NATO Meets to Plan Expansion, Repression and Future Wars

Finance capitalist oligarchies^[1] of the G7/G8 states^[2] and their minions, are focusing on the meeting of the 28 NATO states^[3] in Lisbon Portugal November 19-20^th 2010.

The elite gathering will be a focal point of mass protest organized by the World Peace Council (WPC) and its Portuguese affiliate^[4] the Portuguese Council for Peace and Cooperation (CPPC). The demonstrations will expose the so-called new NATO Strategic Concept, a euphemism for plans to expand NATO’s mandate to launch interventionist wars at will and in all corners of the globe.

The Right-Wing Minority Harper Conservative Government Endorses NATO’s Plan to Re-order the World

Canada’s right wing conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, continues the long history of Liberal- Conservative Party support for NATO. The Prime Minister hailed the 60^th Anniversary of NATO and its current interventionist war in Afghanistan.^[5] Prime Minister Harper’s adherence to NATO doctrines has effectively debased Canadian sovereignty over foreign policy to the point where NATO not the elected members of the Parliament of Canada now determine matters of peace and war, what is fundamental to Canada’s national defense, the strategic doctrines and the procurement priorities of Canada’s armed forces.  The much discussed Harper Government decision to purchase US produced 65 C35 fighter jet aircraft at an initial cost of $9 billion is largely determined by the interoperability of these US built aircraft with the armed forces of the member states of NATO.^[6]

NATO Increases Canadian Insecurity. Peace and War Determined by Article 5 of the NATO Charter

Canada as a member of NATO is obliged to go to war if Article Five of the NATO Charter is invoked.^[7] If the new NATO doctrine of expanding its mandate beyond the Euro Atlantic states to all continents is adopted at its November meeting, it will increase the potential for Canadian involvement in future foreign NATO wars and thereby diminish Canadian security. For example, NATO has expanded from its original 12 states to its present 28 member states. The new members of NATO are former socialist states, now capitalist. The capitalist governments of these states are hostile to Russia, which is not a member of NATO but also a capitalist state. NATO’s relationship with capitalist Russia is fractious and belligerent. The expansion of NATO under these circumstances has increased not diminished the likelihood of Canadian involvement in future inter-capitalist wars in Europe, possibly against Russia with whom Canada at present maintains normal diplomatic and mutually beneficial trade relations.

NATO at its November meeting will identify Africa as a continent now under its purview. A potential theatre of NATO involvement is the resource rich Democratic Republic of the Congo. NATO involvement in Africa would have the potential of involving Canada in NATO instigated wars in Africa.

Peter Gehl, Vice Chair of the Regina Peace Council authored an in depth analysis of imperialist designs on the Congo. The paper, lauded by some in the international peace movement was published on the CPS website but unpublished in the left progressive press in Canada and the USA.^[8]  The CPS and the Regina Peace Council fully exposed the Harper Conservative pro-NATO stance and its support for a New Strategic Concept for NATO, last February and March 2010.^[9],[10] The analyses were circulated to the left progressive community, and published on the CPS website but regrettably suppressed in the left progressive press.

The NATO meeting in November will also discuss the rapid economic developments in China and US-NATO intervention in Central Asia. The NATO meeting will demonize both Iran and North Korea for its nuclear programs while at the same time, justifying NATO’s nuclear armament which lies at the core of its military strategic planning.

The International Communist Movement has been alerted by persistent warnings from Fidel Castro Ruz, the Greek Communist Party KKE, the World Peace Council and many others in the international peace and democratic movements that NATO and the USA and Israel are well advanced with plans for a military attack on Iran. CPS has circulated such warnings and issued its own statement on the growing danger of an imperialist attack on Iran.^[11] The CPS appeal to the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) to mobilize the left progressive forces in Canada to expose the Harper Government’s complicity in US-NATO-Israeli plans to attack Iran have thus far been ignored.

Such passivity is inexplicable in light of the CPC’s long history of active opposition to Canadian Government support for NATO.

