Upstream - NATO Pt. 2: The Long War on the Third World w/ Pawel Wargan

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

It’s not hyperbole to suggest that the imperialist wars waged upon the Global South by the United States and the imperialist bloc that it leads are akin to a protracted genocide. The sheer amount of death, carnage, destruction, immiseration, crushed dreams, is almost unfathomable. But it’s real. And it’s the status quo for what we love to refer fondly to as "Western Civilization." And there’s no other force more responsible for implementing this protracted genocide on the Third World than NATO. And in today’s conversation—Part 2 of our ongoing series on NATO—we’re going to explore the role that this military alliance has played in the long war on the Third World.  Pawel Wargan is an organizer and researcher based in Berlin and the coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International. He’s the author of the Monthly Review piece “NATO and the Long War on the Third World” which we’ll be focusing our conversation around today.  In this episode, Pawel tells us about the fascist roots of NATO, its “dark mandate” which ushered in an era of terror against the populations of the Global South leading to a protracted genocide that has left tens of millions dead and even more immiserated. We talk about the way that NATO operates in Africa, Poland, and how NATO has served as a leading opposition to liberation struggles in the Third World and across the globe.  Further resources: NATO and the Long War on the Third World, Monthly Review Progressive International Related episodes: Our ongoing series on NATO Our ongoing series on Iran Our ongoing series on Palestine Our ongoing series on China Our ongoing series on the Alliance of Sahel States Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism w/ Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante The Imperial Boomerang w/ Julian Go Intermission music: "Black Serpent" by Noroth Covert art: Soviet anti-NATO propaganda poster Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Ah Imperialism as we know because it is an extension of capitalism, its very purpose is to continue expanding. Its very purpose is to continue bringing in more profits and accumulating ever greater shares of global labour and global resources and cannibalizing in effect increasing shares of the planet, which is one reason we have the climate and environmental crisis right now. And so having military capacities which are able to prevent that from happening with the US and Israel failing to topple the Iranian government and failing to topple the Islamic revolution and thereby sustaining a project of economic sovereignty there,

that's a very significant defeat for imperialism. And it's a very clear indication that something has changed qualitatively and quantitatively in the balance of power in the international system, where the kind of policies where the West could ride roughshod over global South sovereignty are increasingly challenged. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that

invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond and I'm Della Duncan. It's not hyperbole to suggest that the imperialist wars waged upon the global south by the United States and the imperialist bloc that it leads are akin to a protracted genocide. The sheer amount of death, carnage, destruction, immiseration, crushed dreams is almost unfathomable. But it's real, and it's the status quo for what we love to refer fondly to as Western civilization. And there's no other force more responsible for implementing this protracted genocide on the Third World than NATO. And in today's conversation, part two of our ongoing series on NATO,

we're going to explore the role that this military alliance has played in the Long War on the Third World. Pavel Vargin is an organizer and researcher based in Berlin and the coordinator of the Secretariat of the Progressive International. He's the author of the monthly review piece NATO and the Long War on the Third World, which we'll be focusing our conversation around today. and the long war on the Third World, which we'll be focusing our conversation around today. In this episode, Pavel tells us about the fascist roots of NATO, its dark mandate which ushered in an era of terror against the populations of the global south, leading to a protracted genocide that has left tens of millions dead and even more immiserated.

We talk about the way that NATO operates in Africa, Poland, and how NATO has served as a leading opposition to the liberation struggles in the Third World and across the globe. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give

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Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's my conversation with Pavel Bargay. Pavel, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a great pleasure to finally connect. Big fan of your program and thank you for inviting me. Yeah, of course.

And thank you so much for that. Let's start with an introduction. Maybe you could just start with telling our listeners a little bit about the work that you do and kind of what got you into this work in the first place? Sure, I guess that the first part of the question is easier to answer than the second, but I am from Poland originally. I work now in an organization

called the Progressive International, which has just celebrated its fifth anniversary in May this year, although we haven't publicly commemorated it yet due to other commitments. And the Progressive International is an experiment. It's an attempt to revive the historic tradition of internationalism, to build a front that's made up of different kinds of progressive movements and progressive forces from different parts of the world. These are political parties, trade unions,

national liberation movements, peasant movements, and other kinds of organizations that are broadly united behind an agenda of liberation. And our task for the past five years, and we're still figuring it out in different ways, was to try and find actions and campaigns that can unite these forces strategically in ways that advance the individual consciousness of the movements taking part, but also that build power that's greater than the sum of its parts. So we're going to be spending most of our time today discussing a piece that I came across of yours recently. It's called NATO and the War on the Third World.

And it was published by Monthly Review and monthlyreview.org. And so this episode that we're doing today, it's part two of our NATO series. Two weeks ago on our last public episode we spoke with Alina Xenophontos covering sort of the basic foundations, the basic introduction to NATO and I want to take most of this episode to dive into your piece pretty deeply but maybe just to start I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about how NATO is organized because I don't actually really know much about that. I'm not sure most

people really do. Like how it works, how membership works, what countries are members. I mean, you don't have to like list every country, but how does the decision-making process work? Who runs the show? Like all of those kinds of questions. I'm wondering maybe if we can just start by like laying that foundation before we dive into your piece. I mean, in a sense, it's a tricky question. It's a question with many different layers. And of course, we could talk about the political geography of NATO, right? The fact that there are 33 members after the recent expansion with Finland and Sweden joining. We could talk about the internal governance model which NATO itself describes as a process that's, you know, where

decisions are made collectively and the organization is governed by consensus. But it doesn't take a very hard look or very deep dive into the organization to see through that language, right? The very recent summit, all it took was a bit of posturing from Trump and a few threats aimed at European partners for the entire alliance to fold behind US demands, despite the fact that that's opened severe frictions within the organization. And I think it's a lot more helpful to think

through questions of who runs the show, in whose interest is the show being run, not by looking at NATO through the lens of political geography, but by looking at NATO through the lens of class. Now before I go into that, it's worth saying that NATO was not the only treaty organization that was founded after the Second World War. It was part of this much broader global grand strategy of economic and military encirclement and containment of communism, and it included the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, which was called SEATO for short, and the Central Treaty Organization, which was called CENTO for short. Now those two organizations no longer exist.

