Jack D.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine last February provoked a flurry of interest in NATO as many comrades sought to understand the root causes of the ensuing war. Yet NATO cannot be understood as an isolated entity. Instead, it must be regarded as a vestige of a worldwide system of aggressive military-political blocs arrayed against the USSR, the countries of people’s democracy and the peoples of the world, a system for the global dominance of U.S. imperialism, a system founded on the remilitarization of the defeated Axis Powers, a system fundamentally at odds with the project of the United Nations for world peace. Our aim here is to distill some of NATO’s essential features by presenting a brief overview of the historical trend known as Pactomania, out of which NATO emerged. It is our hope that this context will contribute to deepening comrades’ awareness of NATO’s aggressive character and clarifying the nature of the threat NATO poses to the world.
Pactomania and Its Ideological Foundations
In the wake of the second imperialist world war, the United States undertook to establish a worldwide system of reactionary military-political blocs, a pursuit that has been termed Pactomania. NATO was the crown jewel atop this edifice, which also included the OAS, ANZUS, the Balkan Pact, SEATO and CENTO, not to mention numerous bilateral treaties. The dual purpose of these blocs was to counter an imagined Soviet military threat and—this is often forgotten—to suppress the democratic forces within member states. The former had the effect of provoking an arms race, the latter of arresting the spread of socialism globally.
The ideological basis for Pactomania was the Truman Doctrine, which viewed the spread of socialism “by direct or indirect aggression” as a threat to U.S. national security and consequently pledged to prop up reactionary régimes around the world. Of course, according to the bourgeois ersatz ideology of the day, it was inconceivable that contradictions of a purely internal character could motivate a nation to freely choose socialism. Those who had internalized this premise saw the upsurge of democratic forces in the wake of the war through the hallucinatory lens of an international criminal conspiracy headed by Moscow. To them, communists in opposition were all fifth-columnists and the spread of socialism necessarily implied Soviet aggression.
The Truman Doctrine is widely seen as marking a decisive break with more than a century of isolationist foreign policy, represented by the earlier Monroe Doctrine. While this perspective contains a kernel of truth, it obscures a more significant continuity between the two doctrines, both of which employed a devious conception of “self-defense” in response to “indirect aggression” to justify wanton imperialist aggression against foreign states. It is, then, a curious irony of history that the legal underpinnings of Pactomania were inadvertently laid by Latin American states in their struggle against the Truman Doctrine’s nearest historical antecedent.
A unilateral U.S. policy dating back to the Founding Fathers, the Monroe Doctrine saw any expansion of European influence in the western hemisphere as a threat to U.S. national security and for that reason—as opposed to any altruistic motivations—sought to prevent European aggression in the region. In 1904, the Monroe Doctrine was augmented by the Roosevelt Corollary, which stipulated that the U.S. could intervene in the affairs of its southern neighbors whenever they developed internal disorder that might invite European interference. This was the basis for numerous U.S. military interventions and occupations in the early twentieth century, the period of the so-called Banana Wars.
Dumbarton Oaks Sparks Concern in Latin America
To ward off threats to their sovereignty from both the U.S. and Europe, Latin American states sought to multilateralize the Monroe Doctrine, transforming it from a unilateral policy for U.S. “self-defense” into a pan-American mutual security agreement. Moves in this direction were made at the 1933 Montevideo Conference, the 1936 Buenos Aires Conference, the 1938 Lima Conference and the 1940 Havana Conference, which repudiated unilateral intervention and established an “all for one, one for all” principle in response to any aggression by an extra-hemispheric power.
But the Latin American states feared these gains would be undermined when in 1944 the U.S., the U.K., the USSR and China convened the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and proposed a draft charter for a new global security organization—the United Nations. The Dumbarton Oaks proposal, whose chief architect was State Department official Leo Pasvolsky, permitted “regional arrangements” like the budding inter-American mutual security system to undertake “enforcement action” for the maintenance of international peace, but—crucially—only with the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. This provision would ultimately form the basis of Article 53 of the U.N. Charter.
Aside from the familiar threat of U.S. interference, the conservative governments south of the Rio Grande were spooked by the specter of communism, for the march of the Red Army through eastern Europe had coincided with a wave of strike actions and unprecedented labor militancy across Latin America. And Latin American perceptions of the U.N. as a potential instrument of U.S. and Soviet influence would only be exacerbated by the February 1945 Yalta Conference, which established the principle of unanimity of the great powers as the cornerstone of the U.N., granting a veto over substantive matters to the five permanent members of the Security Council. Without this principle, which is also known as the Yalta formula, the U.N. would never have been established. But this principle directly clashed with Latin American aspirations for an inter-American system capable of defying the Colossus of the North.