Tim Buck the Only Political Leader in 1949 to Oppose Canada Joining NATO

Of all of the political parties in Canada, the Communist Party has the most consistent record of opposition to NATO. The initial Communist response to the formation of NATO was outlined by Tim Buck Communist Party General Secretary from 1929 to 1962 and Chair of the Communist Party until his death in 1973.

Tim Buck in his CBC reminiscences edited by W.C.(Bill) Beeching and published as “Yours in the Struggle” by NC Press in 1977 recalls attending an address by Liberal Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in 1947 at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto on the subject of “The Foundation of Canadian Policy in World Affairs.”

Buck recalls that St. Laurent departed from his prepared text and said to the audience:

“Within my lifetime, we in Canada shall be compelled to participate in the greatest and most destructive war ever waged in the history of mankind to preserve our Christian civilization from atheistic Bolshevism. In this great struggle to preserve Christianity, the leadership will have to be taken by our great neighbor to the south and this fact makes it necessary for us to reconsider our foreign policy from its foundations.”

St. Laurent’s Toronto University speech heralded a shift in Canadian foreign policy and became the basis for enunciating the new Liberal Government policy of US-Canadian integration.  The St. Laurent analysis was formulated into policy by Minister of Finance Douglas Abbot who went to Washington and cut a deal with U.S. President Harry Truman, who, two years previous had ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Canada-U.S. deal meant that in exchange for US produced consumer and industrial goods Canada would supply the USA with all of the vital raw materials it required to wage war with the Soviet Union, a war to destroy socialism. Canada from that point forward and for many decades, embarked on active participation in the cold war as a junior partner of the USA and its strategic aim of global economic and political dominance.

Buck then went on to say in his recollections:

“St. Laurent played a leading role in the founding of NATO. In fact, the speech in which he introduced the idea of NATO in the House of Commons literally kicked the ball off…When in the fall of 1947, Douglas Abbott, the minister of finance, went to the US and concluded the agreement which became known as the Abbott Plan, we were not surprised.”

On April 4th 1949^[12] Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent with the leaders of the USA, Great Britain and France and eight other countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty. Article 5 stated that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all thereby repudiating the solemn agreements reached at Yalta among Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill for post-war international collective security for all UN member states through the Security Council Provisions of the UN Charter.

NATO an Aggressive Anti-Communist Alliance

From the outset NATO was an aggressive not a defensive alliance. NATO in practice had two inter-related goals. The first goal, as enunciated by Prime Minister St. Laurent, and relying on nuclear weapons superiority, was to prepare Canadians to accept the prospect of world war three with the aim of destroying the Soviet Union. The second goal was to create an imperialist military alliance that would act independently of the UN and begin a process of subverting the collective security provisions of the United Nations Charter.  That process continues in the changed world of today, where the UN Security Council was complicit in NATO wars in Yugoslavia in 1989-90 and today in Afghanistan.

St. Laurent’s NATO policy was a departure from the stance of Prime Minister Mackenzie King who was not prepared to completely abandon the WW2 foreign policy developed during Canada’s wartime participation with Britain the USA and the USSR in the Allied effort to defeat Hitler. Upon King’s death in July 22^nd 1950 things changed. King had kept Canada out of the Korean War but upon his death, and Canada’s entry to NATO, under the leadership of Louis St. Laurent with Lester B. Pearson, Minister of Foreign Affairs in full support, Canada entered the Korean War.

Accordingly, all NATO member states began an intensive military buildup with the deployment of nuclear weapons as its core strategy. In violation of its post-war agreements to disarm Nazi Germany NATO partners led by the USA-Britain and Canada began the rearmament of Germany integrating the defeated German Wehrmacht into NATO with former Nazi generals promoted to the NATO high command.

