If you were in Newport and Cardiff in south-east Wales during the first week of September, you might have thought you’d entered a warzone. Instead, it was simply the September 4 and 5 NATO Summit.
As NATO warships drifted ominously into the harbour and US Osprey and Nighthawk helicopters thundered in the sky, above mile after mile of steel fencing, disgruntled residents were left taking to Twitter to complain about their desks shaking at work.
“The amount of helicopters I have heard today makes it sound like we’re at war,” one said.
In Britain, we can view this dazzling array of weaponry with sardonic takes on social media. But this is a world away from the carnage in Afghanistan: a country left in ruins by a NATO-led force.
Here, these same helicopters really do fly over a war zone. They fly over a country which has seen tens of thousands of its men, women and children killed. They fly over shattered institutions, a foundering security force, a state rocked to the point of collapse.
And that is what NATO stands for. It is not Barack Obama grinning for a photo-op in a Newport school ― it is the bombed-out ruins of an Afghan school providing the only playground for local children.
Formed in 1949 as a “defensive” alliance, NATO prompted the creation of the Warsaw Pact (involving the Soviet Union and its allies). But while the end of the Cold War in 1990 meant the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, it was the start of a new era for NATO.
This “defensive” alliance decided to take on “out of area” operations. Defence through killing tens of thousands in Afghanistan? Or through the bloody chaos in Libya, where militias compete in an all but lawless land?
Few can now argue that these interventions have contributed anything to global security.
And of course there is Ukraine, the primary item on the agenda at the NATO Summit. It is clear there is no military solution for the Ukraine crisis ― from whatever quarter it comes.
But few can deny that NATO’s insatiable expansion into eastern Europe has contributed to heightening tensions around Russia and Ukraine, raising the spectre of a new Cold War.
Is it any surprise that Russia feels threatened? Do we really need to spell out how the US would react to a Russian-led military alliance pulling up at the border in Mexico?
In the lead up to and during the summit, peace activists have been working to not only protest the NATO Summit, but challenge the rhetoric and the actions that underpin it.
The No To NATO Counter-Summit was held in Cardiff and Newport ahead of the NATO meeting. It involved peace campaigners and activists from across Europe, the US, and Russia coming together to discuss alternatives towards true global security.
And the weight of the peace movement has never been clearer. A potentially disastrous bombing campaign in Syria was averted last year, when more than a decade of protest against wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond hung heavily over the parliamentary vote. A humiliated David Cameron was forced to abandon military action.
The atrocities of the civil war in Syria are all too clear, but let’s not delude ourselves that bombing in favour of the rebels would have solved anything. Many of those who called for bombing last year are now telling us that we should be aligning with Assad to counter the barbarism of Islamic State. What a difference a year makes.
Tens of millions around the world oppose NATO’s interventionism, its expansionism and the fact that US/NATO nuclear weapons are hosted on European soil ― in countries with staunchly anti-nuclear public opinion such as Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands.
It is only through persisting with campaigns that call for political solutions over military actions, for diplomacy over air strikes, and for peace not war, can we hope to achieve real and lasting global security.
[Abridged from Left Unity. Kate Hudson is general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and national secretary of Left Unity, an English left-wing party formed last year.]
Like the article? Subscribe to Green Left now! You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.