NATO and the Long War on the Third World
NATO and the Long War on the Third World
NATO and the Long War on the Third World.pdf
Fascism is rearing its head, and fresh crosshairs are being painted on nations seeking to embark on the path of sovereign development. In this way, the counterrevolutionary drive of the old Cold War is carried forward into a new century, once again filled with promise and terror in equal measure.
In the twentieth century, the colonial counterrevolution would play out along two geographic axes. One was the war of Western nations against the cascading process of emancipation unleashed in the east. In 1917, men and women with sweaty brows and calloused hands seized power in Russia. They would achieve what no peoples had yet been able to do. They built an industrialized state that could not only defend their hard-won sovereignty, but also projected it toward those living under colonialism’s yoke. The clarion call of October would be heard around the world. For Ho Chi Minh, it shone like a “brilliant sun…over all five continents.” It opened, Mao Zedong said, “wide possibilities for the emancipation of the peoples of the world and opened up the realistic paths towards it.” Years later, Fidel Castro said that, “without the existence of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s socialist revolution would have been impossible.” The barefoot, the illiterate, the hungry, and those whose backs were strained by the plow learned that they, too, could rise up against the indignities of colonialism and win.
The establishment of a state hostile to capitalism and colonial domination was intolerable to the imperialist powers. In the first three decades of its existence, the Soviet Union was tossed from invader to invader
It is impossible to extricate Hitler’s mission from the long project of European colonialism, or the particular expression it found in U.S. settler-colonialism. Hitler openly admired how the United States had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep[s] the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” The war of extermination waged by the Nazi regime sought nothing less than the colonization of Eastern Europe and the enslavement of its people, aiming to conquer the “Wild East” just as U.S. settlers had conquered the “Wild West.” In this way, Nazism carried forward the colonial tradition against the emancipatory promise unleashed in October 1917—and for that reason, Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo would call it the first colonial counterrevolution. Germany, Hitler said in 1935, would stand as “the bulwark of the West against Bolshevism.”
The Soviet people would pay a tremendous price—one that was particularly severe in Russia. In the 1990s, Russia experienced a profound drop in living standards as public assets were captured by a bourgeoisie that quickly ingratiated itself with Western financial capital. Its GDP collapsed by 40 percent. Its industrial inputs fell by half, and real wages dropped to half of what they were in 1987. The number of poor people increased from 2.2 million in 1987–88 to 74.2 million in 1993–95—from 2 percent of the population to 50 percent in just over five years.7 Life expectancy decreased by five years for men and three years for women, and millions died under the regime of privatization and shock therapy between 1989 and 2002.8 In that time of collapse and depravity, half a million Russian women were trafficked into sexual slavery
The assault on the Soviet Union was one axis in the war against human liberation. The other would sharpen as the United States emerged as a global hegemon after the Second World War. Unconsummated on the European battlefield, the Cold War between the eastern and western nations alchemized into an epochal assault by the North against the South. From Korea to Indonesia, Afghanistan to Congo, Guatemala to Brazil, tens of millions of lives were claimed in a battle that would pit popular forces against a shape-shifting imperialism that tolerated no dissidence from its extractive drive. If the United States and its allies could not defeat the Soviet Union in direct military confrontation, they would wield extreme violence in the service of a grand strategy that, as early as 1952, sought to establish nothing “less than preponderant power.”10
As described in The Jakarta Method and Washington Bullets
If Soviet power acted as a check on U.S. belligerence, the unipolar moment inaugurated an era of impunity. The United States found itself with nearly free reign to influence or topple governments that stood opposed to it; some 80 percent of U.S. military interventions after 1946 took place after the fall of the USSR. From Afghanistan to Libya, these terrible wars served both to invigorate the militarist project in the United States and signal that dissidence would not be tolerated beyond its borders In doing so, they helped sustain a cruel balance in the capitalist world system, condemning the states of the Third World to a position of permanent underdevelopment to protect the rapaciousness of Western monopolies.11
Publicly, NATO members supported the process and reaffirmed the commitments given by James Baker to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would “not expand an inch” eastward. Germany’s Der Spiegel recently unearthed UK records from 1991 in which U.S., U.K., French, and German officials were unequivocal: “We could not…offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others.”24 But privately, the U.S. government was busy plotting its era of hegemony.
