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11/16/19

NATO: Editorial: Good news for anti-imperialists — Nato is falling apart

 THE Nato alliance — set up to hold back the advance of working-class (and Russian dominance) power in Europe — is unravelling.

If US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks that his lightning visit to surf the avalanche of tendentious propaganda celebrating the dismantling of socialism in Europe provides a good opportunity to reinforce US dominance over its European allies he is mistaken.

Pompeo pontificated today on “the need for traditional Western allies to work together in the face of modern threats.”

That he combined this with a defence of Trump’s erratic tariff policies and The Donald’s strictures on the “need” for European states to match US defence spending shows how out of touch he is with European popular opinion.

Pompeo said: “We have a duty, each of us, to use all we have to defend what was so hard-won in 1776, in 1945 and in 1989” name checking the 18th-century end of colonial rule in North America, the 20th-century victory over fascism and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet republics and the European socialist states.

If either Pompeo, or his astoundingly ignorant president, think these historic turning points form a seamless historical narrative they are mistaken.

Today French President Macron thinks the alliance is “brain dead” and blames Trump’s policies. Nato members Greece and Turkey are periodically on a war footing and Turkey is playing the gangster capitalist regime of Putin off against the US. On a host of foreign policy issues — from Palestine to the Iran nuclear deal, from US extraterritorial demands that constrain European trade with Cuba, Iran and Venezuela to trade tariff wars with China; from policy on Syria to the sponsorship of competing jihadi militias in Libya — the bourgeoisies of European countries are at loggerheads with the US.

Macron is in conflict with the Nato defence and intelligence establishment because he wants an integrated European military force. When he was EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU needed its own army.

Trump wants European states to stump up 2 per cent of their GDP for defence spending whilst complaining that the US forks out 4 per cent. Playing Britain’s traditionally supine role Dominic Raab says that: “… the answer is for all European countries to meet their commitments to spending two per cent of GDP on defence — the surest way to reinforce rather than weaken the transatlantic relationship.”

Read more at: Editorial: Good news for anti-imperialists — Nato is falling apart | Morning Star

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