No to NATO Expansionism

Statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party

(August 2008)

NO TO NATO EXPANSIONISM

The dangerous outbreak of armed conflict in the Caucasus, launched on Aug. 7 by the deadly Georgian military assault against schools, government buildings and residential areas in the South Ossetian capital city of Tskhinvali, is a stark illustration of the potential for such events to spark wider wars.

This episode is also a disquieting reminder that during the last century, two world wars which took the lives of over sixty million people began on European soil, arising from the imperialist drive for redivision of the world.

Far from receding, the danger of new wars is on the rise, fuelled by inter-imperialist rivalries and by the drive to seize control of oil and other vital resources. In this situation, the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and central Asia is an ominous development. Far from being a "defensive" alliance, NATO was formed in 1949 to threaten the socialist countries of Europe and the Soviet Union with a vast array of tactical and nuclear weaponry.

NATO actively promoted military alliances in other regions to encircle the socialist countries and to restrict their ability to provide concrete assistance to global struggles for national liberation. While millions of people hoped that NATO would dissolve following the demise of the Soviet Union, the US-led alliance instead began a new stage of militarism, acting as a hammer to smash holdouts against western capitalist penetration of eastern Europe.

This was the cause of the 1999 NATO bombing war against Yugoslavia, a war which had nothing to do with "democracy" or protecting small nations. Since that time, NATO has aggressively expanded its reach, taking formal control of the imperialist occupation forces in Afghanistan, and adding the Baltic countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Poland and the Czech Republic to its membership.

More recently Croatia and Albania have been invited to join NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia were told that they would likely become members in future. The strategic calculation of the US is clearly to isolate Russia and China, which it sees as rising geopolitical rivals.

For Russia, which suffered enormous losses during the Nazi invasion, the forging of a chain of imperialist military bases and armies along its western and southern borders clearly signals a US attempt to create a force with the abilities to attack and seize Russian territory. Given the hair-trigger tensions in Central Asia and the Middle East, fuelled by the bloody occupation of Iraq and the drumbeat of US and Israeli threats to bomb Iran, the events in Georgia and the proposal to install US missile systems in Poland can only increase the possibility of a military clash with catastrophic consequences.

Here in Canada, instead of working to reduce these tensions, the Harper Tories are accelerating the push begun under the former Liberal government for closer military integration with the US, i.e. to serve as the spear-carriers of an increasingly belligerent imperialist bully.

The new "Canada First Defence Strategy" elaborated by the Harper government reflects the desire of the most chauvinistic and aggressive sections of Canadian finance capital to enormously increase profitable military spending and to bolster Canada's ability to send troops in support of US/NATO interventions across the planet.

This undermines Canadian sovereignty even further, by subordinating our defence policy to the global military strategy of US imperialism and the NATO alliance. 4 From the very beginning, the Communist Party of Canada has called for Canadian withdrawal from this dangerous military alliance, and from the related NORAD agreement. Canadian foreign policy should be based on the goals of eliminating militarism and support for global nuclear disarmament.

More than ever, it is necessary for Canadians to reject the drive for war, and to defeat the Conservatives in the impending federal election, as a first step towards withdrawing from NATO and adopting a foreign policy of peace and disarmament.