The NATO Atlantic Treaty of 1949 was flawed on many levels. It was signed in the mistaken belief that the signatory states had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and was poised to bring the Soviet Union to its knees by nuclear blackmail or by war.  The USA had demonstrated its nuclear weapons superiority in August of 1945 dropping atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 29^th 1949 four months after the founding of NATO the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon creating an instant sobering effect on NATO plans for a blitzkrieg style war of nuclear destruction of the Soviet Union.^[13]

So sobering was the effect of the Soviet Union acquiring nuclear weapons, that General Douglas MacArthur US Commander of UN troops waging war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in 1950 called for the use of 20 atomic bombs^[14]  against Chinese and North Korean forces. MacArthur was relieved of his command by President Truman and replaced by his 2IC US General Mathew Ridgeway.

What the US could do with impunity in 1945 against a defeated and defenseless Japanese civilian population, it could not do in 1950 against a revolutionary army of the Chinese and Korean people backed by a nuclear armed USSR. Thwarted from using atomic bombs against the Korean people, General Ridgeway conducted massive US aerial bombardment of North Korea that destroyed Pyongyang, killing hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians an experience the North Korean people have never forgotten to this day.

NATO led by the USA, was compelled by the new international balance of forces to abandon the plan for an overwhelming nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and opted for a policy of attempting to ring the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, a military strategy of containment a euphemism for a gradual buildup of nuclear weapons superiority through western Europe to Turkey relying on long range strategic bombing superiority and later ICBM’s and nuclear armed submarines. The Soviet Union countered each US-NATO attempt at gaining overwhelming weapons superiority on land, sea and air.

Aware of what another world war would mean, having lost 20 million of its citizens in WW2, and in an effort to halt the burgeoning arms race in Europe, the Soviet Union in 1954 offered to join NATO.^[15]  The US, Britain, France and Canada all rejected the offer having the effect of confirming what the Soviet Union had told the world, that NATO was not a defensive alliance designed for the collective security of the North Atlantic states, but an aggressive anti-communist alliance with the express purpose of destroying the socialist system. In response the European Socialist states headed by the Soviet Union organized the Warsaw Pact on May 1^st 1955.^[16]

The measured responses of the Soviet Union and its allies to NATO plans for war, was the decisive factor throughout the cold war era preventing the outbreak of world nuclear war. Soviet military counter measures to NATO aggression, were accompanied by a constant Soviet diplomatic offensive at the UN and among all states receptive to reducing tensions, resulting in a series of international agreements to reduce nuclear weapons and their proliferation. That legacy lives on today when a new struggle confronts the peace movement to completely rid the world of nuclear arms.

Canadian Political Parties and NATO

Learning nothing from history, the Liberal and Conservative Parties continue in the 21^st Century, their self serving and enthusiastic promotion of NATO including its use of nuclear weapons. On this point, the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) initially supported the organization of NATO in 1949 on the proviso that Canadian Armed Forces would not be compelled to use nuclear weapons. The NDP has since called for Canadian withdrawal from NATO and NORAD but does not campaign on the issue. The NDP’s current foreign policy statement carried on its website^[17] states it supports only those missions endorsed by the UN but has nothing to say about its previous foreign policy papers from the 1980’s when the NDP openly called for Canadian withdrawal from NATO and NORAD. Today the NDP Caucus is mute on the matter of Canada’s membership in NATO, NORAD and NORTHCOM, limiting the NDP’s foreign policy stance to an implied criticism of NATO by calling for the withdrawal of Canadian forces from Afghanistan. Thus far the NDP has had nothing to say about current US-NATO-Israeli plans for launching an attack on Iran.

The Green Party’s website carries a foreign policy statement from the federal election of 2006 where it makes no mention of opposing NATO or calling for Canadian withdrawal from the alliance.^[18] It likewise is mute on the matter of an impending NATO-US-Israeli attack on Iran.

The Communist Party of Canada has a long standing position extending from 1947 to today, calling for Canadian withdrawal from all military alliances including NATO and NORAD. The party circulated a statement and pamphlet denouncing the 60^th anniversary celebrations of NATO calling for Canadian withdrawal from the alliance.^[19] The CPC is late in its exposure of the Harper Governments participation in NATO-Israeli-US plans for an attack on Iran.

