NATO, as it was, was built to try to resist Soviet domination. That was what it was about
and NATO no longer had a reason to exist. In fact, you could have disbanded NATO in the
1990s very easily if you wanted to. Instead, the hawks and the military-industrial establishment
persuaded not only that there should be no peace dividend, and you should keep
on doing the research and maintain the military establishments all around the country and abroad-
all of that apparatus should be maintained just in case. Not only that, but that NATO would expand.
So, we get this push to try to bring in all of those states which had been part of the Soviet
bloc into NATO. We get this urge and push to expand NATO. This was in some ways a crazy idea:
to expand it [at] a particular moment when Russia was on its knees. Russia had a collapsed economy.
Life expectancy in Russia was in decline. The U.S. and the International Monetary Fund was
telling Russia that they had to go through shock therapy in order to come into the capitalist
world and reap the benefits of global capitalism. What was the Soviet Union is in total shambles,
total collapse. It's being humiliated economically, absolutely humiliated economically,
and its monetary system collapsed. Actually if you traded things in Russia in 1992-93,
the trading item was bottles of vodka. So, the large corporations that existed traded bottles of
vodka. That was their currency rather than rubles because rubles were weren't worth anything. So,
the total economic collapse. Now, when you get a total economic collapse, what does the world do?
The total economic collapse that occurred after World War II was mitigated by a Marshall Plan.
That is, the U.S. went in and sort of said, 'Okay, we are going to revive the Japanese and the German
economies. Of course, you could say they did that just because they were good people. But no, they
were really doing it because that was the only way in which they could defend against Communism,
that they needed to develop vibrant capitalist economies in places like Japan and and West
Germany in order in order to say, 'Well, we have a better kind of world than than than the Commies
do.' There was no Marshall Plan for Russia. There was in fact almost a gloating, because this was
a time when people started to talk about the end of history. Everything is over. We have won, and
there were people in Russia saying. 'What do you mean we have won? You have won,
and what's happening to us? Well, we're down the chute. We're down, and nobody is helping
us. Absolutely nobody's helping us.' And at that very moment, what's going on militarily?
What is the United States and NATO doing? What it's doing is it's expanding its military capacity
and expanding it in a double fashion of you know expanding its rocketry and it's atomic weaponry
and all those kinds of things at the same time as it's actually beginning to bring more and more
people into NATO. So, you expand NATO and a lot of people at the time just said, 'This is insane.'
There's a man called George Kennan. Now, George Kennan was a kind of a a sort of elder statesman,
and he was the big designer in the 1960s of what was called 'the containment policy'. His approach
to the Communist threat was to say, 'Look you cannot go against it directly. We cannot risk
an interchange of nuclear weapons and all that kind of thing because
by then, both Russia and China had atomic weaponry. We cannot risk that. So, we contain.
And he said, 'If we can develop strong and vibrant capitalist economies
surrounding the Soviets, surrounding China, then the threat of Communism is contained,
and that's what we do.' So, he was no friend of Russia or China,
but what Kennan saw in the 1990s was the threat from Russia in particular is over. It's over.
So, what did he say? And I have a quote from what he said in 1998 which I think is very telling.
He went to NATO, and he gave a speech. And he said, 'Look, I'm appalled at what you're doing,'
and he said, 'I think this is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians
will gradually react quite adversely, and it will affect their policies. I think this,' he said,
'is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.
The expansion of NATO would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and they, the NATO expanders, will
then say, 'We always told you that that is the way in which the Russians are going to behave.'
He said, 'but this is just wrong.' In a way, Putin has reacted in exactly the way that Kennan
suspected would happen if you went ahead with this expansion of NATO and pushed it up to the edges of
Russia. And so here now we are in this mess. Again, very important,
I'm not saying this to excuse anything that that Putin is doing. I'm just simply saying
what we have here is the keeping alive of the U.S. capitalist economy through military expenditures,
the constant expansion of militarized interests and the constant expansion of the
of the military budget. This is actually creating a situation in the world where if people are not
on board with this- that is, if people are not totally sort of involved inside of this but
are on the outside of it as Russia and China were- then you're going to get the reaction.
And what concerns me is to say look we probably need NATO right now to be able to resist
these awful things which Putin is up to. But if and when this is over, one of the
things we should do is to start to say, 'Hey, it's about time we demilitarize the economy.'
And it would be so interesting to see how well capital can survive with a demilitarized economy.