The first basically collapsed as a result of the contradictions unleashed by the US war in Vietnam, and the second disintegrated after the Iranian revolution, after Iran decided to chart a political path independent of or outside the sphere of US imperialism and left the treaty organization. But NATO persisted and the reason that it persisted I think says something very interesting about its positionality in the global class struggle, but also internally it reveals a lot about the kind of position of Europe versus the United States. So NATO was founded very explicitly to contain the spread of communism. Now, did that mean that the original founding

members of NATO believed that they faced Soviet troops coming across the so-called Iron Curtain imminently? I don't think that they really believe that. But there was a genuine fear, there was a genuine threat in the wake of the Second World War, in particular in Europe's peripheral countries, in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, to a lesser extent, in France and in other places, where you had powerful communist movements that won tremendous prestige on the back of the role of the partisans and their own military formations in the fight against fascism and Nazism during the war, who were very close to seizing power. And that was a profound threat to imperialism as a whole.

And so through various infrastructures and through various mechanisms, from the Marshall Plan to the Truman Doctrine to NATO, the United States engineered a situation in which the Western European economies first were brought in line with the US economic template for the world, were cultivated in ways that made them into stable and reliable export markets for the United States. And then in a sense, NATO secured that consensus, in some cases through violence. So you had in countries like Italy, famously, Operation Gladio, which was a longstanding, decades-long process by which NATO funded and armed right-wing fascist criminal formations as a tool to wield against communism and the socialist and communist

forces in the country, but also to a lesser extent the presence of US military forces on the continent, increasing presence, and eventually from the late 1970s, the presence of US nuclear weapons on the continent prevented the emergence of any anti-systemic alternative throughout Western Europe. And so you're left with a situation in which the old colonial powers came together through this kind of this manufactured process, this process that was scripted largely out of Washington into what Samir Amin called the collective imperialism of the Triad.

And the Triad here refers to broadly to Japan, the European Union and the United States, where for the first time instead of seeing inter-imperial rivalry, we have an imperialism whose power is concentrated in a series of institutions and global infrastructures, including NATO, but where the participants in that system themselves have differential power within it. And so Europe was always allowed to benefit from this imperial arrangement, but we have very clear examples of where it may be overstepped its mandate in ways that were unfavorable to the US and were punished for it. You know, one example that comes to mind is when West Germany, together with the Soviet Union, constructed the so-called friendship pipeline, it was a major gas pipeline that ran I think from Siberia, extensive project, extremely expensive, huge German investment,

and Ronald Reagan orchestrated a covert operation to blow it up. And we know this, I mean, Antony Blinken wrote about this in his memoirs, it's a widely known fact now. But so Europe was kept in this, not in a position of vassalage, I think it's important to acknowledge Europe's own role in the imperialist system, but in a subordinate position to the United States. And so NATO, I think, represents part of a much bigger matrix within which those interests of imperialism are managed, both internally within nation states

and on a much more expansive global stage. Interesting. When you say internally in nation states, can you expand on that part of it a little bit? Well, what I mean is precisely the point I made earlier, which is NATO actively working to block anti-systemic political alternatives in countries by basically foreclosing pathways for socialist or revolutionary projects. And I want to talk more about this a little bit later in the context of colonialism and NATO's role in that, but there are interesting precedents also from Portugal from the 1970s of a country that was on the cusp of a socialist transformation and NATO stepping in to thwart it.

So it's this active cultivating and nurturing of political reaction against projects of liberation within countries that serve to secure the imperial consensus within much of the Western world. So you open your piece in monthly review with a little bit of history. So you basically touch on the rise of communism in the early 20th century, as well as the embrace or at least tolerance of fascism by the US and the UK as this bulwark against the threat posed by communism. And in fact, the primary aim of the United States during much of the 20th century was to defeat communism globally, right? And so I would like to read a passage from the piece here, and then I'm gonna

sort of ask you to reflect and ask a follow-up question. So it's a bit of a longer passage, but I think it's a really great passage and really important. So you write, Unconsummated on the European battlefield the Cold War between the Eastern and Western nations alchemized into an epic assault by the North against the South. From Korea to Indonesia, Afghanistan to Congo, Guatemala to Brazil, tens of millions of lives were claimed in a battle that would pit popular forces against a shape-shifting imperialism that tolerated no dissidence from its extractive drive. If the United States and its allies could not defeat the Soviet Union in direct military

confrontation, they would wield extreme violence in the service of a grand strategy that, as early as 1952, sought to establish nothing less than preponderant power. As British historian Eric Hobbsbawm wrote, the violence, both actual and threatened, unleashed in this time, could quote, reasonably be regarded as a third world war, though a very peculiar one. With the advent of the atomic bomb, the cold zones of this war threatened at times to sear humanity from existence. Between these two axes of the Cold War, then, we find a historic battle between competing engines of emancipation and submission." emancipation and submission." End quote. So tell us about this Third World War

and how it fits into this process of imperialism and monopoly capitalism, and why, as you write in the piece, quote, the struggle between imperialism and decolonization must be understood as the principal contradiction, the determinative battle for the future of humanity. Yeah, so in the piece I cite the philosopher Eric Hobsbawm who makes this point that the period that emerged after the Second World War could well be described as a Third World War.