The Canadian Peace Congress at its October 2008 Re-founding Convention adopted a resolution containing one of its main demands, Canadian withdrawal from NATO and all military alliances.^[20] The Congress also issued a statement denouncing the 60^th Anniversary of NATO and demanding Canadian withdrawal from the imperialist alliance.

The Military Establishment Support for NATO

The most strident promoters of NATO are Canadian military think tanks.^[21] . These self serving groups act with the encouragement and support of the minority Stephen Harper Conservative Government and the tacit support of the Ignatieff Liberals.  These think tanks now wield considerable extra-parliamentary influence in helping to develop Government policy and NATO’s new strategic concept. 

A policy paper, entitled “Security in an Uncertain World – A Canadian Perspective on NATO’s New Strategic Concept”, a joint effort of the Conference of Defense Associations Institute (CDAI) and the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) outlines the doctrine of the Canadian military establishment that will be taken forward and promoted in Lisbon in November by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Defense Minister Peter McKay and Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon and their entourage. The Canadian document published in March preceded the official NATO expert’s commission report chaired by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright which borrowed heavily from the Canadian document. The official NATO document was released in May 2010.^[22]  Both documents outline the proposed NATO Strategy and provide clear indications of NATO’s stance towards Russia, China, Africa, Central Asia and Europe.

The Canadian document is the work of a who’s who in the defense and foreign affairs establishment, chaired by Paul H. Chapin Former Director General International Security, Department of Foreign Affairs. Contributors include an array of retired Canadian DND and NATO Generals, a Conservative senator, and former deputy ministers, academic luminaries, all well connected to the military, government and well versed in defense procurement procedures. 

The military insiders advocate for a more active role for Canadian governments, present and future, at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, and promote an expanded NATO even though such expansion will require massive military expenditures by the Canadian taxpayers and where it will compete and conflict with Canada’s traditional role at the United Nations.

NATO is now the headquarters of the international war business with each member state committed to placing a contingent of its military forces under NATO command and out of its state treasury contributing to NATO’s rapidly expanding budgetary requirements. A growing portion of the GDP of each member state is required to pay for the expansion of NATO and to maintain NATO’s activities in three areas, a growing parasitical administration now exceeding 4000 at NATO headquarters in Brussels, its so-called social program which draws funds into NATO’s political goals and away from the UN Millennium Fund requirements and its largest allocation to NATO’s military budget used to conduct wars of intervention and occupation also actively depleting the funds that would normally flow to UN so-called peace keeping activities.

NATO has been successful in blurring the lines of operation between itself and the UN to the extent that there is now a popular belief among UN supporters that NATO and the UN are synonymous.

In a recent Citizens Panel Survey circulated by the United Nations Association in Canada the blurring of the roles of NATO and the UN is reflected in the survey question: “Canada should also continue to participate in non-UN peacekeeping missions (such as the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan.)

The time is past due when the peace movement and in the first place the left progressive led peace movement enters fully into the struggle to expose what NATO really is.

 What is NATO?

NATO is the creation of state-monopoly capitalism^[23] and exists to serve its interests. NATO is the gendarme of the imperialist ruling elites of the Euro Atlantic member states tasked to pacify and suppress all popular resistance to the movement of international finance capital to all regions of the globe. It is a clearing house for EU-US conflicts over NATO budget cost sharing in war materials and weaponry and the allocation of combat forces in NATO wars. NATO is dominated by US military officers reflecting the fact the USA is NATO’s largest contributor on a per capita basis^[24] contributing approximately 25% of its total budget amounting to more than $1.5 billion US. US NATO allocations have risen under the Obama administration. Canada contributes over 5% of the total NATO budget.^[25] 

An Alliance of the Past – NATO Seeking New 21^st Century Wars

The global system of capitalism in the 21^st Century is incapable of progressive development. In fact, finance capital has abandoned even the pretext of claiming to be concerned about finding solutions to mass poverty, mass unemployment, homelessness, racism, and war and environmental degradation. The NATO panel of experts is content to simply list all of these human tragedies resulting from capitalist exploitation, as threats to be responded to with military power. The NATO report of the panel of experts outlines scenarios when this power can be invoked and launched against the people. The circumstances under which the leaders of NATO deem a threat to their system to be present are so broad that serial wars instigated by NATO are now a virtual certainty.

