• Monthly Review
  • Monthly Review Press
  • Climate & Capitalism
  • Money on the Left
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Mastadon
MR Online
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact/Submission
  • Browse
    • Recent Articles Archive
    • by Subject
      • Ecology
      • Education
      • Imperialism
      • Inequality
      • Labor
      • Literature
      • Marxism
      • Movements
      • Philosophy
      • Political Economy
    • by Region
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Australasia
      • Europe
      • Global
      • Middle East
    • by Category
      • Art
      • Commentary
      • Interview
      • Letter
      • News
      • Newswire
  • Monthly Review Essays
 | Goyen Chen Know Love Know Peace No Love No Peace 2022 | MR Online

The people want peace and progress, not war and waste: The Twenty-Fourth Newsletter (2025)

By Vijay Prashad (Posted Jun 13, 2025)

Originally published: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research on June 12, 2025 (more by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)  |
Inequality, Movements, State Repression, StrategyGlobalNewswireNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald Trump, Tricontinental Newsletter

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Goyen Chen Know Love Know Peace No Love No Peace 2022

Goyen Chen, Know Love, Know Peace. No Love, No Peace, 2022.

On 24 and 25 June, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) will strut around the streets of The Hague for their annual summit—the first since Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency and the first under new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. On 13 March, Rutte visited Trump in the Oval Office, where he praised the U.S. president on a number of fronts, including the war in Ukraine. Rutte ended the meeting by telling Trump that he was looking forward to hosting him in The Hague, his ‘hometown’, and was eager to ‘work together to ensure that [the NATO summit] will be a splash, a real success projecting American power on the world stage’.

There are thirty-two full members of NATO, thirty from Europe and two from North America. The United States is only one among them, yet, as Rutte made clear in his statement, it is the one that defines NATO and is but a vehicle for the projection of U.S. power. There should be no doubt about that fact. It is precisely for this reason that the idea of the U.S. leaving NATO—as Trump threatened to do if the Europeans did not increase their military spending—is moot. NATO is the United States.

Tricontinental Institute for Social Research Untitled 2025

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Untitled, 2025.

From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the No Cold War collective, and our European partners at the Zetkin Forum for Social Research comes our June dossier, NATO: The Most Dangerous Organisation on Earth. The title is bold but not hyperbolic. It reflects the facts before us. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has conducted some of the most lethal wars on the planet and now threatens us with the unthinkable possibility of nuclear conflict. The dossier provides ample evidence of this. Here, we simply note two of the alliance’s more egregious acts over the past decades:

  • It was NATO that dismembered Yugoslavia in 1999.
  • It was NATO that destroyed the Libyan state in 2011.

It is erroneous to see NATO as an autonomous actor. NATO, as Rutte so eloquently stated, is an instrument of ‘projecting American power on the world stage’. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has used NATO to incorporate Eastern Europe into a pliable set of states subordinate to its interests. When the European Union expanded eastward and sought to build autonomous European institutions, NATO came along and ensured that the United States would be the engine of any European expansion. One might be forgiven for having forgotten the warning that came not from Russia’s current President Vladimir Putin but from his decidedly pro-US predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who warned during NATO’s 1995 bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, ‘this is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. … The game of war could burst out across the whole of Europe’. In 1990, the Soviet Union reluctantly agreed to the reunification of Germany and its entry into NATO under assurances that the alliance would not expand eastward (the U.S. also used the move to ‘keep the Germans down’ by keeping them anchored within NATO structures). But there was no agreement that the U.S. could use NATO as an instrument to project power right up to Russia’s borders. Nor was there any mandate for NATO to be used in far-off theatres like the South China Sea to confront the People’s Republic of China under the pretext of freedom of navigation and regional stability. NATO—against the self-interest of its European member states—has been drawn into confrontations against Russia and China that are entirely about the U.S. wanting to shackle its ‘near-peer rivals’. These confrontations have nothing to do with European security: neither Russia nor China have threatened Europe, with Russia repeatedly reiterating that its war in Ukraine has everything to do with threats on its borders and China emphasising that it is a defensive power with no aggressive intentions regarding Europe.

Goyen Chen War Only Brings Pain 2022

Goyen Chen, War Only Brings Pain, 2022.

Before Donald Trump took office in December 2024, his transition team told European officials that the president-elect would ask NATO member states to increase their military spending to 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to the previous target of 2%. Most states would not be able to comply with this dramatic increase without deep cuts to their social expenditure (as of late 2024, Poland is the only member state that spends more than 4% of its GDP on its military—4.12% to be exact—while the United States officially spends 3.38%). U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said that while this 5% demand would not come with a deadline, ‘the United States expects every ally to step up with concrete plans, budgets, timelines, [and] deliverables to meet the 5% target and close capability gaps’.