And this is a point that Domenico Luserto and many others have made because the violence that I think underpinned the second world war and also the first world war simply shifted to other geographies. Now there's a very powerful set of writings produced in hindsight by anti-colonial thinkers like Franz Fannin, like MSSR who look back at the phenomenon of European

fascism and they say, look, you've been doing this to us for decades and centuries. You've shut your eyes to it, you've legitimized it, and now you're surprised and it comes back to your borders. And the point was that, to a certain extent, fascism as a kind of supremacist, exterminist, genocidal ideology was already practiced by pretty much all of the European empires in different parts of the world. And so we can have a much more expansive vision of history, which looks at not an individual conflicts, but as a kind of ongoing conflict

between struggles for liberation and struggles to secure a consensus or system of oppression on a global scale. Now, I think that struggle really picked up pace with the revolution in the Soviet Union in 1917. We have to remember that that revolution, that project was the first target of Nazi Germany. And in fact, it was also quickly attacked by all the Entente powers from the First World War, including the United States and Britain, who led a multi-frontal invasion that lasted from, I think, 1919 to 1925. And so different people situate the start of what we now call the Cold War at

different periods, but I really think it begins at some stage with the carving out of a massive territory from the sphere of imperialist accumulation on the global scale, which was a tremendous threat to the entire Western Bloc, including Nazi Germany, which was the first to respond to it. Now, immediately at the end of the Second World War, plans were drawn up in Washington and in London to destroy the Soviet Union. Infamously, Churchill had plans made in what was known Operation Unthinkable to use the newly developed nuclear bomb, which had just been tested on the people of Nagasaki

and Hiroshima to destroy Soviet industry. And there was an explicit threat made at one point that every industrial center from Moscow to Beijing and then further afield would be destroyed. I think this was in the context of the Korean War. If Moscow intervened in the Korean War, I think that was the threat. I can remember the exact date. But so with the end of the Second World War, we launched into a continuous, really continuous sequence of extremely violent U.S., primarily U.S.-led wars against forces of liberation in the global south, which could not be fought directly

against the Soviet Union for fear of mutual annihilation from 1949 when the Soviet Union developed the bomb. So you had in the early 1950s, the war in Korea, which we know killed 20% of the North Korean population, destroyed some 90% of its buildings to the point that US fighter pilots were complaining about the lack of targets to bomb. You had eventually the war against the liberation movement in Vietnam and those were the direct conflicts among many others but you also had the emergence of this form of indirect warfare in places like Indonesia where the United States helped orchestrate a coup

against a popular progressive government in what was then I think, the fifth most populous country in the world, and installed a vicious dictatorship that actively exterminated anyone with communist sympathies. And those were significant figures anywhere in the global south at that time. And officially the death toll is at somewhere around a million, some estimated to be at around 4 million. You have the same throughout Latin America, throughout Africa, coups, regime change operations and so on.

And these are tens of millions of lives. You know, if you tally them up, you're looking at 20, 22, 23, 24 million lives. That's the direct toll of these conflicts that already I think would legitimate the use of the term third world war. But there's also an indirect death toll that I think we also have to pay attention to because when you kill a person like Salvador All to because when you kill a person like Salvador Allende, when you kill a person like Thomas Sankara, you don't only kill an individual but you dismantle a political project that carried a promise of establishing the basics of human dignity for its people.

A project that promised and in many cases succeeded in delivering health care, in delivering housing, in delivering jobs, in delivering all of the foundations of a dignified life. And that pulled out from under society's feet, produces outcomes that are not only no less lethal than war, but in many cases are more lethal. They've produced conditions in which today you have 2 billion people who live in food insecurity, you have 3 billion people who can't afford a good diet, you have 3 billion people who don't have access to a cooking stove, you have 4 billion people who don't

have access to safe sanitation facilities, and 4 billion people who don't have access to safe sanitation facilities and 5 billion people who don't have access to basic, the most basic health services. And that produces every year violence on, and this is no hyperbole, it's been described that way, violence on a genocidal scale. You're looking at 5 million people annually because they don't have access to healthcare, 9 million people because they're hungry or have diseases related to food. You have a million people who die because they have diarrhea, because they don't have clean water or sanitation. And the list goes on and on and on. And so the aggregate death toll, the aggregate toll that's imposed by imperialism on humanity, not even talking about the climate crisis, is equivalent to an ongoing active unceasing

and total war that's waged by imperialism against the world's working people. Like I mentioned earlier, we spoke about the formation of NATO both with Alina Zanifantos in Part 1, but also you've mentioned it a couple times now explicitly as an anti-communist project. One thing though that we didn't really touch on last time that I'd love to kind of get more deeply into with you is the role that fascism plays in NATO and or has played historically in NATO in many ways like fascism was explicitly like you know fascists were explicitly absorbed into NATO after World War two can you talk about that fascist foundation a little bit more explicitly and then maybe give us some examples of what you call in the piece this dark mandate by which NATO terrorized much of the global south through the 20th century?

Right. So I think that this question can be answered in two ways. On one level, there's a structural sense in which NATO has absorbed the mandate of fascism into its very being through its founding mission, the containment of communism, the containment of projects of liberation. Now, I understand fascism as a kind of extreme form of reaction that emerges when capitalism faces crisis, when the institutions of social

democracy and liberal democracy are dropped to the side in the service of protecting the capitalist and imperialist nucleus that comes under threat because of the internal contradictions within capitalism. So it is an answer to capitalist crisis, which depends on extreme violence, extreme political repression, the destruction of institutions of democracy and so on. So in that sense, the mission of NATO to prevent liberation carries on the mandate from fascism.

And we're seeing now within NATO member states as opposition say to the genocide in Palestine increases, that again, this facade of liberal democracy is very quickly being discarded in the service of measures that are profoundly anti-democratic and profoundly repressive. You see in the United Kingdom now organizations like Palestine Action are being prescribed as terrorist organizations. So this is a designation that was reserved for a large part in history for national liberation, anti-colonial movements of the global south to suffocate them, to stifle any solidarities

with them, has now turned back against solidarity movements in the global north and anyone who will support them internally. So this is a very profound escalation. You have increasing numbers of political prisoners in the United Kingdom, in Germany, in the United States. So there's this process within NATO where the contradictions produced by the crisis of capitalism, the crisis of imperialism and its actions abroad in the service of defending that capitalism and that imperialism are producing fascist tendencies once again within the NATO countries.