Most perplexing for NATO planners is their inability to evade the truth that the system they seek to perpetuate indefinitely is the very system that has created all of the prerequisites for its own demise. Imperialism, the era of finance capital in its most concentrated, integrated and extant form has created the ultimate in social production and private appropriation to the point that progressive development of the productive forces can only occur if the imperialist system itself is replaced by socialism. Such is the profound contradiction confronting humanity in the 21^st Century. The response of the elite NATO thinkers and planners to this profound contradiction is to simply plan for more wars. Planning to wage war on social conditions is not only absurd, it is a crime against humanity and a stark admission of the total failure of the pursuit of private maximum profit as a social good. 

The pseudo theories promoting and upholding the policies of state monopoly capitalism are well advanced and promoted in all NATO states by the corporate controlled mass media. The result is a widespread illusion that NATO is a benign protector of all the people. Such illusions have been allowed to gain widespread adherence even among those Canadians who are opposed to war and campaign for peace. All of the political parties in Canada supported the cold-war rationale for the founding of NATO and now confront the dilemma of a new era without an apparent opponent of imperialism except the people. NATO has now been fully exposed as an enemy of all progressive impulses by the real global community, the masses of all continents striving for peace and progressive economic and social progress. For NATO now, in the 21^st Century, to claim to have discovered the “threats” to the global social condition faced by billions of suffering humanity and purports to have something positive to contribute to its resolution, is the ultimate in imperialist cheek and is stated with the utmost cynical self interest.

The threats outlined in the NATO Report of Experts chaired by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, are in fact not threats against the Canadian people and their security, but threats to the dominance of international finance capital by the growth of anti-imperialist, anti-monopoly, anti-capitalist movements of the people, inevitable and certain to grow in the 21^st Century. NATO has set itself against the demands of the people of the world for peace, economic and social justice in the 21^st Century. NATO and its proposed New Strategic Concept is the antithesis of the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.^[26]

NATO remains a wholly reactionary institution opposed to solving any of the global problems of peace, mass unemployment, poverty, the oppression of women and the victimization of children and of the growing problems of environmental degradation of the planet.

NATO and the Struggle of Canadians for Peace and Economic Development

The outcome of the November NATO heads of state meeting will impact Canadians and their struggle to wrest a bigger share of the social wealth they create in the work place, stolen from them by domestic and foreign corporate industrial and banking capital. The impact on Canadians will be direct and indirect. Directly, NATO will consume more of the defense budget of the Canadian state depriving the Canadian people of tax dollars required for public education, health care, child care, pensions and affordable housing. Indirectly it will impose on Canada, a requirement to support the NATO doctrine of military intervention abroad that is bound to embroil Canada and its youth in more costly and terrible wars such as the NATO war in Afghanistan and the planned US-Israeli war on 75 million Iranians.^[27]

The message in the NATO working document is for the consumption of the ruling elites of the member states and their hangers on. There is nothing in it for the Canadian people who in their majority support world peace and security. NATO is not about peace and security. It is about something entirely different.

 The November NATO Heads of State and Government are seeking a consensus as to how to coordinate the suppression by military force of the resistance of any and all mass movements that challenge state monopoly power. The greatest fear of the NATO heads of state and government is that the class struggle which is intensifying in all member states in a period of acute economic crisis will grow into mass revolutionary movements demanding fundamental anti-monopoly change.

The ruling elites in the NATO states are frightened and perplexed by the historic decline and disintegration of mass popular support for the profit system especially among youth. Capitalist governments, such as the minority Harper Conservatives, have enacted repressive legislation and plan to invest large amounts of the federal budget to construct detention centres and jails in anticipation of mass demonstrations and political strikes for full employment and social benefits and democratic peaceful planned economic development. The indoctrination and re-training of all of the repressive agencies of the state including the judiciary, the army and police in the latest forms of state suppression of mass popular movements are well advanced as was amply demonstrated at the recent G20 events in Canada last June.