From NATO’s founding in 1949—and even throughout the Cold War—there was no firm benchmark for military spending for member states (such as percentage of GDP). The 1952 Lisbon Agreement on NATO force levels, which set targets for the number of conventional and reserve forces, simply could not be met due to the privations in post-war Europe. In the 1970s, NATO members had to fill out a Defence Planning Questionnaire to assess national military spending efforts, but no targets could be set. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981—1989)—when the U.S. was spending around 6% of GDP on defence—questions were again raised about force level goals and defence spending, and there were calls for European members states to increase their share to as much as 4% of GDP. In the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington feared that NATO states would cut their military budgets. At the 2002 NATO Summit in Prague, alliance leaders adopted the Prague Capabilities Commitment, which once more called for the need to modernise forces in the context of the War on Terror, but no formal spending target was established.

It was not until the 2006 Riga Summit, when NATO officially endorsed the 2% target, that the first formal benchmark for military spending among member states emerged. Though pressure mounted at the 2014 Wales Summit to comply with this hitherto unmet goal, there was still no real enthusiasm for it. Trump pushed hard during his first term, suggesting that the U.S. would leave NATO if the Europeans did not increase their military spending. Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the 2% goal began to be seen—as then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said—‘not as a ceiling, but the minimum, a floor’. In anticipation of this year’s summit in The Hague, current NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that NATO members must ‘shift to a wartime mindset and turbo charge our defence production and defence spending’.

Othman Ghalmi Where Can I Find Peace 2022

Othman Ghalmi, Where Can I Find Peace, 2022.

Various European institutes and movement platforms have already begun to release documents in anticipation of the upcoming NATO summit. One is the annual report from the German Institutes of Peace and Conflict Research (Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies, Institut für Friedensforschung und Sicherheitspolitik, Institut für Entwicklung und Frieden, and the Leibniz Institut für Friedens-und Konfliktforschung), which argues that Europe must prepare for a post-US NATO by increasing its own military spending and moving toward non-lethal forms of diplomacy such as arms control and peace-building measures. This is one approach to the NATO crisis, but it suffers from two key flaws: first, it misunderstands Europe’s role in NATO by treating it as an equal partner, when NATO is in fact an instrument for the subordination of Europe to U.S. strategic aims, and second, even if member states in Europe increase their military spending to 5% of GDP, they simply do not have the capacity to do so.

The British government’s Strategic Defence Review 2025 is basically a recipe for bankruptcy. Britain simply does not have the resources to build a new ‘hybrid navy’ with ‘hybrid airwings’, provide housing for the working class, or refurbish its health care system. It is easy to write about a ‘whole-of-society’ approach but hard to find the money to build a society strained by so many afflictions. On the other hand, the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament make a perfectly reasonable case for ‘human security and common security’, as they write it in their Alternative Defence Review. They argue this can be achieved by:

  1. Prioritising diplomacy, global cooperation, and conflict prevention.
  2. Investing in health, education, climate resilience, social care, and the creation of well-paid, secure, unionised, and socially useful jobs.
  3. Significantly reducing military spending.
  4. Immediately halting arms exports to countries involved in active conflict or human rights abuses (including Israel and the Gulf States).
  5. Preparing and executing a just transition for defence-dependent workers and communities.

These are sensible, achievable goals in a world where most peoples want peace and progress, not war and waste.

Warmly,

Vijay

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.

About Vijay Prashad

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) President Donald Trump Tricontinental Newsletter
‘Christopher Hill: Life and Legacy of a Radical Historian’
Official: U.S.-Israeli deception gave Iran false security ahead of attack
  • Also by Vijay Prashad

    • Who says a chicken feather can’t fly up to Heaven?: The Twenty-Eighth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad July 11, 2025
    • The Global North lives off intellectual rents: The Twenty-Sixth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad June 27, 2025
    • Despite the pain in the World, socialism is not a distant Utopia: The Twenty-Fifth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad June 20, 2025
    • The people want peace and progress, not war and waste: The Twenty-Fourth Newsletter (2025) by Vijay Prashad June 13, 2025
  • Also By Vijay Prashad in Monthly Review Magazine

    • The Actuality of Red Africa June 01, 2024
    • Africa Is on the Move May 01, 2022
    • Preface January 01, 2022
    • Introduction January 01, 2022
    • Quid Pro Quo? October 01, 2011
    • Reclaim the Neighborhood, Change the World December 01, 2007
    • Kathy Kelly’s Chispa December 01, 2005

    Books By Vijay Prashad

    • Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective November 15, 2022
    • Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations September 16, 2020

    Monthly Review Essays

    • The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle
      Iker Suarez  | A banner at a memorial rally for victims of the 2014 massacre of migrants at Tarajal 2021 | MR Online

      Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone.[1] On June 2022, the border fence of Melilla, one of two Spanish enclaves in Morocco, was witness to a massacre that killed or disappeared over a hundred African migrants.[2]  A recent BBC investigation revealed that Greek border guards systematically repeal immigrants already on Greek […]

    Lost & Found

    • Strike at the Helm: The First Ministerial Meeting of the New Cycle of the Bolivarian Revolution
      Hugo Chávez  | Mural of Chávez in Caracas Univision | MR Online

      On October 7th, 2012, after hearing of his victory as the nation‘s candidate with 56 percent of the vote, President Hugo Chávez Frias announced from a balcony in his hometown that a new cycle was beginning the very next day, October 8th.

