by Danaka Katovich

[Brochure in the Sarajevo 80’s Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia]

Today is the anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO has long been misunderstood, under-discussed, and marketed to the American people as a force for peace and stability in the world.

In reality, NATO has been one of the biggest purveyors of war and instability in the last seventy years – acting as a political enforcement arm for U.S. global domination.

For decades, NATO was a way of taking other countries hostage under the guise of collective security — but NATO only acted on behalf of global oligarchs and billionaires — not Europeans, not Africans, not everyday Americans. Trump’s administration has been flirting with departing from NATO, which means after decades of gross military buildup, the United States is deciding it hardly needs anyone else to wage its wars anymore, except for maybe Israel. It’s proven that in Venezuela and Iran. That is the American way: use it up and throw it to the side. All the countries conned into capitalism, once treated with feigned regard, are left to deal with their own fates.

On NATO’s anniversary, the boss of that mafia is currently waging wars on Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Understanding NATO is critical to understanding the U.S. drive for global domination over economic and political systems. One thing I’m reflecting on today is how NATO and the United States choose the targets of their barbarity. They seemingly only go after nations that could prove the existence of an alternative to their exploitative, profit-driven systems by which they run the world.

Yugoslavia was once an inspiring example of an alternative economic system to capitalism before the IMF gutted it and NATO conducted its first “offensive” operation against it. First, the IMF created economic instability, internal divides cracked wide-open, and NATO dropped bombs on civilian infrastructure. In former Yugoslavia, I talked to people who yearned for the days before the war. Families were scattered across borders and their economies depressed by privatization. A peace deal negotiated far away codified the state of limbo and political uncertainty.

How could NATO allow a country who stood on its own, separate from the Soviet Union and the capitalist bloc led by the U.S to exist? How could NATO, with capitalism enshrined into its founding documents, allow for millions of Yugoslavs to experience too much success under socialist self-management in the workplace? What if they proved to the masses of oppressed workers in the U.S. that there was another, more dignified way to live?

There have been dozens of cases like Yugoslavia since then, and with the U.S. and NATO still at the helm, there will likely be more.

After the Cuban people victoriously overthrew their puppet dictator Bautista and built their country on their terms, how could the U.S. allow its own people to see such a powerful people-led revolution so close to its own borders without some sort of punishment? The U.S. blockade in Cuba has been in place for over sixty years now, and it’s reached its most brutal chokepoint. When I was in Cuba in 2022, no matter where people lived, they could go to a doctor and not have to pay a cent. All the children could read and write. Cubans were collectively writing one of the world’s most progressive family codes. It passed by a popular vote soon after I left. What if the American people saw proof that they could chart their own course? No matter what tech oligarchs or authoritarians like Trump have to say? What if their rights were in their own hands?

For Iran, it’s simple. What if Americans saw proof that there’s a country that doesn’t do whatever Israel wants it to? What if they saw proof there are people who won’t lay down to U.S. hegemony without a fight?

What if people in the United States saw through the propaganda that says people around the world were their enemies? What if NATO and the IMF didn’t exist to squash alternative systems in the global south? Maybe instead, people in the U.S. would see that the ones Trump calls our “enemies” might have something to teach us about dignity and standing up for ourselves. Then what?