All political parties in all NATO states that uphold the profit system, are being pressured by international finance capital to accept and legislate into the force of law doctrines of societal acquiescence to the gradual loss of sovereignty and democracy and to accept rule by state monopoly edict.  All of the bourgeois think tanks, corporate funded universities, the military establishments and compliant media are working together to convince the masses of working people to voluntarily abandon traditional norms of bourgeois democracy and to passively accept and adapt to a future of open corporate rule. The invitation to accept forms of 21^st century fascism are everywhere in the demands by big business for more autocracy in governance.

NATO Remains the Bulwark of Anti-Communism

The Communist Parties of Europe are under attack by the most reactionary forces in the EU parliament for advancing slogans for peace, disarmament and anti-monopoly economic development that benefit the working class and its allies. The Communists are openly calling for a renewed struggle for socialism now, as the only alternative to the mediation role played by social democracy which continues to promote the possibilities of a reformed imperialism.

Whatever new persona NATO assumes after November 20^th it remains the cold-war anti-communist military enforcer for imperialist expansion that it was during the cold war. NATO has not abandoned its role as the leading imperialist military presence in Europe, monitoring and threatening the embattled people of the former Soviet Union, and the Eastern European states. NATO attacks on the former socialist state of Yugoslavia and its dismemberment by force, was designed to send a message to all of the Balkan people’s and all of the peoples of Europe that all Communist led movements for sovereignty, democracy and socialism would be suppressed by force and that the revival of socialism would be attacked.

The NATO November Assembly in Lisbon coincides with actions by right-wing extremists at the European Parliament to ban Communist Parties and their program for a socialist alternative to capitalism. Anti-communism, the ideology of imperialism, discredited during the cold war for its anti-democratic pro-fascist essence, is once again being resurrected in Europe, in particular in the former socialist states. Neo-Nazi and xenophobic political parties are once again reaching for influence and power in European politics.

Such intimidation has failed. All across Europe in the former socialist states, new struggles led by Communists and their allies have been undertaken to re-establish socialism.

NATO – Template for North American Reaction

If not challenged and stopped the EU anti-communist template will be adapted to North America. It is already present in the disguised form of the Tea Party in the USA. In Canada, a variety of extreme right wing Parliamentary lobbies now influence the legislative decisions of the minority right-wing Harper Conservative Government. These extremist forces are the activist core of the Harper Conservatives.

Resistance and exposure of this trend, reminiscent of the period that gave rise to fascism and WW2 is now a primary responsibility of not only the Communists but of all progressive, patriotic and democratic forces. It is impossible to support NATO and its actions and at the same time claim to be democratic. NATO is the antithesis of democracy. NATO instigates wars and then with the connivance and complicity of the militarist and war industry lobbies, bullies Parliaments and legislatures in all member states to retroactively support and accept the burdens of such undeclared wars. 

NATO is being portrayed in the corporate controlled mass media as dedicated to protecting the people of its member states from so-called external threats. Nothing could be further from the truth. NATO’s new mandate will empower it to direct its military power against the people of its member states should they decide to opt for governance other than so-called western style liberal democracy. 

NATO –the War Business

The self-appointed role of NATO as imperialist enforcer is being challenged. NATO’s image as a defensive alliance is wearing thin as it embroils member states in serial undeclared wars of intervention. The war in Afghanistan stands as the most terrible indictment of the failure of the so-called “Responsibility to Protect” mantra of NATO and that is meekly accepted by the liberal-democrats.

NATO wars burdens member states with rising costs of deaths and injuries of combatants and civilians. NATO Charter obligations subvert the sovereignty and democracy of its member states and undermine the role of elected Parliaments and Legislatures. In addition to its rogue aggressive interventionist role as imperialist enforcer, NATO has also become a vital factor in the economies of the G7 capitalist states. All NATO member states are now obliged to militarize their economies as a vital component of so-called economic revival of depression ridden capitalist states.

