Trotskyists Denounced Formation of NATO

(Quote of the Week)

Sixty years ago, our political forebears in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) denounced the formation of NATO as military muscle for U.S. imperialism, which emerged from World War II as the new top cop of the capitalist world order. NATO’s role as the anti-Soviet juggernaut in Europe was baldly proclaimed by its first General Secretary, Lord Ismay, who said that the alliance’s purpose was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” As Trotskyists, we have always opposed NATO as part of our fight for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, for workers political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and for the triumph of the working class over their capitalist exploiters and the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe. The SWP’s prediction that NATO’s birth signaled the demise of the United Nations was mistaken. The UN served then, and continues to serve today, as a “democratic” shell for the imperialist powers, centrally the U.S., dispatching blue-helmeted “peacekeepers” around the globe.

As we go to press the signatures of twelve European nations are being affixed to the North Atlantic Pact. The immense significance of this event transcends by far its effect on the “cold war” for which it is immediately designed. Four years after the collapse of Hitler’s “New Order” a new balance of power is being forged on the old continent. At the head of the coalition, for the first time in modern history, stands a non-European power—American imperialism, chief victor in the recent war, inheritor of the mantle of the British Empire, unrivalled pretender for the role of master of the world....

While the pact will hasten the demise of the United Nations, it is important to note, as the architects of the alliance continually assure us, that the pact is legally sanctioned by the UN charter itself. Once again the class character and class aims of a bourgeois institution has dynamited the illusions and demagogy of liberals, social democrats and Stalinists. Just as Hitler was able to use the statutes of the Weimar Constitution, “the most democratic in the world” to create his Nazi dictatorship, so American imperialism is establishing its juggernaut of war in the very bosom of “the organization of world peace.” The UN, like its predecessor, the League of Nations, as we predicted long ago, has been the breeding ground for war.

The general staffs have carefully calculated all contingencies and eventualities—all but one. That one is the alliance of the peoples of the world who above all want peace. Not the maneuverings of the Kremlin, but the class struggle in Shanghai and Indonesia, in Milan, the Ruhr and Detroit will prove the Achilles heel of this unholy compact of death, reaction and dictatorship.

—“North Atlantic Alliance,” Fourth International (April 1949)