Chapultepec Sets an Ominous Precedent
In the days following the Yalta Conference, a pan-American summit at Chapultepec in Mexico City called for the establishment of a postwar inter-American mutual security pact. The Act of Chapultepec applied not only to extra-hemispheric aggression, but also to inter-American aggression. At the time, the far-reaching consequences of the precedent set at Chapultepec were foreseen by few, but one journalist made the prescient observation that “[the danger] is that in giving legal sanction to the concept of the Western World as a separate security area the Act of Chapultepec will provide an excuse for the setting up of other regional arrangements similar in form but very different in spirit from the American type.”
Dumbarton Oaks and Chapultepec represented two competing models for the maintenance of international security, one based on cooperation between the great powers and the other based on multilateral mechanisms at the regional level. The U.S. ruling circles were themselves sharply divided between these two visions. “Internationalists,” represented by Pasvolsky and Republican Senator Warren Austin, argued that if an independent regional pact were established in the Americas, Great Britain and the USSR would set up analogous pacts and shut U.S. influence out of Europe. “Regionalists,” represented by Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs Nelson Rockefeller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, doubted the U.N.’s viability and shared Latin American concerns that the global organization could become a vehicle for Soviet influence.
San Francisco Opens the Door to Pactomania
This conflict took center stage at the April-June 1945 San Francisco Conference, whose task was to finalize the U.N. Charter. Over the course of the war, the Soviet Union had established bilateral alliances with European states like France and Great Britain, which were now directed against any potential renewed aggression on the part of the defeated Axis Powers. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov proposed that these alliances be exempted from the requirement for authorization from the Security Council before taking enforcement action against the Axis states. The Soviet concern, also voiced by Great Britain and France, was that Germany would certainly seek to rearm and that a newly formed institution could not yet be relied upon to safeguard against this latent threat.
The U.S. delegation accepted Molotov’s proposal, but was met with outrage and accusations of betrayal when the Latin American delegations caught wind of the arrangement. Recognizing that the Yalta formula was non-negotiable, they argued that the pact envisioned at Chapultepec deserved a similar exemption. Their protest threatened to upset the whole U.N. project. After intense negotiations, a compromise was found. A distinction was to be drawn between “enforcement action” and “action in self-defense” and new language was to be added making explicit the “inherent” right to self-defense—individual and collective alike—without the need for approval from the Security Council in the face of an “armed attack.” This provision ultimately became Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, considered by many to be the most important article in that document.
Although the USSR recognized the legitimacy and importance of the self-defense principle, a crafty application of the concept of “armed attack” would in time provide the Truman Doctrine with a legal fig leaf. At one point during the negotiations at San Francisco, Pasvolsky had prophetically warned, “we will convert the world into armed camps and end up with a world war unlike any we have yet seen.” Indeed, before long State Department memoranda on the spread of socialism would be talking of things like “proposing a worldwide treaty of mutual assistance, along the lines of the Act of Chapultepec, under Article 51 of the Charter.” Years after the conference, the notorious anti-communist crusader and “pactomaniac” John Foster Dulles, who had sided with Pasvolsky at San Francisco, would run into Rockefeller at a banquet and say, “I owe you an apology. If you fellows hadn’t done it, we might never have had NATO.”
The Rio Pact and the OAS Introduce the Concept of “Indirect Aggression”
In 1947, the pact called for at Chapultepec was established by the Rio Treaty. This would be followed by a summit at Bogotá the next year, at which the Organization of American States was founded. The Rio Treaty and the OAS Charter contain essentially the same provisions with regard to aggression. Though based on the Act of Chapultepec, the Rio Treaty introduced a distinction between “armed attack,” addressed by Article 3, and “aggression which is not an armed attack,” addressed by Article 6. Article 3 echoes the Act of Chapultepec’s stipulation equating an armed attack on one with an armed attack on all and cites Article 51 of the U.N. Charter as justification. Article 6 reads as follows.
If the inviolability or the integrity of the territory or the sovereignty or political independence of any American State should be affected by an aggression which is not an armed attack or by an extra-continental or intra-continental conflict, or by any other fact or situation that might endanger the peace of America, the Organ of Consultation shall meet immediately in order to agree on the measures which must be taken in case of aggression to assist the victim of the aggression or, in any case, the measures which should be taken for the common defense and for the maintenance of the peace and security of the Continent.
