legal parties to agree on terms that grant its personnel complete immunity from legal prosecution, while enjoying protections at the level of diplomatic missions. These are some of the clauses (Rambouillet Agreement) that Yugoslavia was forced to sign in order to end the destruction of that nation:
- NATO personnel shall be immune from any form of arrest, investigation, or detention by the authorities in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).
- NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include but not limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities required for support, training, and operations.
- NATO shall be exempt from duties, taxes, and other charges and inspections and custom regulations including providing inventories or other routine customs documentation, for personnel, vehicles, vessels, aircraft, equipment, supplies, and provision entering, exiting, or transiting the territory of the FRY in support of the Operation.
- No charges may be assessed against NATO for air navigation, landing, or takeoff of aircraft, whether government-owned or chartered. Similarly, no duties, dues, tolls or charges may be assessed against NATO ships, whether government-owned or chartered, for the mere entry and exit of ports. Vehicles, vessels, and aircraft used in support of the operation shall not be subject to licensing or registration requirements, nor commercial insurance.
- NATO personnel shall be exempt from taxation by the Parties on the salaries and emoluments received from NATO and on any income received from outside the FRY.
- NATO is granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tolls, or charges occasioned by mere use. NATO shall not, however, claim exemption from reasonable charges for specific services requested and received, but operations/movement and access shall not be allowed to be impeded pending payment for such services.
- NATO personnel and their tangible moveable property imported into, acquired in, or exported from the FRY shall be exempt from all duties, taxes, and other charges and inspections and custom regulations.
- NATO shall be allowed to import and to export, free of duty, taxes and other charges, such equipment, provisions, and supplies as NATO shall require for the Operation, provided such goods are for the official use of NATO or for sale to NATO personnel. Goods sold shall be solely for the use of NATO personnel and not transferable to unauthorized persons.
It is not surprising that, when leaders from various countries traveled to Washington in order to participate in the Summit, they did not end up reflecting on how NATO should confront its long legacy of terrorism, criminality and impunity. On the contrary, the past provided a useful lesson for the present decline of imperialism: they argue that NATO terrorism should expand further, pillaging the world.
A Criminal Agenda for the Future
In recent years, NATO has been expanding far beyond the North Atlantic. One of the mechanisms used to justify its global expansion happens through the designation of reactionary leaderships of countries in the Global South as Major Non-NATO Allies. Via this process, 20 countries have so far joined this terrorist military alliance and, most recently, Kenya joined the notorious list. By intentionally disregarding the national sovereignty and developmental autonomy of other countries, NATO sees this process of expansion as normal and healthy for the governance of the planet, as it happened in the case of the Baltic countries and those belonging to the former Warsaw Pact. However, should any country raise doubts about such activities or—even more daringly—ask NATO to stop its expansion and provide security guarantees, then the propaganda machine is activated. Each of the countries that did so, like Russia, immediately became framed as authoritarian, dictatorial regimes and a threat to global security—that is, a threat to the limitless expansion of NATO. These were the conditions that led to the war in Ukraine, which has also been one of the key points in the agenda of the 2024 Summit. Let us break down the major directions that NATO aims to consolidate and expand:
1. NATO in Ukraine
NATO countries agreed to launch the NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine, a logistics hub in Germany, with facilities set up to train Ukrainian forces and coordinate transfer of equipment to the frontline, coupled with a forty billion euros financial pledge for Ukraine next year.
2. Consolidating War Economies
Part of the Summit was dedicated to consolidating NATO countries’ economies into militarized ones, thus seeking various measures to grow investment in the military industry. At present, many NATO countries contribute 2% of their GDP to the organization. and so it was agreed to “removing barriers to trade and investment” and let the free market reign over the working masses of these countries. To justify these measures, the propaganda machine rushed to state that such investments are being delivered to Ukraine to fend off the looming imperialist ambitions of Putin’s Russia. However, it was U.S. Secretary of State Blinken himself who repudiated this unquestioned truth that the liberal-nazi propaganda of the West keeps repeating. He said that the hundreds of billions being given to Ukraine actually do not end up there; rather they stay in the U.S. economy to produce more weapons locally—essentially, the billions of dollars bills signed by Biden and U.S. Congress are handed to the likes of Lockheed Martin and other weapons companies. NATO countries will be spending 2% of GDP on buying American weapons —1000 patriot missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles worth $700 million, and 850 aircraft (e.g. F35s). In other words, this militarized industrialization is engineered to serve imperialism and the forceful expansion of NATO, and works directly against the interests of the working masses.
