#NatoExit: Why Americans Should Demand the United States Withdraw from NATO

I am a working class American citizen. I’m also a Marxist, and I am sick to death of Forever War. It is way past time that we demanded some real America First foreign policy, and it is not only Americans that would benefit if we did, but the rest of the world, including the biosphere, would as well.

First, just a little history. When Bill Clinton first started expanding NATO eastwards in the 1990s, there was no longer any need whatsoever for the military alliance to continue existing. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Russia was a wreck. It was so weak it couldn’t even hold the Baltic States, Ukraine, or the Stans, much less the central and southeastern countries of the old Warsaw Pact, which had dissolved.

NATO was established during the Truman Administration as a defensive military alliance to prevent the spread of Soviet Communism, as exemplified by that real paranoid maniac, Josef Stalin. The premise was simple: Any attack on one NATO member was an attack on them all. The idea was to deter Stalin from trying to conquer any more European countries.

I think it safe to say that objective was achieved. For whatever reason, the Soviet Union never attacked any member of the alliance, or any neutral European country, for the rest of its existence.

The reason NATO expanded eastwards was not to protect countries like Poland, Hungary, and Romania from any Russian attack. It was expanded because every single one of those countries was a new market for the American and Western European military-industrial complexes. All of them were required to update their military to NATO standards, and hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars or euros poured into the coffers of the international arms industry.

NATO’s defensive nature was quickly forgotten. NATO took offensive action, first in Yugoslavia, then in Afghanistan, then in Libya. The results were horrendous for all three, and didn’t do anything for the working classes of any NATO country.

Now working class Americans are expected to enthusiastically pay cripplingly higher prices for gasoline, food, and probably damned near everything in the name of defending Ukrainian “freedom.” The proposed new defense budget is for $785 BILLION, plus another 13+ billion to supply weapons to Ukraine. We should not be cheering. We should be shouting HELL NO at the top of our lungs. Truckers should be obstructing all the traffic around Washington DC. Hell! We should be planning a general strike!

Americans need to take a good, long hard look in the mirror. We have the most expensive medical system in the world; a capitalist system that makes basic health care unaffordable for tens of millions of people. It couldn’t even handle a mutated common cold virus over the last two years; how can we expect it to handle something really deadly?

Our infrastructure is crumbling. Bridges collapse, potholes go unfilled, the power goes out somewhere every time there’s a storm, and some cities(Hello, Flint) don’t even have safe drinking water.

Most millennials and Gen Zers can’t even dream of a college education because we also have a capitalist higher education system. Our public primary schools don’t get the money they need, our teachers are disrespected and grossly underpaid, and politicians of both major political parties push for-profit charter schools that don’t teach critical thinking skills.

Our homeless population is burgeoning, as housing is not a right in this country, and many simply cannot afford rent and mortgage payments because they’re too damned high and our wages are too damned low. What public assistance programs exist are grossly underfunded, and means-tested to guarantee resentment from those who make just a few pennies an hour too much to qualify.

Most of our unions are corrupt, with employers easily bribing union officials to squash worker militancy whenever it rears its head.

Meanwhile, climate change continues. Hurricanes grow ever stronger and more destructive as they pummel the East and Gulf coasts, wildfires burn vast swathes of the West every summer, coastal cities face inevitable devastation from rising sea levels, and cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will likely be uninhabitable by the end of this century.

Whenever some politician actually proposes spending money on any of these things, our kleptocracy and its media lap dogs all chorus “How are we going to pay for that?,” but there is never any debate, much less serious opposition, to spending more and more money on war and weapons.

The American Empire has become the world’s biggest bully, bullying not only countries that can’t fight back if America’s capitalists see natural resources to exploit, but Americans themselves. Our police act like an occupying army in many cities, while prosecutors and courts imprison more people than Russia and China combined do in order to provide slave labor for the prison industrial complex, focusing on poor people in general and poor people of color in particular. The biggest white collar criminals never get more than a fine, and usually not even that.

And the American working class is supposed to be worried about Russia invading a neighboring country thousands of miles away after years of provocations and cries to Moscow for help from ethnic Russians? Wake the fuck up, people. (WTFU—did I just create a new acronym?)

We, at least the bottom 95% of the American people, need to demand that our government function as it was meant to. To obtain a more perfect union, to promote the general welfare, to serve its own people. The American government is not doing those things. Instead, it is pursuing an insanely risky foreign policy that could easily result, probably through mistake or accident, in a nuclear war that could kill us all.

There’s a very easy way to end this particular crisis in Ukraine now, and anything else that happens in Europe in the future which could cause one—withdraw the United States from NATO. We should listen to our first president, George Washington, and avoid entangling military alliances with foreign countries that can suck us into wars which are most definitely not in our interests.

We should also demand that the troops come home. All of them from all of the hundreds of unnecessary military bases we have encircling our so-called enemies. An unprovoked Russia is no threat to us. China depends on us for trade and definitely doesn’t want war with us. Iran, Venezuela, Cuba…none of them are threats, and there is simply no rational reason to go on pretending that they are.

It’s time to take care of ourselves. Then we will actually be able to cooperate with other peoples and countries to save our entire species, and our world, from the disastrous climate change our exploitative capitalist system has created and will make worse every single day until we get our shit together and put an end to it.

First step: #NatoExit . Then bring the troops home. Then spend our money on us.

Thank you for reading and have a good night.