While Joe Biden has withdrawn from the 2024 Presidential election race, the oppressed and exploited people of the world are still made victims by two sides of the same pro-war imperialist American government.
Ultimately, both the Trump and Biden-Harris Administrations further entrenched… the US war machine. Both expanded military bases, alliances and military assistance around the world. Both expanded the US military budget and pushed forward the modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Both escalated tensions against China and Russia to pre-empt strategic competition. During the elections, the Democrats and Republicans battled out who could be the bigger war-hawk overseeing the world’s largest military chest, currently funded at $841.4 billion with an additional $32.4 billion for national security programs within the Department of Energy (DOE), and $438.0 million in defense-related activities. In Trump’s time as President, he represented the Republicans openly fascist faction of the ruling class and activated the ultra-nationalist and most rightwing currents in the US to take on more visible activity, and more escalated forms of action among both State and extra-state forces alike. Though Trump’s politically chaotic public statements about the US withdrawing from NATO and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan promoted an anti-war illusion to his populist base, Trump’s administration in 2016-2020 was responsible for missile strikes in Syria and Afghanistan, pushing for NATO countries to increase their defense spending, overseeing the drastic military build-up in the Indo-Pacific that Obama started, and illegally recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Zionist occupation state Israel. He backed coup-elected Juan Guido in Venezuela to push for further sanctions and destabilization of the nation. He further passed a nuclear posture review that broadened the circumstances under which the United States can use nuclear weapons to encompass cyberattacks. During his 2020 election campaign, Biden marketed himself as a “reasonable” Democratic alternative and response to the fascism under Trump, Biden was able to win over large sectors of progressives towards fundamentally right-wing politics under the guise of “progressive values.” Throughout his term, Biden has exposed himself through his aggressive foreign policy, heightened repression and policing within the US, and the continued worsening economic crisis which is exacerbated by the neoliberal policies under his administration among other things. In the midst of the massive upsurge in global solidarity for Palestine, Biden was brought to court for complicity in genocide. “Genocide Joe” Biden traveled to Israel after the start of the Israeli genocidal war, provided the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with huge quantities of munitions, refused to publicly call for an indefinite ceasefire, and vetoed UN resolutions it opposed while openly calling himself a Zionist. This all reflects the president’s strongly held personal beliefs on the need to support the Jewish state and the idea that public support for Israel gives America greater behind-the-scenes leverage. VP Kamala Harris herself has a concerning pro-war record. Exposing her own genocidal support of Israel through US military aid and diplomatic support, she stated after October 7th, “our support for Israel’s security is ironclad, and we stand with the people of Israel in defense against these attacks.” She has reiterated the U.S. commitment to the transatlantic NATO alliance with America's European partners and earlier this year, she vowed the U.S. would support Ukraine's fight for "as long as it takes, showing that she’d continue Biden’s practice of shredding any Ukrainian peace deal brought to the table. On a visit to Taiwan, the Philippines and other Indo-Pacific states, she stressed what she called the United States' "enduring engagement" in Asia, hitting on previous administration talking points about ensuring an "open and free" Indo-Pacific region, and "freedom of navigation" in the South China Sea. What that really means for the people of the region is more corporate land grabs and militarization to protect them. Harris herself has a political career predicated on the criminalization of poor working-class Black people in the Bay Area of California, as attorney general. She supported inmate slave labor, criminalization of poor parents over truancy, an increase in Black incarceration, and expressed support of the death penalty. We need a stronger anti-war movement to fight against whichever faction of the ruling class takes power in the White House in November. Our task is to take up the calls of the world's people against US military funding, US military base expansion, sprawling military alliances, and war mongering by Washington. We continue to stand with the anti-militarism agenda representing these calls, not the war agenda of any Republican or Democratic candidate, and call on our movements to continue to struggle against US-led war through the elections and beyond.
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This speech was delivered by the Resist US-Led War Movement Secretariat at an event in Washington, DC, during the start of the 2024 NATO Summit. It has been modified so as to be a standalone analytical study of the current state of US-led war and how networks like the Resist US-Led War Movement can be used to build an international united front to end all wars of aggression.
