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Will NATO’s expansion bubble burst?

Part I: Dick Cheney’s voyage exposes U.S. weaknesses

U.S. imperialism’s every effort to assert itself and reverse its declining global domination confirms its weakened position.

This weakened U.S. position was never more obvious than during Vice-President Dick Cheney’s early September visit of Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. And it was confirmed when NATO members sidestepped U.S. demands to impose sanctions on Russia after Georgia’s Aug. 7 invasion of South Ossetia and Russia’s counterattack. Imperialist NATO members Germany, France and Italy politely put on hold the U.S. push to include Georgia and Ukraine in the U.S.-commanded NATO alliance.

The European imperialists need the oil and gas from Russia to fuel their own industries. They also want to protect their own corporate investments in Russia more than they want to back up a crumbling U.S. position.

Cheney visited Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan in Washington’s effort to ratchet up military threats against Russia and to show U.S. determination to control this strategic region on Russia’s border. As he visited, 18 NATO war ships, equipped with strategic weapons, including cruise missiles, appeared in the Black Sea off the coasts of Georgia and Russia. The USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet, docked on Sept. 6 at Georgia’s Black Sea port of Poti, six miles from a Russian military base.

Escalating U.S. military threats worry the business interests of not only the imperialist allies in Western Europe. They have also led to a sharp confrontation with the emerging capitalist class in Russia.

This grouping acted earlier as if they would remain partners with U.S. imperialism in the long-term exploitation of the giant, once-socially-owned industries of the Soviet Union. They were totally compliant with the breakup of the USSR. Then they found to their chagrin that the imperialist pirates didn’t honor their agreements.

Many historical studies assert that in 1990 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made the astounding capitulation that a united capitalist Germany could join NATO after Secretary of State Baker gave assurances that NATO would not extend its jurisdiction to the East. German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, Francois Mitterrand of France and John Major of Britain made similar promises.

U.S. imperialism has no room for capitalist partners who ultimately become capitalist rivals. Washington’s policy, stated explicitly in documents in the mid-1990s, was to transform NATO—a U.S.-commanded military alliance—to prevent socialist planning and ownership from reemerging and to assure that no new rival capitalist power in Russia or rival military bloc in Europe was established. U.S. military and corporate domination of the entire region was the goal.

NATO’s bombing, dismemberment and occupation of Yugoslavia from 1994 on set a precedent for the rapid expansion of NATO as a U.S.-dominated military alliance.

The new Russian capitalist class watched all the countries of Eastern Europe and many of the former republics of the USSR turned into pawns and used as anti-Russian military bases. Now Russian Prime Minister Putin is belatedly trying to assert some sovereignty over a vast, encircled country, greatly weakened since the Soviet days.

That Putin would denounce the role of U.S. warships in the Black Sea delivering supposedly “humanitarian aid” to Georgia is hardly surprising. But even French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner—who had called NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia a “humanitarian war”—questioned current U.S. tactics and pointedly said that “the use of warships to deliver humanitarian aid risks enflaming tensions with Russia.”

Kouchner’s statement shows all the tensions, fissures and weaknesses within this major alliance that can unravel it. Kouchner said that the crisis “can only be solved politically and not with warships.” He also cast doubt on the political value of Cheney’s trip to Georgia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. (Bloomberg News, Sept 6)

Cheney’s visit to Azerbaijan, an oil-rich country on the Caspian Sea that was once a republic of the Soviet Union, was a big setback. The U.S. financed the building of a $4- billion, 1,000-mile, million-barrels-a-day oil pipeline from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, across Georgia to its capital Tbilisi to Ceyhan, a port in Turkey.

The vast and expensive construction project—called the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan or BTC line—was a U.S. effort begun during the Clinton administration. Its whole purpose was to route oil for Western markets away from transit through Russia. For the same reason, billions were also spent on the Nabucco gas pipeline from Baku via Georgia to Turkey.

According to a Sept. 8 Times of London article entitled: “How the West is losing the energy cold war,” Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev publicly snubbed Cheney, phoned Russian President Medvedev the moment after he met with Cheney and ruled out supplying gas for the Nabucco gas line. “A disgruntled Mr. Cheney apparently then failed to appear at an official banquet.”

Then on Sept. 16, the two pro-U.S. parties in the Ukraine regime split and brought down the government despite Washington’s efforts to keep them united against Moscow.

This is quite a turnaround after almost two decades of growing U.S. corporate and political domination of the entire region.

These setbacks don’t eliminate the risk of a new U.S. war. Opposing all U.S. wars and calling for the abolition of NATO is now on the agenda for the anti-war movement in the U.S.

“Part II: U.S. more dependent on military solutions”