Webinar talk: NATO is tool of imperialist rule

Workers World Party was invited by the Turkish organizations Struggle Unity and The Union Against NATO and Imperialist War to participate in a webinar meeting on June 13, 2026, with representatives of other parties from around the world. The webinar is part of a protest against the NATO summit that will be held July 7-8 in Ankara, capital of Türkiye. The following article is based on Catalinotto’s presentation. 

Workers World Party in the United States greets anti-imperialists from all over the world who are meeting to discuss how to confront imperialism and how to fight against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO.

Workers World Party has always been for the dissolution of NATO and has supported the movements in the NATO member countries that want NATO bases removed from their territory and their countries removed from NATO.

During the last decades there have been demonstrations in the United States against NATO. Part of the education of activists about NATO is the content of this talk.

The arguments and conflicts between the Trump administration and the European Union powers, including Trump’s criticism of NATO, does not change Workers World Party’s position against NATO.

What was NATO’s role?

According to the self-serving description on the NATO website, the military alliance “strives to secure a lasting peace in Europe and North America, based on its member countries’ common values of individual liberty, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.” 

This is a Big Lie. In the last 25 years, NATO has killed, wounded or displaced more than 10 million people while destroying Yugoslavia and Libya and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. NATO also provoked the war in Ukraine against Russia. 

That should be enough to make the world’s people question the virtue of those “common values.” But the wealthiest and most powerful NATO members — the U.S., France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Canada — have added additional crimes. They have armed and politically supported Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

By supporting a genocide that the world can see daily on social media, the NATO countries’ rulers have made it obvious that the real “common values” shared by their states lie elsewhere. To find them, we can examine the class character of those states along with their colonial history. What did the ruling classes of these countries have in common that caused them to found NATO? 

NATO established in 1949

According to the NATO website, when NATO was established on April 4, 1949, its “founding member countries were: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom [Britain] and the United States.” 

These countries were and remain capitalist countries where the capitalists, who own the wealth and especially the means of production, are the ruling class. State power is wielded to serve the interests of this exploiter class. The government and the military serve that wealthy class, which exploits the workers inside their borders and wherever they hire labor throughout the world.

The major powers among the NATO founders are imperialist countries that held vast colonial possessions at one time. At the beginning of World War II, they ruled over most of the world, exploited its people and pillaged its resources. If the population of “their” colonies dared to revolt, they ordered their armies to fire on these uprisings. 

For example, while Britain was itself small in land area, in 1940 the British Empire contained a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of its landmass. French imperialism was second largest, with colonies throughout North and West Africa and also in Indochina. Until 1960, the rulers of small Belgium held the vast Congo, an area nearly 80 times the size of Belgium itself. Those who ran the Netherlands ruled most of the immense archipelago of Indonesia. 

Portugal, a weak imperialist power in 1940, nevertheless ruled over Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau in Africa and half of one of the Indonesian islands, East Timor. Denmark “owned” Greenland, some 50 times the size of the Scandinavian kingdom.

U.S. imperialism, which by the end of 1945 was the richest and had by far the most powerful military of all the NATO founders, had spread across North America by slaughtering Native Americans, stealing their lands and forcing some tribal nations onto reservations. Its colonies included Alaska and Hawai‘i — which were later absorbed as states — and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, whose peoples the U.S. occupation force had slaughtered after the U.S. seized the islands following the 1898 Spanish-American War. 

Washington also dominated most of the Western Hemisphere, but mostly indirectly and economically rather than as colonial possessions.

In brief, these imperialist powers plundered and pillaged “their” colonies, superexploited the colonial workers and greeted every popular protest with repression that should have made the whole world revolt, had its people seen it on video. That’s what the ruling class of these NATO powers had and still have in common — their shared ruling-class interests in exploiting humanity and the world’s wealth.

At the end of 1945, U.S. imperialism produced half of the commodities in the world. The U.S. had the most powerful military, was the only nuclear-armed power, had 8 million troops in arms and occupied the defeated imperialist powers Germany, Italy and Japan. However, the U.S. ruling class faced the following challenges, specifically in Europe:

1. The Soviet Red Army occupied most of Eastern Europe, including eastern Germany, and there had been communist-led revolutions in Yugoslavia and Albania and an attempt at such a revolution in Greece. Where the Red Army had liberated countries from Nazi occupation, it was possible for workers’ parties to take over the governments and to seize the means of production from the capitalists. 
2. In some of the West European countries, communist parties had led the partisans fighting against German occupation during World War II. These parties were popular and in some cases were armed. This was especially a problem for the capitalists and their political parties in Italy and France. Workers’ revolutions were conceivable. U.S. strategists believed that mere Communist Party participation in these governments would benefit the Soviet Union and world communism.

