The socialist correspondent is an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist journal. It supports all those fighting for peace and socialism. Putcuss 98, NATO, or non-alignment. On the 4th of April this year, Finland joined NATO, becoming its 31st member state, with Sweden also set to join soon.
With Finland's accession, NATO doubled the length of its border with Russia. Finland will now welcome US and NATO military bases onto its soil, including the capacity to station US nuclear missiles within five minutes striking distance of St Petersburg and seven minutes from Moscow. In military language, this will provide the US with nuclear primacy, that is, a nuclear first strike capability. Investigative historian Eric Zus explains that US nuclear missiles will, quote, be within just a seven minute blitz striking distance away from instantaneously annihilating Russia's central command, so fast that for Russia to be able to recognize the missile had indeed been launched and then to unleash Russia's nuclear arsenal in response would be impossible.
Until today, no NATO member nation was even nearly so close to the Kremlin. Finland's joining it gives to America's central command the nuclear primacy, the ability to win a nuclear war against Russia, not merely to prevent one, close quote. Zus goes on to say that the nuclear primacy nuclear war met a strategy includes acceptance, that at least a few million Americans would die in a US-Russia war, even under the best of circumstances, but considers that to be well worth America's then emerging after World War III as the unchallengeable master of the entire planet, end quote. The rhetoric that Finland joining NATO somehow makes the world, or even Finland, safer, is Cold War madness.
In February 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker gave his Soviet counterpart Edward Shavenadza, Ironclad guarantees that NATO's jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward. On the same day in Moscow, he famously told the Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that the alliance would not move, quote, one inch to the east end quote. Since then, 15 nation states east of Berlin have joined NATO, four of which directly border on Russia, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and now Finland.
Ukraine, which shares a 1,400-mile border with Russia, if not the final piece in the jigsaw, which would be Belarus and Georgia, would be the jewel in NATO's offensive crown. NATO's eastward expansion has nothing to do with defence. Defence against what? Russia's annual military budget of $61.7 billion is miniscule, compared with that of the USA, $778 billion.
It is comparable to that of Britain at just under 60 billion. A budget Britain's government is committed to doubling over the next seven years, and it is marginally less than each of France, Germany, and Japan, three nations that have also recently committed to massive militarisation. In addition to military expenditure, overseas military bases are useful indices of offensive capability and intent. Russia has around 35 of them.
Britain has 145. The US has approximately 750. China has five. When 12 states formed NATO in 1949, the excuse was, quote, to defend Western values and the way of life from Soviet socialism.
Bearing in mind that the Soviet Union had just lost 28 million citizens, defeating Nazi Germany and liberating two-thirds of Europe, in a war that the US had kept out of for five years, and a war in which Britain had for four years opted to squabble with Germany in North Africa over colonies, rather than open a Western front against the might of the Wehrmacht. We may want to question just what those Western values amounted to, other than naked imperial interest. Decades later, the Cold War narrative persisted, that NATO was formed to defend the West from the Warzel Pact. In fact, the Warzel Pact was not formed until 1955, after six years of NATO war mungering.
Predictably, when the Warzel Pact was wound up in 1991, NATO was not dissolved. On the contrary, it doubled its membership. Over 30 years later, it continues in its mission to marshal the rest of the world in accordance with the interests of exported Western capital, whilst subordinating its members to US hegemony. Since NATO's inception in 1949, NATO countries primarily the US have been involved in multiple wars of invasion and conquest under the guise of peacekeeping and conflict resolution.
According to one study, the US engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime changed during Cold War. Since the defeat of the Soviet Union in 1990, the War on Terror, in troops and imperial war of terror, has inflicted devastation with millions of fatalities, creating 30 million displaced people of whom the British government is seeking to wash its hands. Britain and NATO have either participated in these wars explicitly back the US, or covertly supported it, including in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria. Ukraine is the latest case of US military interference.
NATO powers and Western media have worked overtime to rewrite history and present the Ukraine war as a Russian provocation. The reality is that the US organised the coup in 2014 that overthrew the elected government and facilitated Kiev's eight-year war on the People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Skeptics should read the 2019 Rand report, over extending and unbalancing Russia, which spells out the US covert plans to drag Russia into a war in Ukraine. After the investigative report by Seymour Hirsch, there is little doubt that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline that brought Russian gas to Germany.