NATO’s procurement of armaments has become the pretext for compliant governments to divert public funds from state treasuries directly into the hands of a growing parasitical class of war industries and military elites that rely on NATO wars and preparations for war to profit and prosper. NATO has become a parasitical burden on the people, depriving them of funds for social needs as it evolves into a militarist spa, where jaded generals, corrupt academics, political careerists can, out of the misery and deaths of combatants and civilians, enter the promised land of imperialist wealth and privilege. 

For A World without War – Dismantle NATO - Build International Cooperation – Progress Demands World Peace

The November NATO meeting, one in a long series of such gatherings, is nonetheless not routine. The November NATO meeting is a state monopoly crisis management meeting. The NATO meeting is a response of imperialism to a global crisis of its system. The November NATO meeting will bring together heads of state and governments in the midst of another acute episode in the long general crisis of the global system of capitalism in its advanced imperialist stage. The meeting will attempt to reconcile differences among advanced imperialist states where private monopolies dominate and demand harsh government measures to suppress growing working class opposition to mass unemployment, loss of hard won pension and health benefits.

The high level NATO meeting confronts the reality, that the traditional dominance of the leading imperialist states is being challenged by new developing states, some with socialist and others with mixed socialist and capitalist economies and others with anti-monopoly governments committed to improving the working and living conditions of the masses. Those objective global realities will be on full public display at the G20 meeting in Seoul South Korea on November 11, 12 2010 a week prior to the NATO November meeting. Some of the states attending the G20 have opted for new non-belligerent economic and trading agreements independent of the leading imperialist states. This is something new in recent international relations and poses a direct challenge to US dominance in the global economy. The underlying principle governing the stance of the most powerful imperialist states participating in the G20 and NATO meetings is motivated by self interest to oppose such anti-imperialist developments. The G7 states will attempt to coordinate and impose their separate economic and military doctrines on all participants in both meetings. Where such doctrines coincide there will be a measure of agreement among them and where they don’t coincide, there will be an intensification of inter-capitalist and inter-imperialist rivalry. It is the latter and not the former that will characterize the future of NATO.

The G20 and NATO November meetings will illustrate not only the complexity of the current disarray in the global system of capitalism, but also, if they are clearly studied with science of Marxism-Leninism can provide the progressive forces of the world with an understanding of what must be done to move towards a world of peace, humanity, genuine progressive development and to halt the unmistakable trend to a new arms race and horrors of world nuclear war.

The November NATO meeting takes place during a period of acute internal economic crisis and political instability in the leading imperialist state the USA. The decline of the global political and economic influence of the USA is paradoxically occurring at a moment of its unparalleled military dominance which adds further contradictions into inter-imperialist relations.

21^st Century imperialism is characterized by advanced integration and centralization of industrial-banking- monopoly power merged with the state. 21^st Century imperialism is further characterized by the decisive influence of militarism in the projection of economic power. Wars the preparation of wars, the production of advanced weapons systems is a major factor in the economies of all the leading imperialist states including Canada.

The NATO and G20 meetings occur in the midst of ruinous US-NATO wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global economic depression caused by overproduction and under consumption, aggravated by deep contradictions between productive capital primarily engaged in profiteering from the production of commodities and rogue rentier capital primarily engaged in profiteering from financial speculation.  

The NATO and G20 meetings are the desperate attempt of the most powerful finance capitalist interest to compel all capitalist governments to agree to a program of anti-people’s policies to protect the profit system and to resort to all forms of capitalist state power to suppress the rising movements of opposition to the global predatory goals of finance capital.

Peeling away the media hype, the November meeting of NATO if studied carefully, will reveal the actual current state of relative economic, military and political power among the participants and the intensity of the inter-imperialist rivalries and contradictions.

In all NATO states the working class is beginning the arduous struggle of not only defending its gains but of striving to lead the nation away from war and imperialism towards progressive advance and towards socialism. That reality is the future and the hope of humankind in the 21^st Century.