NATO 2024: The Fronts of US-Led War and the Urgent Task to Build our Broad International United Front against War and Militarism

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.