This discussion begins with an overview of the current state of US-led war today, followed by an analysis of the ways that NATO is still used as the primary tool of US-Led War, and how an anti-NATO united front of the people must be formed to prevent the worst kind of destruction that modern technology is capable of in the hands of the imperialists and war profiteers. The US has already decided that it is planning for open conflict with its rival states. Its stated goals are very clear in its official documents like the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. This makes it all the more crucial for us to understand the plans being set in place to convince us, the common everyday people of the world, to accept this nightmarish scenario as inevitable. War is not inevitable if we are prepared to fight for a new social paradigm in which the root causes of conflict have been resolved through the combined struggle of the people. Let us reflect on the current status of US-led war, and how NATO plays a significant role. The US is currently waging war on three main fronts: In Europe, the US uses the NATO alliance to cement its strategy with fellow imperialist and reactionary states in the European Union and around the continent in general. This includes the most powerful Western imperialist countries making up the G7, and the so-called Eastern Flank of countries acting as a shield between the G7 powers and the borders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, NATO’s self-perceived frontier. On this front of US-led war, the G7 is the brain, NATO is the brawn and Russia is the chief rival. This has altered the face of Europe, with military spending skyrocketing and new bases being built from the Mediterranean islands, to the Carpathian basin, to the Baltic Sea. This year’s military exercise Steadfast Defender mobilized over 90,000 troops in the largest European military drills since the Cold War. With Sweden and Finland’s ascension to NATO, the US-led camp gains access to the vital Swedish airbase of Gotland and thus secures the entire Baltic for NATO and cuts off Russia’s Baltic Fleet at Kaliningrad, while the recent allowing of US troops to station at dozens of new outposts along Finland’s eastern border puts combined NATO troops within miles of being able to invade Russia’s only highway on the Kola Peninsula and cut off its Northern Fleet port at Murmansk. Sweden and Finland push Russia further into a corner by NATO, and this makes Ukraine that much more of a flashpoint where over 320,000 Ukrainians and Russians are suspected to have lost their lives. The NATO Summit declared Ukraine’s future in the alliance to be “irreversible,” pushing this iron-hot tension to explosive levels. In West Asia, Israel and the Gulf Monarchies make up the US’s preferred alliances in its war drive against Iran. The US relies on Israel’s ideology of Zionism to push its expansionist agenda and wage attacks against Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and the Horn of Africa to keep these countries weakened. Palestine pays the harshest price with over 75 years of occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide to keep Israel, the US’s favored war dog, forever combat ready. The Gulf Monarchies of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait form a backbone of military bases crucial for US positioning. The ultimate dream of wedding Israel and the Gulf Monarchies diplomatically has met lukewarm response, with the Abraham Accords of a few years ago tying UAE and Bahrain to the Zionist entity but failing to secure the gargantuan Saudi kingdom, and the genocide against Palestine has dashed these hopes further. Nevertheless, the US continues to wield these two alliances against its primary rival in the region, Iran, which it has subjected to assassinations, cyber warfare and a massive sanctions regime. NATO remains a key player in this region too, with NATO members sending warships to protect Israel as it wages its genocide and positioning of NATO technology to fortify the US’s allies that surround key oil and gas fields. The US’s most active front of war is the Indo-Pacific where it actively prepares for open conflict with China and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Japan, the Pacific member of the G7, has volunteered as the clear imperialist partner of US-led war, changed its constitution to rearm its military to exponential proportions, and solidified trilateral military agreements between the US on the one hand, and South Korea and the Philippines on the other hand. The so-called QUAD alliance with Japan, Australia, the US and India seeks to win India away from economic and military partnerships with China and Russia, which it has failed to do. The Hiroshima Accord of 2023 stations British aircraft carriers, from a NATO country, in Japan for regular use. The 2023 Washington Declaration between the US and South Korea stations US nuclear armed submarines in South Korea for the first time in 40 years. New US bases and missile systems placed in the Philippines solidify the country and its people as a shield and launching pad in the so-called First Island Chain, a chain of military bases and missile systems along the major Pacific archipelagos extending from the East Asian continental mainland coast. Australia becomes a storage site for NATO technology, with new nuclear submarines from the US and UK placed under the AUKUS deal while surveillance technology from the US, UK and Canada is utilized as part of the Five Eyes alliance. This combined front, this “Pacific NATO” as this iron web of military alliances has been called, enacts some of the most intense military exercises such as the Rim of the Pacific happening as we speak on US occupied Hawai’i, mock “decapitation” exercises over the Korean Peninsula simulating invasions of the DPRK, and even urban warfare training in