NATO at 70: Global Enforcers of Western Imperialism

“Today, our Alliance is the strongest in history, guaranteeing the freedom of our almost one billion citizens, the security of our territory, and the protection of our values, including democracy, individual liberty, human rights, and the rule of law.” – Statement issued by the NATO Foreign Ministers, Washington D.C., 3rd-4th April 2019
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Formed in the years immediately following World War II, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then comprised of Canada, the United States, and ten European powers, was presented to the world as adefensive pact, wherein an attack on one member is an attack on all. The Encyclopedia Britannicaexplains that NATO was established and conceived as “a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and eastern Europe after World War II.”
Today, seventy years after its founding, the Soviet Union is no more. NATO has increased its military involvement in theatres around the world, including the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Mediterranean, and Libya. Many of these missions were framed as ‘humanitarian interventions’ or disaster relief as opposed to aggression.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), NATO powers spent $900 billion USD in 2017 on militarism, accounting for 52 per cent of global military spending. These figures do not, however, account for U.S. spending on actual theatre wars, so-called ‘overseas contingency operations’ in addition to other military related expenditures.
In an article timed with the 70th anniversary commemorations, Professor Michel Chossudovsky’soutlines how, in fact, NATO is the military arm of a hegemonic project to impose an economic restructuring on targeted countries, making them and their resource base rife for exploitation by the Anglo-American capitalist class. He documents the organization’s role in recruiting and financing destabilizing elements in Kosovo, Libya ad Syria among other countries:

“NATO member states are harnessed into endorsing Washington’s imperial design of World conquest under the doctrine of collective security.”

As NATO foreign Ministers gather in Washington D.C. to toast their contributions to the ‘peace and security’ of the world, and draw up their plans for the next 70 years, the Global Research News Hour radio program attempts to probe this much more dissenting perspective on the role of NATO and the Euro-Atlantic powers generally, in global affairs.
In the first half hour, we hear from a man who literally wrote the book on NATO. Mahdi Nazemroayaexplains how NATO was conceived to counter left movements in Europe as well as advance its geo-strategic aims on the Eurasian continent. He also explores the U.S.-centric economic imperatives being forged through this bellicose alliance. He also advances an opinion of the recent news that NATO member Turkey will purchase an anti-missile system from Russia rather than purchase the counterpart technology from NATO ally the United States.