So that's the structural reason. But there's a more direct sense in which NATO was an inheritance of fascism. One of the founding members was the Portugal of Antonio Salazar, who was an explicitly fascist dictator who ruled the country until the carnation revolution toppled him in 1974. But beyond Antonio Salazar, you had a series of extremely high ranking NATO officials who were drawn directly from the cream of the crop of the Nazi regime. You had people like Adolf Hitler's chief of staff, Adolf Huysinger, who became the chairman of the NATO military committee in 1960, 1961, I think. You had Erwin Rommel's, who was a Nazi field marshal, Erwin Rommel's chief of staff, who was commander-in-chief

of NATO's forces in Central Europe, also in the late 1950s. He would be replaced by a former general staff officer of the Wehrmacht, high command, Johann von Kilmensegg. You had people like Franz Josef Schulze, who was a senior lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, who also became the commander in chief of NATO forces. And the list goes on and on and on. So, you had this absorption of the Nazi forces into the alliance, which served some end. I don't think that story is very well known or very well has been thoroughly investigated yet, and perhaps it's surely to know, but we know for example that one of the strategies

of the Nazi regime, two of the strategies of the Nazi regime in its war against the Soviet Union was one, the weaponization of Islamic separatism in the Soviet Union and the weaponization of far-right movements on the Western flank or the Soviet or the Eastern front to chisel away the social consensus, to chisel away, to build partisan fronts behind enemy lines, to chisel away at the Red Army's capacity to fight. And we know that some of those same strategies were later absorbed into NATO and used throughout the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And so there is an absorption of knowledge and an absorption of strategic insight and

strategic orientations into the Alliance directly through the individuals that came to play a significant role in NATO. And now part of what I call the dark mandate is NATO's active role as a bulwark of European colonialism, especially on the African continent. Of course, Portugal, Antonio Salazar's Portugal, had extensive colonial holdings in southern Africa, and NATO directly funded, armed, provided diplomatic cover for, provided intelligence for those military operations, for those aggressions. You know, Amal Kar-Kabral, the great anti-colonial leader, wrote in his writings that he would find on the battlefield weapons from Germany, weapons from the United States, weapons from

Italy, weapons from France, a very similar kind of story to what we see with Zionism today. And so you had, through collectivizing the power of imperialism, this kind of international class division, NATO also supported the continuation of the colonial project in the global south through extreme violence and through the provision of weapons. And so that is what I meant by this dark mandate that was formed and then kind of out of reaction in Europe, led by the United States and weaponized and deployed in the service of preserving a system of imperial privilege and white supremacy in the international order.

Can you talk maybe a little bit explicitly, because we're doing this episode series on the Alliance of Sahel States, and one of our guests mentioned briefly, and I didn't follow up with her on this, but she mentioned how many African countries are actually just kind of like NATO proxies in a sense. I'm wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about that, if that's something that you might be able to unpack for us or give us some examples of how NATO operates in Africa to extend this sort of imperialist domination over the continent. So I'd like to focus on one example, which I think in a sense is reflective of the whole.

And that example is Morocco. Now, Morocco has a deeply reactionary monarchy, which lays claim to what the United Nations recognizes as the last colony in Africa, which is Western Sahara. Western Sahara was a Spanish colony, which officially ceased to be a Spanish colony, or actually, officially never ceased to be a Spanish colony, but it was abandoned by Spain in 1975, effectively, and left to Morocco and Mauritania. There's a national liberation movement in Western Sahara called the Polisario and the Polisario immediately fought a war to secure its territory from

the invading countries and it kicked out Mauritania but Morocco was able to not only secure but also extend its reach over the territory of Western Sahara. Now I visited the camps in which hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi refugees live in the south of Algeria. These refugee camps were established after the so-called Black March when Morocco sent in settlers and troops to occupy large parts of Western Sahara, including many of its major cities, all of its major cities. And in these refugee camps, there's a museum of the ongoing War of

Liberation. And in that museum, you find weapons and military equipment that was captured from Morocco in that struggle. And you find the wreckage of a French fighter jet, you find artillery guns from Germany, you find armored personnel carriers from the United States, you find land mines from different countries United States, you find landmines from different countries and machine guns from different countries, you find the wreckage of an Israeli drone. And so once again, you have the story of the entire, pretty much the entire NATO block, sustaining this colonial occupation through a proxy in the service of what?

In the service of securing that region's tremendous resource wealth. So you have not only some of the most abundant fishing waters in the world which are being fished to extinction now, but you also have huge reserves of phosphates and also tremendous amounts of land which are now being used in these renewable energy projects in the service of General Electric in the US or Siemens in Germany and also served to greenwash the occupation because then, you know, Morocco can show up at COP and say, look, we're doing all this renewable energy, all these renewable energy projects are very

progressive. And so NATO is serving there to secure a status quo that again allows for this unequal international order to be sustained and allows for a colonial arrangement to be sustained against the people who have been struggling for their liberation since 1975. And that's a very similar role to the role that NATO has played in many other countries across the continent. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Pavel Vargin. We'll be right back. You must......sorrow of the audience have given. Let it die... ...and see you. The The last serpent creeps Through the shadows Waves with ease Murders the born The last serpent creeps

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So as we discussed, NATO was designed as this sort of global anti-communist enforcement project, if you wanna call it that, but it was also designed just to crush any opposition to like US or to a lesser extent European hegemony globally and maybe if you could tell us a little bit about the Wolfowitz doctrine and this idea of the grand chessboard that you talk about in your piece like what were these strategic documents intended to do and how did NATO implement these grand

designs more generally? So the Wolf of its doctrine is a very interesting document. It was formally called defense planning guidance, which was a document that was leaked by the New York times in the early 1990s, and it's stipulated explicitly what was implicit in the question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the

question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the question of the less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. And by preponderance, they mean what we now call unipolar power, total hegemony. And so it was clear that the Soviet Union was disintegrating, that pole and the global balance of power was withdrawing, was receding.

