By John Catalinotto
April 29, 2026

The White House’s hostility to NATO and the reluctance of most NATO members to join the U.S.-Israeli aggression against Iran have brought sharper attention to the nature of this 77-year-old imperialist military organization.

Some of the U.S. strategic think tanks and editorial analysts in the corporate media — including The New York Times and Washington Post — have criticized the current MAGA administration for putting the very existence of NATO at risk.

What’s involved in the current tension within NATO is the relationship between the billionaire, imperialist ruling class of the U.S. and its counterparts in the European and Canadian imperialist states. Such wealthy individuals and the state officials who represent their interests have been the colonial oppressors of much of the world since the 19th century and still exploit the workers at home and plunder peoples abroad.

The capitalist ruling class of the U.S. and the capitalist rulers of the European Union (mostly NATO member countries) share these common class interests: keeping workers’ wages low and keeping the nations of the Global South unable to stop their plunder. Yet they face a changing world where they are continuously losing their domination, especially because of the challenge from People’s China. The loss of control and the crisis in their economic system since 2008 sharpens contradictions between them. [workers.org/2025/10/88233/ ]

Many people in the United States have reacted with anger at the horrors of the U.S.-armed Israeli genocide aimed at Palestinians and Lebanese people. They are disgusted by the military aggression aimed at the people of Iran.

They consider the MAGA group currently holding U.S. executive power to be grotesque, noted for its open racism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia and overall reactionary social program and now adventurist militarism and war crimes.

A look at NATO’s history illustrates, however, that this new period is not due solely to president #47.

NATO’s early role

The U.S. initiated NATO, which was founded in April 1949 by 12 members. The military alliance included all the states whose colonial empires comprised the bulk of the world before World War II except Japan. Their ruling classes plundered the territories and exploited oppressed countries, often massacring or enslaving the local populations and sometimes wiping out Indigenous peoples.

At the time, the U.S. was by far the dominant power among imperialist countries. Besides being undamaged by World War II and producing half the world’s goods, the U.S. had troops occupying countries throughout Western Europe, with the most troops in Germany. The U.S. was then the only nuclear-armed power; the first Soviet atomic bomb test took place in August 1949.

The Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, was not established until 1955, only after West Germany joined NATO and remilitarized. To accelerate West German rearmament, Washington quietly rehabilitated many of the top German officers who had served the Nazi regime.

While NATO has been treated as the force confronting the Soviet Union, its main task in the early decades was to prevent Communist parties throughout Western Europe from becoming the government of any West European state — or even becoming part of any government coalition.

Following the enormous damage to the productive forces of most European industries by the war, the European capitalist class was weakened economically. Pro-capitalist parties that colluded with the German occupation of their countries — and many did — had also lost much popular support.

As World War II was ending with a victory by the Soviet Red Army, Communist parties were at a high point in terms of public support. They had led resistance fighters in Yugoslavia and Albania that drove out the German occupiers and made working-class revolutions. In Greece, the Communist Party led the resistance, but the heavy intervention of Britain and the U.S. helped the monarchists win the civil war. (There were dramatic changes in East Asia and other parts of the Global South, but this article focuses on NATO.)

Communist parties also played a major role in the Resistance to the Nazi occupation in Western Europe, especially in Italy and France. As a result, the French Communist Party was consistently getting 15% to 20% of the vote, and the Italian CP got as much as a third of the vote in the mid-1970s.

NATO connected the dominant U.S. military with reactionary officers in Italy and Greece. NATO helped organize the 1967 colonel’s coup against the elected Greek government. The colonel’s military dictatorship lasted until 1973. In 1975, U.S. warships in NATO sailed to the waters around Lisbon to threaten intervention against the ongoing pro-working-class revolution in Portugal.

The U.S. deployed missiles to West German bases in the 1980s that increased the threat of a first-strike nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

The U.S. set up NATO’s bylaws to guarantee U.S. military leadership throughout its existence. U.S. generals always provided the top commander. The political head was always a European subservient to the U.S.

This military cabal, the pro-NATO propagandists insisted, represented “The Free World.” In reality, it was more like a syndicate of organized crime. The U.S. was the boss of all bosses, giving each smaller boss protection and a small share of the plunder seized around the world — in return for obedience and sharing the risks.