3. Expansion in the South
Just like the Monroe Doctrine of the U.S. that viewed Central and South America as the US’s southern neighborhoods, NATO began adopting the same language in the 2022 Madrid Summit. It designated Northern Africa as its southern neighborhood to give legitimacy to any military practices it conducts in the region. During the recent Summit, NATO prided itself in expanding its offices from Kuwait and Iraq to a new reactionary regime in the region, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan . “The Office, acting as a representative office, will bring NATO and Jordan closer, by enhancing political dialogue and practical cooperation… thus contributing to a better shared understanding of the national and regional context”. The revolutionary masses understand this move very well. The reactionary regime in Amman is, in fact, enabling genocide, protecting the Zionist entity, and remaining very obedient to U.S. imperialism. The latter aspect is exemplified in how the airspace of the Kingdom was used by the U.S. Air Force in intercepting Iran’s barrage in April after Iran’s retaliation for the Zionist bombing of its consulate in Damascus. While Jordan has been praised for its reactionary and functional role in protecting imperialism and Zionism, it is now also granted the possibility to cooperate more deeply in the terrorist schemes of global NATO.
4. NATO in Australasia
The propaganda machine of NATO is claiming that adversarial nations are getting closer, yearning imperialist desires for conquest. As the liberal-Nazi litany goes: Russia moved westward towards Ukraine, China is building infrastructure outside of eastern Asia, and so on. At the same time, the Alliance makes sure to avoid revealing its expansion—even before 2022—to other regions of the world, such as the Pacific. In September 2021, the U.S., UK and Australia made the AUKUS agreement to base nuclear submarines in the region, close to China. This provocative measure was condemned by China and many anti-war activists, calling it hyper-imperialism . NATO, nonetheless, is determined to provide the major bases for global terrorism against the working masses of the world, and slowly expand them. From Non-NATO Major Allies to Partnership in the Indo-Pacific, NATO no longer includes just Japan, but it is calling on other Trojan Horses of Imperialism , such as the Republic of Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
5. Expanding the List of Hostile Countries—China, Russia, Iran, DPRK and Belarus
An ever-expanding NATO requires an endless expansion of the list of adversarial countries. When the war in Ukraine is not turning in NATO’s favor, despite the billions of dollars being spent and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted, it is important to distract the masses and shift blame on other countries. In this regard, NATO’s discourse is no different from the U.S. Foreign Policy establishment, as both designate countries as enemies. For instance, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s speech is indistinguishable from any official from the U.S. State Dept, where he said :
China has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine… Other authoritarian states such as Iran and North Korea are also supporting Russia’s war… This makes it even more important that we work closely with our like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific… These are all important steps because we see all too clearly that what happens in Europe matters for Asia, and what happens in Asia matters for Europe. And this more dangerous world, we must stand together to defend our shared security interests and uphold our shared values.
By arrogantly posing themselves as a bastion of security and democracy, NATO then moves to blame the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Belarus as conspirators that seek to challenge NATO’s hegemony.