This was an act of state terrorism against Russia, but it was equally a devastating attack on Germany. The outcome is that the German people will have to pay 40% more for their gas, which will now be bought from US liquefied natural gas monopolies. It was a violent lesson in US power and coercion. NATO members will not be allowed to build international economic relations, which conflict with the interests of US monopoly capital.
NATO is a military alliance for imperial collaboration in exploiting threatening and where required brutalising states that wish to assert their independence. But it is also a tool of US hegemony for asserting control over its members. Rather than being an alliance for mutual security, NATO is a surreptitious threat to the independence of all its members, except the US, of course. NATO members join the alliance partly at least to share in the imperial booty.
But they are also banking on the alliance to uphold the interests of domestic capitalism against the exigencies of an enduring economic crash and social unrest. In that respect, NATO is the military expression of the IMF and the World Bank. Given no other choice, the ruling elites of other major capitalist states would rather be beholden to US capital and NATO, than to the revolutionary potential of their own working class. De-dollarisation.
The rejection of the dollar as the compulsory currency for international trade is indicative of the increasing strains on the US world order and the beginnings of new opportunities for non-alignment. The response of the US establishment of states abandoning the dollar is illuminating and alarming. US Senator Marco Rubio recently let the cat out of the bag in an astonishing outburst. Quote, Just today, Brazil, the largest country in the western hemisphere, cut a trade deal with China.
They're going to from now on do trade in their own currencies, yet right around the dollar. They're creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States. We won't have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there'll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won't have the ability to sanction them. Close quotes.
Rubio's view was endorsed by Fareed Zakaria writing in the Washington Post. The dollar is America's superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy.
And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt will be bought up by the rest of the world. Pentagon insider Eldridge Colby endorsed the view that the US might not be able to finance the world with China if the US dollar loses its status as the world's reserve currency. Close quotes. States with significant economic leverage, such as India, China, Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia, are now negotiating deals based on their own currencies.
These developments are not devoid of problematic repercussions. They are the wedge of a new multipolar world order that in the short term is destabilizing and carries the threat of new US-led conflicts. But they also carry the hope of a domino effect in world trade that opens up important opportunities for poorer non-aligned states to trade more freely without the destructive threat of sanctions and the imposition of debt that can never be paid off. The non-aligned movement, the NAM, had its origins in the Bandung Conference of April 1945 in Indonesia, inspired by three world leaders, Nehru of India, Tito of Yugoslavia and NASA of Egypt.
It was formally launched in 1961. It draws together 120 nations, representing nearly two thirds of the United Nations members and 55% of the world's population. It is independent of military blocks, today that effectively means not in NATO. The NAM has based its work on the 10 Bandung principles, which include respect for the sovereignty, equality and territorial integrity of all states, the rejection of any unconstitutional change of government as well as external attempts to change the regime of government, the preservation of the inalienable right that each state is free without interference from outside to determine its political social economic and cultural system and the rejection of aggression and direct or indirect use of force, and finally rejection of any unilateral economic, political or military measures.
For the first 30 years of its existence, the NAM played a crucial role in decolonization and the formation of new independent states. In the post 1990 US Unipolar World Order, the NAM has aspired to occupy a global political niche that seeks to oppose the West's unilateral actions on the world stage. NATO does not defend Britain, it ties us to the coattails of US foreign policy and embroiled us in military threats to the independence and very existence of other states. In so doing, it makes the UK a prime target for retaliation, and so long as Britain retains its nuclear arsenal and insists on flexing its imperial muscle like sending an attack to the South China Sea as it did last year, our NATO membership represents a self-inflicted existential threat.
The case for Britain withdrawing from NATO and joining the non-aligned movement grows stronger as the US Unipolar World Order begins to crack, and the US responses increasingly to wage war and to whip its allies into line. A non-aligned Britain would be free to participate in the international economic and trade alliances that are emerging such as BRICS, composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and to forge long-term peaceful cooperative relationships independently of the dollar. The outcome would be a more prosperous Britain and a safer world. If you'd like to read more or to subscribe to the journal, you can do this via our website at www.thesocialistcorrespondent.org.uk.