And the defense planning guidance basically said the primary goal, the primary objective of US foreign policy now is to prevent the re-emergence of a rival on the scale of the magnitude of the Soviet Union anywhere else in the world. So it was explicitly a strategy for domination and it paved the way for the emergence of the US's unipolar dominance over the world. Now, Russia was always a very important part in that project. In a sense, the collapse of the Soviet Union secured US control over that tremendous landmass, the biggest country in the world, one of the wealthiest in terms of its resource base. Because through the involvement of US experts, of US institutions, of US political pressure, of US money, an economy that was underpinned by planned industrialization and therefore necessitated a very broad social

safety net for its people to sustain a large and active workforce, was transformed overnight into an economy primarily based on rents. So this was oil and gas being extracted upwards to a national oligarchy, a newly emergent national oligarchy, and then siphoned through them outwards, primarily to Wall Street and to a lesser extent to the city of London and other financial centers in the world.

So you had this victory, but empire has a habit of beating down the defeated again and again and again to extinguish from them any impulse for sovereignty. And there was a fear that was expressed in the book that you cited, the Grand Chessboard, that Russia would try to reassert its role in the international system. Now, the Grand Chessboard was written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a Polish-American diplomat, basically, who served under Jimmy Carter as the national security advisor and had a bunch of other roles in United States foreign policy.

And he wrote this book in 1997, and timing I think is really relevant because it was published just a year or two years before NATO was expanded eastward, not by one inch as was promised to the Soviet Union by James Baker but by a thousand kilometers when Poland and other countries were absorbed into the alliance. So he wrote this book called The Grand Chessboard and in it he argued that Russia's resurgence and historical ties with Ukraine were a central factor in the geopolitical balance of power globally. And he believed, as many US strategists did, that US control over Eurasia as a whole was central to this strategy articulated in the defense planning guidance of preventing any other power from

achieving a dominant role in the international system. So to preserve American primacy, Brzezinski argued, you have to secure control over what he called this hitherto closed area, which is the territory of the former Soviet Union. And he said that the central piece on that chessboard was Ukraine. And so one way to think about NATO expansion is precisely as this creeping, slow-moving movement to realize that long-standing vision

of tearing Ukraine away from its historical partner and ally, Russia, pulling it into the Western orbit, weaponizing it in the service of dismantling Russian sovereignty so that the US could gain control over the entirety of the Eurasian landmass, and also implicitly encircling

China in the process. So we did talk a little bit about Yugoslavia and Ukraine in part one, but I'm wondering if you can actually talk a little bit about your native country of Poland, and maybe even in the context of what we were just talking about. Can you describe the impact that NATO had on Poland? Yeah, in some sense, it's a little bit too early to make a firm historical assessment, because that story is still being written now. Where in a sense at the apex of popular support for NATO were, you know, involved, very loyal as a country, as a political system to the Alliance in ways that I think will backfire at some point as the contradictions within the

Alliance tighten or intensify, but I think there are a few things we can say here. The first has to do with Poland's historical orientation. And there's a story that I like to tell about a company that was established under Socialist Poland. We had, as your listeners will know, a socialist political system from the end of the Second World War until 1990, basically, 1989, 1990. And as a socialist country, we were, our foreign policy was governed by the principles of internationalism. And it was a very strong move to support countries that were emerging from colonial rule

in establishing the foundations of sovereign development. And so we had a number of companies, number of institutions under the, under this operating under the state that went to countries throughout the global South to provide technical support, to provide architectural support, to help with urban planning. And there was an institution and a company that partnered on developing and realizing

a master plan for the long-term development of Baghdad in Iraq. I think the plan was developed in the 1970s and foresaw a continued path of development with zoning, social housing, health care, all of that good stuff, all the way until the year 2000. So very robust, very long-term plan with tremendous technical support from Polish builders. And this company called Budimex, a major Polish construction company, in fact I think the largest Polish construction company to this day, was involved in realizing some of these projects. Now of course the socialist system collapsed. In 1998, 1999, we joined NATO and, of course, joined the coalition of the willing in helping the United States destroy Iraq.

And now, very recently, the same company that used to help with social housing and publicly useful things in the Global South completed works on a border wall to prevent refugees from those countries from coming into Europe. And this is a border wall that we put up on the border with Belarus notionally because Belarus was a popular vector for quote unquote illegal migration into the continent.

So there's a very tragic denouement of our internationalist legacy that's primarily expressed through our entry into NATO and participation in these imperialist wars of aggression in West Asia. So there's that kind of grand historical narrative, which I think is still being written, but there's also a question of the more immediate political orientation. And one dimension of that that hasn't been adequately studied is the process of Poland's entry into NATO itself. Now there was a coalition government that won the 1998 election, which was made up of a large number of liberal and center-right and right-wing parties.

The Republican Party in the United States claims credit for this historic project of uniting the Polish right behind a single coalition. That coalition won the 1998 elections, pushed through NATO accession, and then disbanded a few years later. And it disbanded in part because of contradictions and disagreements within that grouping about NATO membership. But there's a curious historical fact about support coming in from the United States to these reactionary forces who then ended up sealing the deal on NATO accession. And so I think NATO has been a very powerful force for political reaction, not least because it foreclosed pathways back to a kind of more progressive political project in the country.