    Trending

    • diabetes
      China strikes Diabetes
    • John Bellamy Foster on U.S. Foreign Policy & the “New MAGA Imperialism”
      What is the Trump Doctrine? John Bellamy Foster on U.S. Foreign Policy & the “New MAGA Imperialism”
    • Chilean Communist Party leader Jeannette Jara in a photo composition with sketches of Santiago and the Chilean flag. Photo: Eduardo Ramón/El País.
      Chile: A major victory for the People and the Left, with strategic impact
    • dollars and euros background
      Dollar v Euro
    • Picture: Daderot. Public Domain
      China is not a monolith
    • Image by Caitlin Johnstone
      The Empire is a nonstop insult to our intelligence
    • Black Lives Matter protest, London 2020. Photo: Steve Eason / CC BY-NC 2.0
      Where do ideas come from? And how can they change?
    • Zohran Mamdani
      New York Times joins a White Supremacist in attacking Zohran Mamdani
    • Tony Blair at World Economic Forum 2025 / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
      Tony Blair and the disgusting capitalist fantasy for Gaza
    • Abraham Shield Plan
      The Abraham Shield: Israel’s new blueprint for regional control after Gaza

    Popular (last 30 days)

    • Airbus A330-243F cargo aircraft
      Russian and Chinese Military cargo planes shuttling weapons, missiles, supplies into Iran
    • Trump
      Mainstream media ignore Trump’s planned Office of Remigration, a term for ethnic cleansing
    • A person on a crane surveys the ruins of a bombed building, surrounded by smoke.
      The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline
    • AP Photo / IRNA/ Mostafa Qotbi
      Iran now first line of defense of BRICS and the Global South
    • Natanz, Iran
      Exclusive: Iran given advance notice as U.S. insisted attack on nuclear sites is ‘one-off’
    • Black citizenship
      The necessity of birthright citizenship for Black People
    • Climeworks CO2 capture plant under construction in Iceland.
      Can carbon dioxide removal save the climate?
    • diabetes
      China strikes Diabetes
    • Figure 2 – Credit: Matt Kenard / Declassified 2023
      The urgency of abolishing Britain’s colonial bases in Cyprus
    • A building damaged in an Israeli strike on Tehran, on 13 June 2025 (Atta Kenner/AFP)
      Exclusive: U.S. quietly sent hundreds of Hellfire missiles to Israel before Iran attack

    RSS MR Press News

    • EXCERPT: Colonial dreams, racist nightmares, liberated futures (from the introduction to A Land With A People) July 11, 2025
    • LISTEN: Public banking must be definancialized…and democratized (Socialist Register/Thomas Marois on ‘Against the Grain’) July 11, 2025
    • LISTEN: Rafael Barrett’s keen observations, blistering critiques, and anarchist politics (William Costa on ‘Against the Grain’) July 9, 2025
    • The legacy of a Sardinian original (Roses for Gramsci reviewed in ‘Counterpunch’) June 13, 2025
    • LISTEN: Gramsci’s lasting contributions (Andy Merrifield on ‘Against the Grain’) June 6, 2025

    RSS Climate & Capitalism

    • ‘Climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people’ July 9, 2025
    • Can carbon dioxide removal save the climate? June 29, 2025
    • Global heating isn’t just getting worse. It is getting worse faster. June 19, 2025
    • Ecosocialist Bookshelf, June 2025 June 17, 2025
    • 1.5 is dead: How hot will the Earth get? June 5, 2025

     

    RSS Monthly Review

    • July-August 2025 (Volume 77, Number 3) July 1, 2025 The Editors
    • A Special Issue on Communes in Socialist Construction July 1, 2025 Chris Gilbert
    • Venezuela’s Communal Project July 1, 2025 Ángel Prado
    • Socialist Communes and Anti-Imperialism: The Marxist Approach July 1, 2025 Chris Gilbert
    • The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today July 1, 2025 Prabhat Patnaik

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Creative Commons License

    Monthly Review Foundation
    134 W 29TH ST STE 706
    New York NY 10001-5304

    Tel: 212-691-2555