“NATO members are only allowed to manufacture and purchase arms for defensive purposes.”
Not one of the analysts came to conclude that Russia’s demand is merely confined to stopping NATO from advancing eastward; to stop recruiting the former Soviet Republics, Ukraine, and Georgia, to join the alliance; for NATO to dismantle its military infrastructure in eastern Europe like the missile bases in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania; and to remove the stockpile of nuclear weapons in Germany and Turkey.
In short, Russia is demanding the decolonization of the whole of Europe. Maybe the demands would serve to destroy the meticulously arranged security architecture but the core and substance behind this is the complete decolonization of Europe.
We are saying this for it seems the victory of the US and the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany resulted in the imperialistic colonization of Western Europe. This became most apparent after the Cold War ended which saw the implosion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the members of the Soviet bloc were enticed to join NATO.
After defeating Germany, the US tried to retouch its image and role in history by presenting itself as the sole liberator of Europe, ignoring that it was the Soviet Union that paid the highest price to defeat Nazi Germany. The US played the role of liberator but arrogantly imposing its will to shape policy and interest in Europe. American imperialism was insidious because the US exploited to the hilt the members of the alliance through diplomatic machination to ease out the role of the Soviet Union by raising the fear of communist engulfment.
The US was able to justify the setting up of a formidable alliance to protect Western Europe. The Cold War came about in 1949 after wartime US president Franklin Roosevelt was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman wasted no time to impose the policy of containing of the Soviet Union. The concept of limited war was made part of the US policy that incidentally generated enormous profit in what US president Eisenhower would term as “military-industrial complex” with US arm industries having power and influence to shape US foreign policy over Europe.
Without containing Europe, the US would have far more difficulty building NATO. US policy makers realize that colonizing Europe is different from colonizing underdeveloped countries. An economically rehabilitated Europe could easily allow American investors to recoup their capital, much that Europeans have the skill, talent, and industry to rebuild their industrial infrastructure. Likewise, the US did not allow defeated Germany to pay compensation for that would be anachronistic to their concept of building a strong alliance for Europe.
The US was able to accumulate capital surplus, the country not having been devastated in WWII. Thus, to make the colonization of Europe palatable, the US has to impose financial and monetary changes to firmly dominate and control the economies by unilaterally pegging the value of its own currency. Through the Bretton Woods Agreement signed in 1946, the US was able to peg the value of the US dollar at $32 per ounce of gold. The US practically dictated the value of world exports, and facilitated economic dominance of Europe and of the whole world.
To prevent the eruption of financial imbalance, the US launched the so-called “Marshall Plan” to sustain the rehabilitation of Western Europe. Countries in Eastern Europe that were liberated by the Soviet Union were excluded. The same can be said of countries occupied by Japan. Instead, the US demanded from Japan reparations for the damage it caused to the economies of Asia like the Philippines.
Economically rehabilitating Europe and forming a strong defensive shield against the Soviet Union became the foundation for the stability of Europe under the tutelage of US imperialism. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 compelled the US to redraw NATO to one of open-ended membership. The end of the Cold War saw the implosion of the Soviet Union viz, an opportunity for the US to recruit the former members of the Warsaw Pact and states of the former Soviet Republic.
The US did not dismantle NATO as promised by US State Secretary James Baker, not for the reason it would imperil the entire security infrastructure of NATO but could expose the whole agenda of the imperialistic designs of the US and now free to penetrate Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asian regions. Demanding the US to withdraw would be asking them to decolonize in the region, and not that it could endanger the security of the Western Europe and the US.
Colonizing Europe under the protective mantle of an alliance became the US’s most plausible justification to remain in Europe. This explains, for instance, why the US is against the building of Nord Stream 2 because that could make Europe dependent on Russia on energy, specifically natural gas. It has even embarked on a policy of deindustrializing the former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia. It was against the idea of France to build an independent defense force for Europe is not so much that it could resurrect the specter of war in Europe but the orchestrated fear that Russia was about to gobble up Europe and deny its military-industrial complex of enormous revenue it has been raking in from the sale of weapons.
The US has to inculcate into the people of Europe that NATO is an alliance primarily intended to secure their freedom. For that, member-countries must pay for their defense like asking member-countries to pay for the stay of US bases in Europe. Today, members of NATO are obligated to contribute at least 2 percent of their GDP to the alliance.
Demanding that NATO move back the boundaries after the Cold War ended would unmask the truth that the US is deeply embedded in imperialism/colonizing Europe under the guise of promoting military alliance. With the US controlling NATO, it opened the whole of Western Europe to US arms dealers. This explains why the US suddenly became strict in the observance of intellectual property rights because the US wanted to control and regulate the sale and distribution of arms.
NATO members are only allowed to manufacture and purchase arms for defensive purposes. It is said that the Gaullist ambition of an independent European force was meant to satisfy the French ego of being at the center of the political arena wanting to project a balance between the two superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union. Though it was not overtly endorsed by the then Soviet Union, the policy of wanting to promote an independent force for Europe was a policy that was silently endorsed as seen by its crucial role in the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and later remained as the European Union.