You know, everyone's forgotten about this, and this has been effectively been written out of our history now. But before Poland ever held a quote unquote free election after the collapse of socialism, with no democratic accountability, we passed a sweeping bill that are sweeping set of reforms that was authored primarily by the Harvard boys in the United States, which with zero democratic mandate sold off our entire economy at bargain sale prices to largely Western investors. And as a result of that, you had all of the social dislocations, you had other parts of the socialist block, tremendous popular and labor mobilizations throughout the 1990s against those reforms, and a pretty sizable swing back to the left electorally. But that project was effectively killed in 1998, and the Polish left has never really recovered from that.

And so you have, I think, if we're talking about NATO's impact on Poland, you have this kind of grand historical arc in which not only did a political project that explicitly aligned itself with the global majority, with the oppressed people of the world, with the colonized, you know, with those subject to imperial violence, and not only tore Poland away from that, it also tore Poland from the other socialist projects in Eastern Europe, from Ukraine for a time, from having a common identity with the other

countries of the former socialist bloc, including Russia. And so I think that tearing apart of nations that in some senses considered themselves fraternal or friendly and cooperated in very critical projects of third world solidarity that was destroyed through the collapse of socialism and through our absorption into NATO. And I think that's a tragedy on a world historic scale. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

We touched a little bit in various different episodes. We've we've touched on bricks a little bit, but I'm wondering if you can just maybe, you know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the BRICS Alliance, right? Like, there's been a lot of talk about BRICS as a counter force to sort of the United States's economic domination of the globe, but BRICS is obviously an economic alliance, right? We're talking about NATO, which is a military formation. What are your thoughts in terms of like the building of actual military opposition to the NATO Alliance? And I know that's a little bit of a separate question. And I also want to ask you about the strategy of BRICS,

which is more of creating these alternative economic pathways for developing countries so that they can bypass this dependency on the West. I don't have an explicit question right there, but I want like throw that all at you, because I think what happened in Iran recently really raised a lot of questions, right? Like, are these economic alliances going to be enough in the face of explicitly military formation of NATO in terms of who gets to control the way that the globe is organized economically?

Yeah, it's a very big question. And as always, as a communist, it's very difficult to answer or attempt at attempting an answer without delving a little bit into the history. And I think there's a thread here where you had in the course of the 20th century these powerful movements for liberation from colonialism and to a large extent with of course critical exceptions Western Sahara, Palestine and others, that process of formal liberation from colonialism was completed. But what happened is that through the calibration of imperialist violence and calibration of imperialist policies and the imposition

of what some have described as neo-colonialism, through the various infrastructures of imperialism, not just military, but also economic and financial, these countries that had liberated themselves from colonialism were never allowed to fill that shell of political liberation with the substance of economic sovereignty. And so throughout the history of the emergence of the third world, you had intense debates about what would it mean to complete that project of liberation.

One of the most significant moments in that history, the earliest significant moments in history was the Bandung Conference in 1955, which explicitly put forward a vision of a world that was governed by peaceful exchange and peaceful cooperation on equal terms. And this, if you think about the way that the world had been structured for now centuries, was a revolutionary idea. And the mere fact that an idea like that could be put forward by states

was already a pretty seismic development in the international system. But of course, in various ways, that project never really reached the ambitions that it aspired to. And you had successors, you had the Tri-Continental, you had the new International Economic Order put forward at the UN General Assembly in 1974, I think April 1974. Each of those, by the way, each of these initiatives was seen as an existential threat to the United States. Kissinger explicitly talked about destroying the new international economic order and not allowing it to flower right when it was announced. And there were

tremendous efforts deployed diplomatically and economically to prevent these proposals from coming to life. And so BRICS is kind of a part of that broader story. It's a part of a broader story of post-colonial countries trying to establish the foundations of South-South trade on terms that are peaceful and on terms that allow them to sidestep some of the mechanisms of coercion that the West has deployed to prevent them from being able to operate in this way. You know, from the...in Paris, Yeros, a great scholar, he writes really compellingly about this.

From about the 1970s onwards, you had this wave of renewed assaults by the countries of the...of imperialism against the countries of the global south, which included not only military assaults, but also sanctions, debt, structural adjustment, unfair trade terms, which in aggregate created a situation in which large parts of the world were deliberately kept in positions of severe underdevelopment. I talked about some of the consequences of that underdevelopment earlier, talked about some of the consequences of that underdevelopment earlier, for the benefit primarily of the extreme

and excessive levels of consumption we have in the global north. And so what we're seeing now, in a sense, is a reaction to that overreach really by the imperial countries. We're seeing the emergence of new institutions, the new development bank, the BR of new institutions, the new development bank, the BRICS bank, providing an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Not only that, we're seeing the emergence of other institutions parallel to BRICS, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and others, regional integration structures, that are trying to answer this question, this really old question of how do we build a sovereign political system from the global south that can secure peace and that can secure equal cooperation? And I think that's a very important project. But as you, you know, as you said in your question, BRICS is not a military alliance, it doesn't aspire to be a military alliance. And in a sense, it can't be a military alliance, right? If you look at the 10, now I think it's 10 member countries, you have Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the original five members, and then you have Egypt, Ethiopia,

the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Indonesia. These are not countries that are aligned at all in terms of their foreign policies. You have India, which is much more closely aligned with the United States. You have Russia and China, which have an Iran, which have a strategic partnership and increasingly, including in the case of China, position themselves in opposition to imperialism. And so these are not, you know, bricks isn't the vehicle beyond building the economic infrastructure for global South trade. Isn't the only vehicle that's going to break through this dam of imperialist control and encirclement. And you asked, you know,

is a military alliance, does a military alliance have to emerge? I don't think we need more military alliances that are aggressive in nature, but we are seeing in fact a kind of military alliance slowly emerging with the alliance of Russia and the DPRK, with the alliance of Russia and Iran, with the alliance of Iran and Yemen, with the provision of military hardware and technical support by China to many different countries in the global south. So we're seeing in some sense the formation of an alternative kind of center of military power in it, which is in a very serious way constraining the capacities of imperialism to move further afield. And I think you mentioned Iran and that's a very good example.