Taiwan, the US’s most sought-after resources for control of semiconductor markets and military positioning just miles from China. The NATO Summit Indo-Pacific forum exposed just how intertwined these alliances are to US-led war strategy. This is the chess board the US has set with its allies and puppet states to wage all-out war against the up and coming states it sees as its most existential rivals. One only has to look geographically at the three most dedicated trade and infrastructure deals the Biden administration has worked to bring into place to see the economic incentive in breaking the rise of these rivals: the European Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the India-Middle East Corridor, and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Prosperity. These economic agreements and development plans are the latest attempt for the US and its allies to break open new markets and exploit the people and resources of these countries. To maintain its hold on resources for technological war preparations against these three fronts, the US wages constant counterinsurgency wars against people and nations standing in its way all around the world, and NATO ensures its ability to do so. In Africa, the Americas, South Asia and Oceania, the US and its allies continue their resources wars by destabilizing nations like Haiti, the Congo, Sudan, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, New Caledonia, and many others. Whispers of Argentina and possibly even Kenya joining NATO should warn us of how far the US is willing to go to hold onto its dying and desperate empire. NATO goes far beyond the North Atlantic. NATO is everywhere, and NATO is first and foremost a tool for counterrevolution. This preparation for all-out war that NATO is laying the plans for this week in Washington, DC, is of course not just all-out war on China, Russia, Iran or the DPRK. It will be an all-out war on all of humanity. In fact, the people of the colonies and semi-colonies and the poor and working class people of all capitalist and imperialist countries are experiencing the impacts of rural bombings, paramilitary violence and abductions, disappearances, police violence, forced migration and border militarization, and more surveillance than ever before. Especially impacted are rural and peasant communities in the countryside and working class people whose entire livelihood is uprooted by war. Women and children make up 75% of displaced people in conflict areas where they face increased gender based violence, experience food insecurity, human trafficking and displacement. Preparations for war therefore amount to a state of war for the masses, even if some are experiencing it more than others based on which part of the US’s global military chessboard they happen to live. But these very conditions of suffering and oppression, essentially, are the basis for building our broad, international united front against war and militarism. The reality of the crisis and desires for a just peace are the biggest drivers that push people to struggle against the system that oppresses them. And if no country is untouched, then we can find unity with the people in each country in the fight for a just and lasting peace, a peace beyond the imperialist system that unendingly keeps US-led war alive. The people must be awakened to see their conditions of war and militarism as not individual experiences, but collective experiences. Only then can we raise their consciousness to see that collective suffering can be solved with collective, systemic change. We must raise the militancy of the people, in each of our respective countries, to fight and win their rights and achieve economic, social, political and environmental justice. By gathering in teach-ins, forums, or other educational settings, we are able to share the experiences of our mass organizing against war and militarism in our countries and how we are coming closer to breaking the hold imperialism has via our own countries’ ruling classes. It is even possible to collaborate on long-term and globally-reaching campaigns together, such as this one against the 75th NATO Summit, of which Resist US-Led War was a proud member of the Resist NATO Coalition with other organizations, putting our efforts together to unite and organize the people against the root cause of NATO and US-Led War itself, the imperialist system. Resist US-Led War is a network of peoples’ organizations and so puts the biggest emphasis on organizing a mass movement of the people as the key solution that will change this war-ridden society. While people’s organizations can and should form a united front with whatever institutions and states that make sense at a given time and circumstance in the anti-imperialist struggle, we still assert that it is the people themselves that are the true makers of history and the most important factor of the movement for just peace. The people may seem devastatingly desperate today, but it is US imperialism that is desperate. This 75th NATO Summit is an act of desperation. Unlike the war profiteers, the people have a world to win. The people have something that’s worth fighting for. NATO just concluded its annual Summit in Washington DC. While celebrating its 75th anniversary of “service to the world,” NATO issued its 38-point Washington Declaration. Point by point, the declaration outlines NATO’s most aggressive and provocative strategy yet for fulfilling its three core tasks of “deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security.” Contradicting its self-declared title as a defensive alliance, NATO shows how in pursuing its three core tasks it is actually gearing up for war on three named fronts–against Russia, against Iran, and against China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)–and making the world more unsafe, unstable and violent for the people of the world.
