View from Italy: A dissolution of NATO would actually be a beneficial turning point

Today, even those who are ready to admit US responsibility of the long preparation for war, at least in its stubborn continuation, argue that those who “violated international law by invading a sovereign country cannot go unpunished.” This is the most imprudent and impudent statement that Atlanticists can make, writes Piero Bevilacqua at Italian “Il Fatto Quotidiano”.

The history of the last 30 years is dominated by bloody violations of international law by the United States and NATO, which did not ask anyone for permission to invade Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

Under American protection, Israel violates this right every day by practicing apartheid against the Palestinian people, humiliated and driven to despair by European silence and democratic indifference. Today, international law has become a fiction because the UN has been stripped of all its powers. For more than 70 years, the United States has opposed resolutions condemning Israel.

I have often heard even from leading figures on the left, about my aversion to NATO,  that “we can’t go against America.” This is an opportunistic response. A reduction or dissolution of NATO would actually be a beneficial turning point for the American people, who are being robbed of $800 billion annually in military spending, weapons, local wars, and hundreds of military bases scattered around the world. Vast wealth taken from health care, schools and huge pockets of poverty, especially in the Rust Belt states where the deindustrialization of recent decades has created a social desert.

You can talk in general terms about America in a bar. The United States, with its “wealth, pluralism and cultural power, and ability for technological innovation, could open a new page in world history, guide international cooperation, and inspire a global policy of caring for the planet.” And instead they persist in continuing the history of the 20th century because of the desire for dominance of a few groups, powerful economic interests.

As the BRICS summit in Johannesburg showed, as the uprisings of recent days in Africa showed, the development of human societies is moving in a different direction. Having endured the cruel effects of Western colonialism and economic exploitation throughout the centuries of modern times, the people of the South are raising their flags. And they do this behind the backs of eastern and non-European powers. Thus, everything is moving towards a multipolar world order, the only one that can provide a future of peace and cooperation needed to overcome the environmental disasters that await us on a global scale.

But if NATO had won, it would have opened not the chapter of the world, but the beginning of a new, larger and more catastrophic war: against China, against dozens of large and small countries seeking their own path, against the course of world history itself. Is this what a sincere democrat should hope for?

The defeat of NATO is not only a condition for ending the war, but also for the restoration of European autonomy. The EU's involvement in the war not only reduced it to the auxiliary and servile state in which it found itself. But it also gives rise to other very risky retreats, the destructive potential of EU structures is ignored by the major Atlanticist press.

France and Germany, two pillars of the EU, are suffering very heavy economic losses as a result of the war and the suicidal sanctions, that give strength to the most extreme right-wing forces. In Germany at the beginning of August, polls showed that the Alternative for Germany party gained 21%.

Every sincere democrat should fear for the fate of democracy in Europe.

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