TORONTO MEETING
Pentagon imposes U.S.-led expansion on NATO allies
By John
Catalinotto
U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen used an evaluation of
the war against Yugoslavia to bully the NATO allies into
accepting U.S. policies at an "informal meeting" of 19 NATO
defense ministers in Toronto Sept. 21-22.
Cohen said NATO won the war with U.S. "precision-guided
weapons" and other high-tech systems. Speaking of European NATO
members, he said that "in some cases countries would have to
spend more money" to buy such weapons--by implication from U.S.
arms makers.
The U.S. media gave the meeting relatively little publicity.
Yet it was an important preparation for a December NATO meeting
that will set policy on the so-called Defense Capabilities
Initiative and the European Security and Defense Identity.
Both programs increase the danger of another NATO
aggression. By beefing up military budgets, they also
threatened the living standards of the working class in both
Europe and North America.
Washington first put forward its policy to expand NATO
toward the end of 1998. Its program would extend NATO's
military reach far beyond the North Atlantic and Western Europe
into Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Persian/Arabian Gulf and
the Caspian Sea.
Washington also demands that the European powers pay a
greater share of NATO's military costs, while the United States
remains the dominant decision-maker in the alliance.
The major NATO countries are all imperialist powers. They
include the former colonial powers: Britain, France, Italy,
Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. The
super-rich of these countries directly ruled and exploited most
of the world by the end of the 19th century. In 1885 they met
in Berlin and carved up Africa into spheres of influence, much
as they carved up Kosovo for "peacekeeping forces."
Now they no longer have such widespread direct rule. They
exploit the world's labor through monopolized ownership of
industry, trade and especially the banking of the entire world,
and by controlling the prices of raw materials.
They possess the most powerful instruments of violence in
their armies, navies and air forces, and they use them to
maintain and expand their economic supremacy.
Now the dominant imperialist economic and military power is
the United States.
While these capitalist powers are allied against the world's
oppressed, they have conflicting economic and strategic
interests. World War I and World War II were serious outbreaks
of this rivalry.
During 45 years of the Cold War, these conflicts were kept
under wraps by the imperialist powers' common hostility to the
USSR and the socialist countries. Now the rivalry is suppressed
only by U.S. imperialism's economic and military dominance.
Defense Capabilities Initiative: global cop
According to data from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the
78-day war 1,100 warplanes flew more than 25,200 sorties and
dropped 25,000 tons of explosives. Some 80 percent of the
targets and victims were civilians.
Speaking at the Institute of Strategic Studies in San Diego
on Sept. 9, Cohen boasted of the U.S. role in this bombing. He
outlined what he would demand from France, Britain, Germany and
the other European powers regarding the DCI.
"We have all agreed to develop forces that are more mobile,
beginning with the reassessment of NATO's strategic lift
requirements for planning purposes. We need forces, we've
agreed, that can sustain themselves longer; that means having a
logistics system that will ensure they have the supplies when
and where they need them."
Cohen said the NATO powers need "forces that can engage more
effectively; that means having the new advanced technologies
such as greater stocks of precision-guided munitions and forces
that can survive better against chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons, and also information warfare."
It's clear that Cohen expects future wars of a Kosovo size
and bigger--and more distant from the United States or Western
Europe.
The Sept. 27 Los Angeles Times reported that NATO analysts
are concerned about what is now a very tentative defense
alliance among Russia, India and China. Washington will try to
disrupt this alliance before it develops. But it's obvious that
U.S. analysts expect NATO to police from the Western Pacific to
the Atlantic, although Cohen denies this.
The original justification for the formation of NATO in 1949
was that it was a defense pact for Western Europe against an
"aggressive" Soviet Union. In reality it was a
counter-revolutionary army against both the USSR and any
uprising by Western European workers.
Now, without a USSR, Washington wants NATO to be a world
cop. And Cohen expects the European governments to pick up a
big share of the costs of expansion.
"As I look around at the budgets of the members of the NATO
Alliance," Cohen said, "I certainly see restructuring taking
place as far as the size of the forces, and one cannot
criticize that. But I also see a corresponding reduction in a
commitment as far as the budget is concerned. So while there is
a great sense of enthusiasm for what we have to do for the
future to modernize NATO, to make it as effective as it needs
to be, there is not at this point the kind of political
commitment to actually carry it out."
By increasing their military budgets, the European
governments would inevitably cut social services. In the last
10 years most have already carried out severe cutbacks that
have sharpened social contradictions in Europe as they squeeze
the working class.
European Security
and Defense Identity
At a meeting in Cologne, Germany, in June, Western European
governments decried their dependence on the Pentagon's military
power and subservience to U.S. policy during the just-concluded
war on Yugoslavia.
Washington had pushed German Chan cellor Gerhard Schroeder,
Italian Premier Massimo D'Alema, French Premier Lionel Jospin
and others of the mostly Social-Democratic regimes into backing
the Pentagon's war.
But when Gen. Wesley Clark ordered bombing of civilian
targets, the strategy quickly became unpopular with European
workers and threatened the Social-Democratic governments. These
leaders urged the development of a European military force more
independent of the Pentagon.
Such a leap in European militarism would be a serious
financial burden on the European working class. And it would
increase the danger of a European-led war against the oppressed
nations.
But Washington would oppose any force that challenges its
domination even in Europe itself. The Pentagon strategists made
their goal of maintaining U.S. hegemony clear in a "white
paper" revealed in March 1992 in the New York Times.
Washington sees the ESDI as a way of harnessing European
militarism back into NATO--where the Pentagon holds the reins.
That's what Cohen told reporters in Toronto Sept. 22.
"There was unanimity of expression [supporting ESDI]," he
said. "This is important for the Europeans to undertake. It is
important also to make sure that it is not seen as a separate
institution and capability, but rather that it is maintained
under the umbrella so to speak of NATO."
Cohen added that since the European countries already have
aircraft that can deliver precision-guided missiles, all they
have to do is get the money to buy them. He implied that U.S.
manufacturers would be happy to sell them.
A Sept. 22 French Press Agency report noted that ESDI was
supposed to allow European NATO members to carry out "a
peacekeeping operation, for example, using NATO materiel and
resources but not involving the U.S. or Canada. It was unclear,
however, how the Europeans would be able to act independently
while relying on assets under the control of an alliance still
dominated by the Pentagon."
Cohen wants a situation in which the European NATO countries
take the risks of wartime casualties and pay the costs, but
where U.S. control of strategic weapons and logistics gives
Washington all the trump cards.
The European imperialists will hate this arrangement, even
if for the near future none challenges the United States head
on. Washington has the advantage of directing one single state
with more resources than any three of its European rivals
combined--and they have their own rivalries. But the sores will
fester.
Workers in both the United States and Europe have nothing to
gain by supporting the bosses and bankers on either continent.
They must strive instead to build international working-class
solidarity as they combat militarism on both sides of the
Atlantic.
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