This crafty article is worded so broadly that virtually anything can be construed as cause for consultation on defense measures. And the measures that may be prescribed by the Organ of Consultation, which are enumerated in Article 8, include “use of armed force”! Just as under the Monroe Doctrine the United States had undertaken years-long military occupations of its neighbors (invariably bound up with economic exploitation) on the grounds of “self-defense,” so now Washington could point to what it called “indirect aggression” as a pretext for interference in the internal affairs of Latin American states. Or, in the words of State Department functionary Dean Rusk, “in the event of aggression threatening the security of the U.S., even though such aggression took place against a third party, the U.S. would have clear legal sanction for such measures of self-defense as it might find necessary to take immediately.”
Simply put, Article 6 was designed to serve as a tool for the suppression of democratic movements in Latin American countries. As U.S. officials would later put it, “under Article 6 of the Rio Treaty, the U.S. is committed to oppose communist subversion in the hemisphere.”
The Rio Treaty and the OAS in Practice
The legal and political machinery the United States had established for countering “indirect aggression” in Latin America was put to regular use during the so-called Cold War. A few examples should suffice as illustration.
In 1954, the U.S. was engaged in a campaign of subversion and propaganda against Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, who two years earlier had initiated an agrarian reform that redistributed idle land held by foreign concerns. The most prominent of these was the United Fruit Company, whose shareholders included now–Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles. In March, the U.S. prodded the OAS states into approving a Caracas Declaration of Solidarity, which declared that the spread of socialism to any American state “would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American States … and would call for a Meeting of Consultation to consider the adoption of appropriate action.” This was followed up in June with the invocation of Article 6, but before a consultation could be held, Árbenz resigned under intense pressure from the difficult circumstances created by the CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS.
As is well known, Washington launched a crusade using every trick in the book to destabilize Cuba in response to the victory of that country’s revolution in 1959. The Rio Treaty–OAS mechanism was but one of the tools at its disposal. In January 1962, the OAS’s Punta del Este Resolutions declared that “adherence by any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the inter-American system,” suspended Cuba from the OAS and imposed sanctions on the island.
In October 1962, in the midst of the Caribbean Crisis, the OAS’s Organ of Consultation recommended “that the member states, in accordance with Articles 6 and 8 …, take all measures, individually and collectively, including the use of armed forces, which they may deem necessary to ensure that the Government of Cuba cannot continue to receive from the Sino-Soviet powers military material and related supplies.” Argentina, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela would join the U.S. in a Combined Quarantine Force blockading Cuba. The OAS measures lent the Kennedy administration a veneer of legality for its “quarantine” of Cuba, allowing it to sidestep U.N. Security Council authorization and push the world to the brink of nuclear war. As Robert F. Kennedy so bluntly put it, “It was the vote of the Organization of American States that gave a legal basis for the quarantine. … It … changed our position from that of an outlaw acting in violation of international law into a country acting in accordance with twenty allies legally protecting their position.”
In 1963, President Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic, a progressive bourgeois democrat, was overthrown in a reactionary military coup d’état. In April 1965, the junta that succeeded him was itself ousted from the capital by a patriotic constitutionalist rebellion led by elements of the army seeking Bosch’s restoration. Within days, the U.S. had launched a full-scale invasion, deploying tens of thousands of troops to the country under the pretext of protecting U.S. citizens, but with the real aim of returning the right-wing junta to power. Within a few more days, the OAS had resolved to take over the occupation of the Dominican Republic, “legalizing” the U.S. army’s presence there by appending to it a handful of troops from Latin American states.
In December 1970, weeks after Chile had elected Marxist Salvador Allende to the presidency, the U.S. ruling circles floated the prospect of military action against Chile whenever the opportunity might present itself. An internal report pointed out, “Just as in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, … the OAS Council, under authority of the Rio Treaty, could provide useful legal justification and political support for our actions.” And maneuvers of this kind are by no means a thing of the past. As recently as 2019, Article 6 of the Rio Treaty was invoked as part of the U.S. campaign against Venezuela, a move Comrade Emile Schepers wrote about in People’s World at the time.
Since their inception, the Rio Treaty and the OAS have served as valuable instruments of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. It was only natural that they should be cloned for use on the other side of the Atlantic.