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Successive waves of NATO expansion gradually eroded the idea that a common security architecture—outside of the sphere of U.S. domination—might emerge on the European continent.25
Still, as late as 2006, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov talked about participation in a “transformed NATO” grounded in proposals for demilitarization and equal cooperation along the lines proposed under the Charter of Paris in 1990. But NATO expanded toward Russia’s borders—not with it, but against it. This expansionist policy aimed at undermining processes of regional integration that were then picking up steam.
If Western aggression pushed Russia to prioritize sovereign development, that historical process also pushed it into alignment with the broader Third World project. What was the threat of a “return to the nineties” in Russia, but the danger that the conditions for its economic sovereignty would be dismantled, producing the kinds of indignities experienced by most of the world’s nations? That, in turn, would harden U.S.-led unipolarity, undermining the capacities for meaningful multilateralism in the world system. Russia’s response has been to accelerate Eurasian integration—pursuing a vigorous relationship with China, India, and its regional neighbors—while expanding alliances with Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and other states suffocated by the knee of U.S. imperialism.
The material imperatives shared by Russia and the Third World explain the isolation of the Western powers in their war of condemnation and economic siege against Russia. While Western leaders heralded the emergence of global unity in condemning the invasion—”the European Union and the world stand with the Ukrainian people,” said Olof Skoog, the EU’s representative to the United Nations—the numbers at the UN General Assembly increasingly painted a different picture. At the emergency session to vote on a resolution on Russia’s “Aggression Against Ukraine” in March 2022, 141 nations voted in support, thirty-five abstained and five voted against. The forty countries that abstained or voted against the resolution—including India and China—collectively make up the majority of the world’s population. Half of these states were from the African continent.31
** capitalism cannot be overcome unless the arteries of imperialist accumulation are severed on a global scale.**
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What does this mean for those of us who live and organize in the imperial core? I would like to put forward three brief theses that follow from the preceding analysis:
- The revolution is already in motion. Since the first anticolonial struggles unfolded, the revolution against imperialism—or capitalism in its international dimension—has been advancing along a winding path through the Third World project. By holding the capacity to arrest the flows of imperial extraction that have made our world, the peoples of the Third World are the engines of progressive change for humanity.
- Those in the West are not the revolution’s primary protagonists. The European revolution was brutally crushed by a powerful ruling class supported by imperial plunder. Lacking state power, the left in the imperialist states cannot dictate the terms of the tectonic processes taking place, and should not try to direct them in ways that provide ideological cover for our ruling classes. Too much ground has been ceded to the imperialists in the pursuit of narrow electoral gains or parliamentary strategies. No power can be built by targeting our limited political capacities against the official enemies of our ruling classes.
- The anti-imperialist left in the West operates inside the monster. The weakness of the Western left is a mirror image of the strength of its ruling classes. At a moment when the Western bourgeoisie faces a historic challenge to its hegemony, the task is not to reassert its power through milquetoast reforms that buttress capitalism against its calamitous contradictions, but to fight for its ultimate defeat. It is an enemy we share with the majority of the world’s people and the planet we inhabit.
Our most important task, then, is to reclaim socialist anti-imperialism as a category of thought and action—working with the grain of revolutionary change rather than against it. This demands nothing less than the recovery of the political audacity we lost at the so-called end of history, when the positions of global socialism retreated and the imperialist ideology proclaimed itself to be as inevitable as oxygen. History has not gone anywhere. Today, it calls on us to be clear in our critique of imperialism, unrelenting in our assault against it, and bold in envisioning an alternative to capitalism that answers the cries of the working classes in our societies—cries that are being met once again by the siren song of the far right.
The stakes could not be greater. Will the Third World rise, and dismantle the centuries-long grip of the colonizing powers on the vast majority of the world’s people, opening at least the possibility of a different political project on the global scale? Or will the forces of collective imperialism continue to drive us down a path of war and environmental collapse? The answer depends on our firm and determined commitment to one of these paths, which stand in dialectical opposition to one another. It depends on us studying the story of the West’s bloody inheritance, and learning from the forces that have resisted it. Built into our struggles, that knowledge holds the key to remaking our world. It enables us to build with and march in step with the vivacious and brave struggles of the Third World against the fading grip of the ruling classes of the collective West. We cannot answer the cries of humanity if we snatch what we eat from the starving.
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