However, the revolutionary masses of the world realize that any attempt to frame China, Iran, Belarus, and DPRK as enabling Russia’s so-called ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine is an ahistorical and politically blind statement. First, these countries have had historic relations with Russia, which predate February 24, 2022. Second, when Europe was interstitially decoupling from Russia with sanctions and isolations since 2014, Russia moved East, looking for more reliable partners and allies with whom it could trade and cooperate. Third, these allies do not weaponize their power to unleash coercive economic measures based on the leadership of the countries. Instead, they forge people-to-people relations that withstand change in leadership. As such, when war and border skirmishes break out in their respective territories, the nature of these relations is not altered. Criminality always follows arrogance. This explains why NATO not only feels entitled to establish the rules but also expects that everyone must abide by the same diplomatic standards. While the collective West is supported by powerful global currencies that can be weaponized as sanctions at a whim, Global South countries continue relations and use peace talks and diplomacy to solve their issues. Interestingly, China proposed a peace plan for the Ukraine war. What did the west or NATO propose? Shall we consider the summit, where only one party of the two warring sides was present, as an effort aiming to restore peace? Are U.S. bombs being sent to Israel that kill, maim and mutilate Palestinians the work of diplomacy? The arrogant behavior of NATO makes it the most aggressive, and warmongering entity ever existing. NATO is a terrorist organization, a threat to global peace.
What to expect from NATO?
In some African countries, you see people supporting Putin, supporting what Putin is doing in Donbass. Saying, “Putin has saved Donbass. Now he will come to Africa and Save us”. What kind of intellectual process is behind this kind of attitude?
When Josep Borrell rhetorically asked why many people in Africa are rejecting NATO’s war against Russia, he ended up claiming that this must be the result of Russian propaganda. We have now become accustomed to the racist remarks of European officials since it was not so long ago that Borrell had compared the African continent to a jungle that could threaten the garden of Europe. While the possibility that Africans might have first-hand experiences of NATO’s terrorist nature is not even contemplated, everyone is expected to believe that NATO is fighting for the freedom of humanity. Imperialism is a rational process bent on exploiting the working masses of the world. To do so, it has to create the necessary ideological grounds that bring the masses to support endless military spending while accepting worse living conditions and less access to social services. Hence, we must expect that NATO is going to fight an ideological war in order to justify its terrorist policies, relying on all means, including think tanks, academics, media outlets, and so on. This war is only going to expand more aggressively, as imperialism enters a historical state of decline.
Unsurprisingly, former military commanders, NATO generals, and CEOs of weapons manufacturing companies are recruited by these pro-NATO think-tanks to produce a wealth of ideas via reports, op-eds, exposés, etc., that manufacture consent and create a buy-in from the masses. For instance, the aforementioned NATO commander, Wesley Clarke, who called for the destruction of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, now serves on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council . A day before the NATO Summit, he penned an article calling for exactly those resolutions that eventually were formulated, i.e., the NATO-fication of the globe.
Since the Summit declared the protection of “defense-critical supply chains”, it is expected that NATO will expand its resource warfare toward countries of the Global South. Like Bolivia’s 2019 coup attempt , and Peru’s 2022 coup , all these meddling operations aim to turn these countries into amenable places for resource extraction and neoliberal diktats. Hence, the revolutionary masses of the world must be wary of these developments and equip themselves militarily and ideologically to question the propaganda showered upon them to justify NATO upcoming wars. The road to NATO-led destruction starts with Borrell-like racist statements, then turns into foreign-funded color revolutions. We should not also buy into TikTok videos of right-wing personalities who are now bashing NATO for what it did, for instance, to Libya. Such statements against NATO terrorism are only functional to discredit those who greenlighted those military interventions, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton . They want to convince us that imperialism can be reduced to a partisan issue, one between Republicans and Democrats. However, the end of imperialism will not take place via the ballot box, and no change of administration in the U.S. will lead us to that point. Both parties are imperialist and both will militarize the world and produce propaganda against multipolarity and anti-imperialism.
Against what Borrell says, or his future replacement, former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, will say about the mental capacities and intellectual rigor of the revolutionary masses of the world, we must persist in rejecting NATO and equipping ourselves with anti-imperialist zeitgeist—financial, military and ideological. These are not acts of mental depravity, or Russian disinformation strategies. These are political and economic necessities to fend ourselves from destruction, and guarantee our national sovereignty and mutual prosperity.
Essam Elkorghli is a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He researches Libya’s modern political history and contemporary imperialism in education. He is a labor organizer with the Graduate Employees’ Organization, assistant editor for Middle East Critique Journal , and a member of the Global Pan African Movement .
Matteo Capasso is on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @capassomat