You know, Iran, in fact, from what we know, developed its capacities largely through its own efforts. It was very much committed from the Iran-Iraq war with Saddam Hussein being funded by the United States, in part, in large part, against the Iranian revolution, against that project of asserting national sovereignty against imperialism. Iran was severely battered in that war and it decided that it needs to be self-sufficient militarily, and it established its ballistic missile program out of that. And I'm sure it benefited from expertise from other countries. We know that its early efforts were supported by Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and there was

a tremendous amount of technical exchange between these countries. But that development through mutual aid efforts and technical assistance and, you know, peaceful exchange and so on, that development of sovereign military capacities, which I think are now being expanded with China's support through the provision of fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles and all of that, that necessarily constrains imperialism's capacities to expand further afield. And imperialism, as we know, because it is an extension of capitalism, its very purpose is to continue expanding. Its very purpose is to continue bringing in more profits and accumulating ever greater shares of global labor and global resources

and cannibalizing in effect increasing shares of the planet, which is one reason we have the climate and environmental crisis right now. And so having military capacities which are able to prevent that from happening, with the US and Israel failing to topple the Iranian government and failing to topple the Islamic revolution and thereby sustaining a project of economic sovereignty there, that's a very significant defeat for imperialism. And it's a very clear indication that something has changed qualitatively and quantitatively in the balance of power in the international system, where the kind of policies where the West could ride roughshod over global South sovereignty are increasingly challenged. And I think that's both important but more than important I think that's a necessary precondition for the emergence of a

fairer international order down the line. So you brought China into the conversation a few times. I'm really curious like so we talked with Alina last episode about sort of Iran as a a being of strategic importance, specifically with the Belt and Road Initiative for China and the role that the US plays in trying to undermine that. We didn't talk about the US's explicit military presence in, say, the South Sea or like how NATO as a military alliance is related to this escalation and the tensions that are rising between the US and China. And I'm wondering if maybe you could just unpack that a little bit for us and explain to us

what's going on with the United States' escalation of tensions and conflict with China and explicitly the prospects of how NATO might be involved in that, both currently in terms of maybe military exercises, but also in the future in terms of more explicit military conflict. So first of all, why is China a threat to the United States? I think it's important to start there. In fact, China is responsible for, to a significant extent, for US prosperity. China has been manufacturing everything in the United States for many decades now, ever since the reform and opening up.

And you know, the very deliberate planned deindustrialization of the US economy, the hyperfinancialization of the economy, which was made possible through the redirection of manufacturing capacities to countries with cheaper labor. So why is China a threat? Well, I think there are a few reasons. One is that internally, China is no longer the source of cheap labor for the United States, and it's no longer a place that the United States has

unlimited access to. In fact, the US never had unlimited access. A big part of the reform and opening up was that the Communist Party of China would retain control over strategic sectors. But that access is diminishing, and it's diminishing in part by increasing wages in China, which have gone up dramatically in the last decade especially, but the last few decades too, but also by the decreasing rate of unequal exchange. Jason Hickle has done incredible research on this and he showed that, I don't remember

the exact dates and numbers, but a few decades ago, for every unit that China imported from the West, it had to export 33 units to pay for that import. So tremendously unequal position in the international economy. And today, despite the fact that by many accounts, China is the most powerful and largest economy in the world, that differential is still four to one. So for every unit that China imports, it has to export four. Now, that means that the US's advantage is rapidly diminishing. And the US is rapidly losing

a site, an export market, basically, and a market for cheap resources, cheap labor, cheap products, and so on. So that's one reason why China is a threat. It's foreclosing a very critical space for imperialist accumulation. But another reason, and I think maybe the more important reason, is that China is not only doing that within its borders. If you look at the vision that China has developed for its foreign policy, concepts like the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity. There's a very concrete set of policies that fall into these kind of overarching political constructions and the Belt and Road is one of them. And one of the underlying

principles or the underlying kind of concepts behind the Belt and Road is that it allows for the creation of infrastructures that enable the emergence of economic sovereignty and equal exchange among countries in the global south. So it is doing to global south countries or supporting global south countries in doing what they have long sought to achieve, which is, as we said earlier, to fill that shell of political liberation with the substance of economic sovereignty. And this means building ports, this means building roads, this means building airports,

this means building train lines between countries, say on the African continent, whose logistical paths were built in a way that supported the extraction of resources from those countries to the colonial metropoles but no trade or exchange between countries on the African continent. I was in Kenya towards the end of last year and I was flying from North Africa and you have to fly out of Africa, go to the Gulf and then fly from the Gulf back into Africa to go between two countries because those connections simply have never been established. And so there is on one hand the foreclosing of China itself for imperialist accumulation,

but also the increasing foreclosing of other parts of the world to empire as well. And we can see that evidenced in the changing balance of trade. Now most countries in the global south have China as their primary trading partner, not the United States. That situation flipped entirely. It's increasing numbers of countries signing up to the Belt and Road Initiative, but also signing up to projects with Chinese development banks, which offer much more flexible and much better terms than the IMF or World Bank ever did, and that don't impose structural adjustment policies, where there's many, many

cases of debt forgiveness in the case of countries who are unable to pay. And so gradually, an infrastructure is emerging that is challenging accumulation in the heart of empire. And that is fundamentally why China is seen as a threat. And that is why the United States has been working to encircle China militarily for now many decades. Now, of course, Taiwan is one part of that puzzle, but it's also Japan, it's also South Korea, it's also Guam, another colony, you know, another island where its

indigenous people have been marginalized in the service of converting their land into a giant military base. It's also increasingly, or has been for a long time, but increasingly in recent years, the Philippines. It's the entire so-called island chain around China that the United States has deployed in terms of a new military encirclement. Now, what role does NATO play in that process? It's very hard to say. On one hand, you have from the summit, I think not this year, but last year or two years ago, you have this kind of expanded vision of what NATO officials called global NATO, where they'd have partnerships with Japan and South Korea and other countries that would serve as kind of partner countries within the alliance, which makes no sense because they're nowhere near the Atlantic.

