Say No to NATO expansion

Editorial, Workers World, 19 March 1998

After the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved plans to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in NATO, it looks like Washington will impose this expansion on its European allies and increase the threat of war in Eastern Europe.

The United States pushed to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. The idea was to defend Western European capitalism from the working class--and to threaten pro-socialist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Only in 1955 did the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact form to counter NATO.

From that time until the early 1990s these two military blocs representing two different social systems faced off along the border of a divided Germany. NATO drew the imperialist powers behind the United States. The Warsaw Pact defended the socialist states.

For 40 years imperialist politicians and media presented NATO as a defensive pact against Soviet aggression. Then why hasn't NATO dissolved by now? There is no Warsaw Pact, no Soviet Union and no Red Army.

Instead of withering away, NATO has come even more firmly under the Pentagon's control. The U.S. government aims to use NATO to intervene militarily in Eastern Europe and the former USSR--as it already has in the former Yugoslavia. And it threatens to deploy NATO forces in Africa and the Middle East.

Despite objections from some of its European allies--which are also imperialist rivals--Washington has insisted on bringing Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO. These countries are led by weak capitalist classes that depend on the United States and Germany to stay in power.

For the people of these countries, NATO membership will mean increased hardships, a growing debt to the U.S. military-industrial complex as the armies are re-equipped with NATO armaments--and a growing danger of serving as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialist interests.

For the working class in the United States, NATO expansion means growing costs of subsidizing these arm sales and growing danger of sending young people to occupy the lands of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Say no to NATO expansion!