It’s an aggressive, expansionist nuclear and military alliance

By Kate Hudson

This month’s Queen’s Speech pledged to honour the NATO commitment to spend at least two percent of national income on defence. This vast sum of money, demanded by the US — and backed up by threats from President Trump — includes UK spending on Trident and its replacement.

Of the many statements in the speech, no doubt this one will be little commented on. Few people really get how negative and destructive NATO’s role in the world is, and even people who are opposed to nuclear weapons can be misled into thinking that NATO is a defensive alliance. If it was ever that, those days are long gone.

In reality, NATO is an aggressive, expansionist nuclear and military alliance, and it plays an increasingly dangerous global role. It’s still in Afghanistan 18 years on and is expanding its reach into Latin America and Africa, as well as through its alliances into Asia, Australasia and the Pacific.

We have a major opportunity to raise public awareness about this, as the next NATO Heads of State Summit is taking place on 3rd and 4th December in London. Donald Trump will be one of those participating.

CND, as part of the international No to War – No to NATO network, is helping to organise a counter-summit on Saturday 30th November, for in-depth discussion of the many issues surrounding NATO, as well as the alternatives we are putting forward. We are also organising a protest on Tuesday 3rd December, when the Queen will be receiving Trump and others at Buckingham Palace for a State Banquet.

The counter-summit, entitled The New World Disorder, takes place at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church in central London, and brings together a range of international speakers in highly topical sessions, including NATO and the new cold war; NATO goes global; Oil, War and the Middle East; Climate Change and militarisation, and much more.

For a US perspective on current challenges we’ll hear from Medea Benjamin from Codepink and Pat Elder from Civilian Exposure; from Europe we’ll be joined by Arielle Denis from France, and Reiner Braun from Germany, as well as parliamentarians and activists addressing Racism, Islamophobia and the Far-Right; and how New Technology is changing warfare.

Below is a video marking the 70th anniversary of NATO in April 2019 and previewing the planned year-end protests.

CND believes that a vital step towards global nuclear disarmament would be achieved with the removal of all US nuclear weapons from European bases. Britain should also withdraw from NATO, and all foreign military bases on British soil should be closed. NATO should not be expanded but rather disbanded and the influence, resources and funding of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) extended towards a nuclear-free, less militarised and therefore more secure Europe.

What is NATO?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is a nuclear-armed military alliance which is an obstacle to a peaceful world and global nuclear disarmament. It currently comprises 29 member states, including the United Kingdom. NATO was first established during the Cold War, and since its inception has expanded both its sphere of influence and the scope of its activity, destabilising international relationships as it does so.

How the alliance developed

NATO was founded in 1949, in the early years of the Cold War, by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK and the USA. The Warsaw pact was established in response by the then Soviet Union and its allies in 1955. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined NATO, followed by Spain in 1982. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but NATO was not. Rather than scaling back its global military presence, the US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. As the countries of eastern Europe embraced free market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into its sphere of influence via NATO. This would prove to be an effective strategy, as witnessed by the support of those countries for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The 1990s saw NATO developing its regional cooperation forums and inviting new members to join the alliance. In March 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were all admitted as full members. Ten days later they found themselves at war with their neighbour Yugoslavia, as part of NATO’s illegal bombing campaign. But developments at that time were not limited to expanding its membership. At NATO’s fiftieth anniversary conference in Washington in April 1999, a new ‘Strategic Concept’ was adopted. This moved beyond NATO’s previous defensive role to include ‘out of area’ – in other words offensive – operations, anywhere on the Eurasian landmass.

In March 2004, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to NATO – not only former Warsaw Pact members, but also former Soviet republics in the case of the Baltic states. In 2009, Albania and Croatia also became members. Montenegro was confirmed as the 29th member in 2017. Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are also in negotiations to join the alliance. This scale of expansion has contributed to international tension as Russia sees itself increasingly surrounded by US and NATO bases. The increasing NATO presence in the region has been a contributory factor to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

NATO has recently exacerbated the situation by announcing new bases in eastern Europe. Deployments – including British troops – arrived in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland during 2017. In addition, the NATO Response Force was expanded in 2014 to include a Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, with an ability to deploy at two days’ notice. NATO has also opened a training centre in Georgia and will support the reform of Ukraine’s military.

Out of area activity

A US drive for global domination through military influence was most notable in Afghanistan. NATO assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2003, marking NATO’s first deployment outside Europe or North America. While NATO officially ended its mission in Afghanistan in 2014, it has since launched a new ‘non-combat Resolute Support’ operation, agreeing in 2017 to increase the number of troops in the country to 16,000.

NATO has also undertaken operations in Libya and the Horn of Africa over the last few years. At its 2018 summit in Brussels, NATO even agreed to develop an overarching NATO Space Policy, extending the reach of the alliance still further.