But it kind of reveals the contour again of the global division of class, right, between the triad, the countries of imperialism, and the countries of what we call the global south. But beyond that, and I think more importantly, the alliance guarantees that to an extent, should the US launch a war against China, it can count on the support at least of some of its most loyal partners within NATO. I would think Great Britain, probably Germany, maybe a few others, although maybe Germany not. And the very interesting

question here is given that China is the European Union's main trading partner, would a war of the US against China not also lead to the disintegration of NATO. We're already seeing huge fragmentation within the alliance with Hungary refusing to play ball on Ukraine, with Slovakia refusing to play ball on Ukraine, with Slovenia now planning a referendum on membership. In fact, just today I was reading where this Slovenian economist calculated the cost to an average citizen of raising the NATO budget to 5% of GDP. And it was something like 1,000 euros per citizen per year, which in Slovenia is every sixth salary or the average price of an apartment over 40 years.

So you know, the amount every citizen would have to spend on increased NATO financing on war would basically amount to a mortgage for the average family. And so you have these contradictions that are already emerging and already escalating within the alliance. And what a much more seismic confrontation with the European Union's trading partner not also lead to the further disintegration and fragmentation of the block? And I think it would. And I think all of this is part and parcel of the inevitable decline of Western hegemony

in the international system. These are contradictions that have reached points that are so severe, they're so irreconcilable, and they're so unsolvable that they will necessarily produce or lead to the end, whether quick or whether sudden or slow, the end of the centuries-long domination of the Western bloc over the rest of humanity. So you end the piece in monthly review by sort of proposing three different theses for organizers in the Imperial Corps and I thought this was a really great way to end the piece. So I'm wondering if you can kind of outline these three different theses and tell us why, to close out today, internationalism must be the central component of our anti-capitalist struggles in the West.

Yeah, in those theses I basically recapitulate a very long-standing tradition of internationalism, one that I feel is closest to me, and one who's theoretical emergence I would situate with the communist international. And in particular with these debates, these wonderful debates between the Indian communist Emin Roy and Vladimir Lenin, starting I think in the second Congress of that international, you can read them on marxist.org.

They're fascinating texts that I think remain highly relevant to this day. And they posed a very fundamental question to the orientation of our solidarities and the orientation of our internationalism. And the question was twofold. First, why didn't the revolution emerge in Europe, as many had anticipated, as many had predicted, that it would emerge in the wealthiest, most advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe. And second, if it didn't emerge and is not going to emerge in Europe, where do we find the revolutionary subject? Where do we situate the revolutionary subject?

And the conclusion that was reached, in part building on the theoretical innovations made by Lenin in his work on imperialism, was that imperialism and colonialism had made the imperial metropoles so powerful that it allowed them to buy off a section of their working class who would otherwise be inclined towards revolution with liberal democracy, with some of the crumbs of imperial loot, eventually with social democracy, to stave off the threat of revolution. And because of that, the way to defeat the imperialist world system was to cut off those arteries of imperial plunder that supported those imperial and colonial metropoles. So in other words, the primary goal of internationalism was to stand with the anti-colonial projects. And that's in a sense what animated the entire project of socialist internationalism in the

20th century. Now with the nuances that I think we've already explored in this conversation, I think that process is still in motion today. And so the three theses that I set out here are one that the revolution is already in motion. Now we are already in the process of building a better world. That process, it looks exactly like our world today.

It looks like a world in which there is anti-colonial resistance in Palestine. It looks like a world in which the panicked reaction to that resistance by imperialism and its Zionist proxy is genocide. It looks like the world in which Iran and China and Russia are starting to threaten imperialist hegemony. The revolution against imperialism, the transition to a different model of political organization is already in motion.

The second thesis is that if you're in the West, you're not the protagonist of that movement, of that historical movement, of that historical process. In fact, the working class in the Western countries, in particular after the Second World War, has often provided the shock troops for the preservation of imperialism. You look at the role of trade unions like the AFL, CIA, CIO, and other formations. Fundamentally, living conditions are still good enough compared to anywhere else in the world in the imperial core, and the propaganda instruments

are so powerful, that that social contract is proving very difficult to break. And so people in the West are not immediately going to be the protagonists of the revolution, but the revolution will be brought to them as the periphery, as the capacities of imperialism to exploit the periphery are chiseled away by resistance in the periphery. So the primary orientation of those in the West is to build effective and meaningful solidarities with those who are on the front lines of that anti-imperialist struggle in the recognition that we are part of the same global chain of exploitation, that we're part of the same global class struggle.

We're not just part of an internal class struggle for higher wages, for housing, for healthcare, for Medicare, whatever it is, we're part of a global chain of exploitation. And the third thesis is that, building from that, is that the anti-imperialist left in the West has to understand that it is operating from inside the monster. And so it has to develop political strategies that rise to the challenge. And in a sense, you know, the point that I make in the piece is that the weakness of

the left in the Western world is a direct dialectical corollary to the strength of the ruling classes. And our task now, when the Western ruling class is facing a historic challenge to its hegemony, our task is not to uphold that power through soft reforms, through return to social democratic principles, but to organize in ways that will build our capacities, A, to beat down that ruling class, and B, to take on the task of governance when the moment comes.

You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Pavel Vargin, an organizer and researcher based in Berlin and the coordinator of the Secretariat of the Progressive International. He's the author of the monthly review piece, NATO and the Long War on the Third World, which we focused our conversation on today. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to NOROTH for the intermission music. The cover art for today's episode is a Soviet anti-NATO propaganda poster.

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