U.S. imperialism and imperialism in general faced other challenges worldwide, both communist revolutions (China, Korea, Vietnam, later Cuba) and national liberation movements. NATO was not directly involved. 

Within Europe, Washington’s instrument for intervention was NATO. The main tasks of this military alliance were to allow the U.S. to threaten nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and to maintain capitalist rule of Western Europe. NATO also kept the rulers of the European capitalist states and their armies lined up behind U.S. leadership and hostile to the Soviet Union. 

Taking advantage of its position as a superpower in 1949, Washington locked in its military control of the Western European states by making this control part of the NATO structure. As of a 1950 decision, NATO’s military forces followed the orders of the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who has always been a U.S. general, who was also the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. U.S. generals have always commanded NATO, whose members were committed to “defend any member under attack,” which in effect meant they all had to join any U.S.-led battle against the Soviet Union. 

From 1959 to 1962, the United States deployed nuclear warheads and PGM-19 Jupiter Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles to Türkiye under a secret 1959 NATO agreement. These weapons were positioned to attack the Soviet Union from a short distance but were later removed as part of a secret agreement during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration with its “Star Wars” program implanted missiles on NATO bases in Europe that could credibly carry out a first strike against the Soviet Union.

NATO’s anti-worker role in West Europe

NATO troops never challenged the Soviet Red Army directly with non-nuclear battle, nor did they battle the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, which was founded in 1955. NATO did, however, intervene against workers’ movements in Europe. U.S. officials in NATO maintained connections with reactionary elements in the other NATO militaries, including those who had served fascist regimes and the militarists in Türkiye, which joined NATO in 1955.

The best-known NATO interventions were in Italy, Greece and Portugal. 

In Italy, the U.S. conspired with anti-communist officers to maintain a “strategy of tension” and prevent the very popular Communist Party of Italy (PCI) from entering the government. The strategy of tension involved terrorist acts that caused train wrecks and blew up train stations, killing dozens of people. 

In Greece, NATO strategists helped plan the military coup of the colonels in 1967. The coup brought a military regime to power for the next six years. 

During the 1974-75 revolution in Portugal that overturned the decades-long fascist regime, NATO warships entered the harbor in Lisbon, the capital. This was a barely disguised threat that NATO would intervene with military force if the Portuguese working class attempted to overturn capitalism. 

U.S. adjusted post-Soviet NATO

When the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact alliance dissolved in the early 1990s, Washington adapted its approach to NATO to the new situation. It became imperative to keep the European imperialist powers behind U.S. leadership (imperative to the U.S., that is), instead of developing their own military intervention force. 

And the U.S. did use NATO to intervene first in Eastern Europe (in 1994-95 in Bosnia, part of the former Yugoslavia and with the 1999 war that destroyed Yugoslavia) and later to extend NATO’s reach to Africa and West and Central Asia. 

The “common values” extolled on the NATO site are not what drives the alliance. It is instead the common interests of their imperialist ruling classes. NATO is a police force for imperialism against the working people of the world. Whether in Palestine, in Africa or in Eastern Europe, NATO and its leading powers, especially U.S. imperialism, are the enemy of the workers and oppressed peoples.

And this does not change after the conflict and competition between the Trump administration and its verbal hostility to NATO and the European NATO imperialist powers’ militarization, which is what they have been doing at triple speed in the past year in building a confrontation with Russia. 

As a working-class party in the United States, we consider U.S. imperialism our main enemy, the enemy at home. But both U.S. and European imperialists are enemies of the peoples of the world. If workers’ parties can take advantage of any of the contradictions among them, we should definitely do it. And we in the United States will aid any of the European parties who attempt to struggle to get the U.S. and NATO out of Europe and to get their countries out of NATO.

Long live international solidarity!

Down with U.S. imperialism!

Down with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization!