IS NATO a friend of the people? As trade unionists, we should ask: is it a friend to our people — the working class, here and abroad? I wonder how the people of Yugoslavia, Libya, or Iraq would answer that.

To begin answering it ourselves, we need to look back to the period after World War II and the onset of the cold war. It’s there we find the roots of Nato’s creation and the logic behind its continued existence.

Post-WWII, much of Western Europe was devastated economically. The United States, emerging as the dominant capitalist power, had both the capacity and the interest in rebuilding these economies in order to restore global capitalist production and markets.

The Marshall Plan of 1948 was the major economic instrument for this. But economic reconstruction requires stability and security, both internal and external. Consider the era we’re talking about: the USSR had played the decisive and victorious role in the war against fascism in Europe, and in many parts of the world, the revolutionary period was beginning anew.

Revolutions in Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Laos kicked off in the first decade or so after the war, alongside broader decolonisation movements across Africa and Asia. These were signs of a sick world fighting back against imperialism, war, and exploitation. Workers worldwide had been building militant trade unionism and political parties that threatened the existence of capital. Only the war had put the working class on the back foot.

In historical materialist terms, this was a moment when the contradictions of imperialism and global capitalism exploded into revolutionary movements across the periphery, shaking the foundations of a world-system devastated by its own greed. It’s as if the tectonic plates of the capitalist world-system had finally slipped, sending revolutionary tremors throughout.

From these premises, we can deduce that the formation of Nato was a reactionary product of the material conditions and class relations that emerged from the aftermath of World War II. Rather than a mere defensive alliance to secure peace in western Europe, Nato immediately began to function as a strategic tool for the consolidation and expansion of global capitalism under US leadership, reinforced economically through the Marshall Plan.

Nato’s formation did not spring benevolently from any genuine desire to help allied nations rebuild, but to restore global markets and secure the conditions for capital accumulation under a new US hegemony.

Nato served this function by anchoring Western Europe within a US-led capitalist bloc, deterring both Soviet influence and domestic socialist movements. A temporary post-war consensus was economically constructed to keep workers and trade unions in line.

Although it might have seemed like it, the post-war consensus wasn’t a gift from above. It was the price capital paid to avoid revolution. Nato was there to make sure they never had to pay it again.

The formation of Nato reflected the class struggle on a global scale. Across Europe, powerful communist parties and labour movements threatened to upend capitalist property relations. Nato provided the military underpinning for the suppression of these forces and the continuation of bourgeois rule in the West. Stay-behind networks such as Operation Gladio were one such means. It was a superstructural institution designed to defend the material interests of the capitalist class.

Nato also marked the institutionalisation of US hegemony in the capitalist core. It enabled the US to exert political and military control over Western Europe, ensuring access to markets, raw materials, and geopolitical alignment against the socialist bloc. In this sense, Nato was an instrument of imperialism, shaping the postwar international order to suit the needs of monopoly capital.

In 1954, in an effort to demonstrate the true nature and purpose of Nato to the emerging revolutionary democracies and liberation movements, the USSR attempted to join. However you wish to characterise the USSR, it’s evident that Nato’s refusal of their entry into the organisation revealed its real intentions.

By this alone, it becomes clear that Nato was created as the military arm of world capitalist restoration and as a bulwark against socialism. By refusing the USSR membership, the old adage is proven true: if you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.

But Nato hasn’t just shaped the world stage. It has shaped the ground beneath our feet as trade unionists, and certainly so in Britain. If Nato was built to defend capital abroad, it also helped enforce capital’s rule at home.

The cold war marked an era of virulent anti-communism, primarily directed at the USSR and, by extension, trade unionists and socialists in Britain. It’s no secret that MI5 and Nato had, or still have, a co-operative relationship to counter so-called threats to national security. This often involved infiltrating trade unions and socialist movements to surveil them, dull them, and divide them, while the industrial base in Britain was dismantled, privatised, and shipped abroad.

Strikes in strategic sectors — mining, transport, energy — were often portrayed as threats to Britain’s role in Nato, justifying state repression.

On an economic level, the defence spending tied to Nato obligations diverts billions in public investment away from social needs, undermining jobs in social care, health, education, and green infrastructure where unions are strongest.

The military-industrial complex tied to Nato also creates jobs that are structurally dependent on war, limiting the horizon of trade union bargaining to what is compatible with militarism and therefore the proliferation of war. As the headline of a recent Morning Star article read, “Workers killing workers is not ‘providing work.’”

These are jobs hooked to an IV drip of conflict — a workforce fed by war like a lab rat on a poisoned pellet.

Britain’s largest Nato base, USAF Lakenheath — which I, along with hundreds of others, some here today, participated in the blockade of last month — is suspected to host US nuclear weapons. These weapons are even granted special legal dispensation, as declassified documents have revealed: US weapons of war are not subject to the same safety protocols as British ones.

They make us a target of the US’s enemies. They endanger workers at Lakenheath and in the surrounding area. This is a site of imperial power, and clearly a danger on British soil.

I have a few friends and family who like to run this line by me every so often whenever I get overly political: usually after a few pints, they say, “The existence of Nato in Britain and nuclear weapons has ensured continued peace.”

While it’s true we are not directly at war with any other nation, all that Nato and its nuclear capabilities have given Britain, and other Nato countries, is the freedom by virtue of their monopoly on violence to participate in the proliferation of multiple smaller wars and conflicts.

Dialectically speaking, continued defence spending on weapons of war and Nato guarantees only two things: profit for arms manufacturers, and death for those targeted by them.

In the words of the late and great Fidel Castro, “Nato’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.”

Nato is no friend to any nation, and certainly not to the working class of Britain.

Before I wrap up, let me leave you with a couple of questions that matter for us as trade unionists: What would a real demilitarisation of Britain look like? And if a socialist government came to power tomorrow, what role would we play in shaping what comes next — in turning weapons of war into socially useful jobs, and Nato bases into resources for our communities?

Simon Brignell is chair of Cambridge Unite engineering branch and a member of the Communist Party.