Deterrence and defense: NATO-speak for nuclear build-up, massing troops and weapons in member countries, and spending billions to modernize weapons NATO says that “Nuclear deterrence is the cornerstone of Alliance security,” making the twisted argument that security is dependent on the very weapons that pose the greatest annihilative threat to life on the planet. With the Washington Declaration, NATO continues to push its members to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals. Hypocritically, NATO calls for the complete denuclearization of North Korea and for the prevention of the building of a nuclear weapon by Iran. NATO’s modernization doesn’t stop at nuclear weapons, but also “further accelerating the modernisation of our collective defense,” which includes “battle decisive munitions and air and missile defense… new technologies and innovation...air surveillance capability… Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear defense capabilities required to effectively operate in all environments.” Is it any wonder that NATO this week conducted the Defence Industry Forum with special guests from weapons corporations and launched the “Drone Coalition,” signing a new Memorandum of Understanding pledging $48.8 million to supply one million drones to Ukraine? As NATO continues to identify Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security,” it has ramped up “more frequent and large-scale training and exercises,...including through Steadfast Defender 24, NATO’s largest military exercise in a generation,” that mobilized over 90,000 troops. The military drills have also extended into the Arctic, with NATO wasting no time in involving its newest members, Finland and Sweden, by conducting exercise Nordic Response with 20,000 personnel including from the two countries this year. Modernization and expansion come at a cost–literally. NATO boasts that the “Allies are stepping up: defence expenditure by European Allies and Canada has grown by 18% in 2024, the biggest increase in decades. They are also investing more in modern capabilities, and increasing their contributions to NATO operations, missions, and activities.” Altogether, NATO members poured a total of $1.34 trillion into military spending just in 2023. When these countries spend more of their budgets on the military, they have less for their people’s basic needs, leading to more wealth inequality, more instability, and less security. Instead of crisis prevention and management, NATO incites and prolongs crises NATO claims it “does not seek confrontation, and poses no threat to Russia.” But NATO was founded from the start to contain Russia, relentlessly adding more member countries closer and closer to Russia’s borders after promises to not do so, and enabling the US to use existing or build new bases to surround Russia. With the addition of Finland and Sweden into its ranks, the alliance is positioned literally on Russia’s doorstep and covers the entire Arctic region with the exception of Russia itself. Although Russia has unequivocally stated that it would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the Washington Declaration makes crystal clear that NATO is dead set on crossing that red line by saying, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO…we will continue to support [Ukraine] on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” The stubborn insistence that Ukraine will join NATO preempts any chance for a diplomatic solution. But the longer the US-NATO proxy war continues, the more money NATO members will continue to shell out to keep providing military equipment, assistance and training to Ukraine; the just-inked “Pledge of Long-Term Security Assistance for Ukraine” commits a minimum of Eu40 billion annually. NATO claims “Terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, is the most direct asymmetric threat to the security of our citizens and to international peace and prosperity.” But it is NATO with the US leading the charge which has manufactured terrorist threats and used the War on Terror doctrine to wage state terrorism on the people and counter-insurgency on legitimate liberation movements. It was to come to the “collective defense” of the US that Article 5 of the NATO pledge was first invoked to draw NATO into the invasion and over 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. Cooperative security means new webs of military cooperation and big bucks for the war profiteers NATO has its tentacles in every region of the world, using special designations (i.e., “Global Partners”), offices and outposts (i.e., in Japan and announced to soon be in Ukraine), and cooperative agreements with dozens of countries in strategic locations. At this year’s Summit, NATO announced the opening of a new NATO office in Jordan, corresponding with its view to “foster greater security and stability in the Middle East and Africa;” announced new Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCA) between the US and Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, in the expanding Arctic frontier; and held meetings with leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, to discuss China’s continuing “challenge [to] our interests, security and values” in the Indo-Pacific. With its expansion, NATO brags that it has “undertaken the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense in a generation. We continue to enhance NATO’s deterrence and defense against all threats and challenges, in all domains, and in multiple strategic directions across the Euro-Atlantic area…Providing the necessary forces, capabilities, resources, and infrastructure for our new defense plans, to be prepared for high-intensity and multi-domain collective defense.” This rhetoric could be lifted straight from the US’s own strategic defense plans for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), a sweeping campaign to create a wholly connected military, with information and forces coordinated across land, air, sea, space and cyber terrains. By the Pentagon’s own admission, JADC2 would likely have no end–meaning no end to the billions of dollars wasted on the new technology. NATO is inherently a tool to wage war for imperialism. NATO 2024’s focus on “bolstering allied defense and deterrence; support for Ukraine; and strengthening NATO's global partnerships” means war and misery for the people. As long as NATO exists, there will be no peace in the world. The only solution is for the people to resist NATO and fight for a just and lasting peace until it is achieved! |
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