NATO’s new aggressive role after 1991

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in 1991, it would have made sense to also get rid of NATO if the goal had been to maintain the peace. Instead, Washington repurposed NATO as a U.S.-led intervention force worldwide.

NATO’s first war was in the Balkans. Its target was Yugoslavia, whose leaders and people were trying to remain independent and socialist. In 1999 NATO — with the U.S. leading the way — carried out a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia and Montenegro, the republics that were still in Yugoslavia.

The bombs and missiles targeted schools, hospitals, industries, bridges and other civilian targets, mainly in Serbia. In the end, the U.S., with support from other NATO countries’ militaries, was able to tear apart the multinational Yugoslav country, leaving mini-states that could more easily be exploited and plundered by U.S. and West European imperialism.

NATO military forces assisted the offensive to reconquer countries that had won some sovereignty earlier — Afghanistan,  Iraq, Libya, for example. NATO also placed hostile troops and military bases housing missiles ever closer to the Russian border. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party supported this use of NATO.

NATO membership had grown to 16 by 1990 and has doubled its number of member countries to 32 as of now, with most of the new member countries from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the three former Baltic Soviet republics, as well as Finland and Sweden.

NATO armies participated in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Both wars started during the Republican George W. Bush administration. During the Democratic Party’s Barack Obama administration, NATO air forces joined the attack against Libya in 2011. They left Libya a destroyed state and destabilized much of northern Africa.

While the Soviet Union existed

In the period the Soviet Union existed, it often provided material support for liberation organizations fighting to free their countries from colonial rule or from some puppet dictator. Some examples were Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia. The U.S. and its imperialist allies armed, financed and otherwise supported the puppet regime.

The class struggle Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 was now not limited to workers vs. bosses. On the international arena there was the direct confrontation of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, including the other Warsaw Pact countries, People’s China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba on one side and the imperialist camp led by the U.S. on the other. It also took the form of the national liberation struggles vs. the imperialist powers.

Two decades after the Soviet Union’s end, it was during the second Obama administration that the U.S. incited and supported a “color revolution” in Ukraine. This coup installed a regime hostile to Russia that included historical fascist Ukrainian elements, including organizers of the Azov Battalion. Victoria Nuland, the neocon U.S. official operating in Kiev in 2013-2014, directly aided the takeover by those who would become the new anti-Russian regime in Ukraine.

Nuland was noted for being caught saying, “F**k the EU,” when she learned that some of the European Union leaders opposed the U.S.’s aggressive steps. The new Kiev regime immediately attacked Russian-language speakers in the east of Ukraine and waged a war against the Donbass region from 2014-2022, until Russia directly intervened.

The MAGA president went a few steps further than Nuland by expressing his hostility toward the EU powers even more directly. He demanded the other NATO countries spend 5% of their gross domestic product on their military and buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers. He added a threat to seize Greenland, which officially “belongs” to Denmark, a NATO member, and whose population are mostly Indigenous people.

No more NATO?

Although #47 appears to despise NATO and most Democratic Party leaders support NATO, there is no reason for anti-imperialists to consider NATO’s disappearance a negative event. On the contrary, the antiwar movement and the working-class movement in general should work for NATO’s dissolution. Anti-imperialists in Europe and Canada are correct to demand that their countries get out of NATO, and NATO get out of their countries.

Even if NATO dissolves, however, the EU remains an imperialist coalition, although still not a centralized state. Most EU countries have already increased military spending and stepped up anti-Russia propaganda. Germany has begun steps to reintroduce conscription of troops and has already provoked youth protests against conscription.

The increased open hostility between the rulers of the EU countries and those of U.S. imperialism, even if it leads to an open breakup, will not by itself guarantee a victory for the workers and oppressed nations.

Just as in the U.S., the increased militarization taking place in Europe brings with it cuts in social services available to the working class. It will mean reduced real wages and the danger of a bigger regional war.

It will be important to develop solidarity of workers in the imperialist countries with all the laborers of the Global South and with workers in rival imperialist countries. They should be ready to unite to win, should the boss class in the imperialist countries try to sharpen their divisions.

The imperialist powers have often used “divide and conquer” against the oppressed. It’s time to reverse that tactic so that workers can “divide (the imperialists) and liberate (themselves).”