Global reach?

NATO adopted a new Strategic Concept at its 2010 summit, entitled Active Engagement, Modern Defence. It recommitted to an interventionist military agenda that set back the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament. This included an expansion of its area of work to ‘counterterrorism, cyber-security, and the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons’. The summit also agreed to integrate the US missile defence system with a European theatre missile defence programme under the auspices of NATO.

At its 2012 summit, NATO declared that it had taken successful steps towards establishing a missile defence system. It also announced developments in its air command and control system, as well as plans for improved and more integrated armed forces. Further developments in the system were announced at the 2016 summit. At the Wales summit in 2014 a statement was made that cyber-attacks on any NATO members could warrant a collective response, expanding the scope of circumstances under which military action could be authorised. This is particularly worrying because of the difficulty in determining the source of cyber-attacks and technical evidence of them is rarely shared or clarified.

The NATO summit in Poland in 2016 demonstrated that the alliance is set to continue to promote military intervention and posturing as the way to resolve international differences. Precisely at a time when what is needed between the alliance and Russia is cool-headed diplomacy and a thawing of relations, NATO is instead taking destabilising and provocative steps the other way.

There seems no doubt that there is a long term plan for maintaining and extending NATO’s global influence.

Military Spending

NATO expects its members to spend 2% of national income on defence every year. NATO should not be in a position to impose spending guidelines on independent nations, which should be determining their own funding priorities based on genuine need.

Only five NATO countries were able to meet this target in 2017, one of which was the UK. But this didn’t stop US President Donald Trump from calling on NATO members to actually spend 4% of their GDP on defence in a shock announcement on the opening day of the 2018 summit in Brussels. Trump even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance if members didn’t spend more (although this would need to be approved by the Senate and Congress).

Asian Pivot

Former US President Obama’s rebalancing of US foreign policy towards Asia has undoubtedly had repercussions on NATO. This ‘pivot’ is already raising tensions and helping to militarise the Asia-Pacific region, a part of the world with four nuclear weapon states – India, Pakistan, China and North Korea. NATO’s closest partners – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – are based in the region. It remains to be seen how the election of President Donald Trump will affect this pivot, but in the early stages of his presidency, he already threatened military action in North Korea.

With more US involvement in the Asia-Pacific, NATO could follow suit and deepen its cooperation with its partners there on perceived threats such as cyber-attacks and terrorism, possibly antagonising further relations with China.

A nuclear-armed alliance

NATO is a nuclear-armed alliance and around 180 US B61 nuclear bombs are stationed in five countries across Europe – Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. There is strong opposition to these weapons, including from the governments of some of the ‘host’ nations. Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have all, unsuccessfully, called for the removal of US nuclear weapons from their countries. NATO recently restated its commitment to being a nuclear alliance and announced that the nuclear weapons under its umbrella will be upgraded to make them more usable.

NATO’s nuclear policies conflict with the legal obligations of the signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Articles 1 and 2 of the NPT forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states, but US/NATO nuclear weapons in Europe are located in non-nuclear weapons states. The alliance rejects a policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and maintains that nuclear capabilities remains a core element of its strategy.

The UK’s nuclear weapons system has been assigned to NATO since the 1960s. Ultimately, this means that the UK’s nuclear weapons could be used against a country attacking (or threatening to attack) one of the NATO member states since an attack on one NATO member state is seen as being an attack on all member states.

Expansion into Latin America

NATO and Colombia concluded a partnership agreement in 2018, ‘with a view to strengthening dialogue and cooperation to address security challenges’. This despite the fact that the Latin American states and the Caribbean are a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone under the Tlatelolco Treaty, agreed in 1967.

There has been angry rejection of the NATO agreement from some of Colombia’s neighbours, with Venezuela accusing Colombia of inviting ‘external factors with nuclear capability to gain a foothold’.

2019 Summits: 70th anniversary

The dramatic announcement by Trump at the 2018 summit mentioned earlier in this briefing was not reflected in the gathering’s official Summit Declaration. Instead, it focused on addressing what the alliance perceives to be the ‘dangerous, unpredictable, and fluid security environment’. Many of the points focus on increasing NATO’s preparedness if military action becomes necessary.

2019 saw two NATO summits: foreign ministers gathered in Washington in April – the 70th anniversary of NATO’s founding; and heads of state will meet in London in December. As President Trump is likely to be present, the London NATO summit will be a crucial opportunity for our movement to oppose Trump’s nuclear warmongering and highlight the dangerous role NATO, as a nuclear alliance, plays in raising international tensions.

CND will be working with British and international partners to co-ordinate protests in London.

Kate Hudson is the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Her article first appeared in the October issue of Campaign. No to NATO is also available on the CND website. All photos courtesy CND.