IN MID-MAY, Chicago will host an unprecedented gathering of the global 1%. The heads of state from the Group of Eight (G8) club of powerful governments will meet side by side with the world’s most powerful military alliance, in the heart of a major American city.

Not since 1977 in London has the G8 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in the same city. Not since its 2001 meeting in Genoa, Italy drew some 200,000 protesters and Italian police killed demonstrator Carlo Giuliani has the G8 dared to meet in an area accessible to protesters, preferring instead remote locations that could be sealed off from the rest of the world.

And not since the eruption of international resistance—from revolutionary struggles throughout the Arab world to the revolt against austerity in Europe and the upsurge of the Occupy movement in the United States—have so many people taken to the streets in a single year to protest precisely the agenda that NATO and the G8 will be trying to advance when they meet in Chicago from May 19 to 21.

Collectively, the NATO and G8 countries command a massive proportion of the world’s economic resources while wielding sufficient military force to simultaneously pursue multiple wars and occupations. As a result, NATO and the G8 together shape the terrain that every person interested in social justice must contend with. That’s because every dollar that they earmark for bank bailouts and bombing runs is a dollar siphoned away from meeting human needs.

Already, activists—from Chicago, across the United States, and around the world—are planning events of all sorts to raise their voices in dissent. There will be marches against NATO’s plans for militarization; there will be actions to oppose the G8’s program of privatization and austerity; and there will be a People’s Summit on May 12–13 to put forward an alternative vision of a world characterized by peace and equality instead of war and want.

But the enforcers for the global 1% are also preparing—for repression. Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel is bending Chicago’s laws without regard to the rights of protest and free speech,1 and law enforcement officials are planning a militarized state of siege, complete with snipers,2 in an effort to squash dissent. Ironically, despite all the violence and misery imposed by these illegitimate and unrepresentative bodies, officials in Chicago have again and again filled the media with the false claim that those committed to exercising their First Amendment rights to assembly and protest to get their voices heard are the “violent” ones.

NATO and the Cold War

NATO has transformed itself in the years since it was founded as the needs and interests of the West’s industrialized countries have evolved. NATO was founded in 1949 in the ruins of the Second World War, and until 1999, the alliance never once engaged in an open military conflict. During the Cold War years, NATO—under firm US leadership—served as the West’s umbrella of “mutual self-defense,” which was mirrored by the Soviet Union’s bloc of Warsaw Pact countries. NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Ismay, stated NATO’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” At the height of its powers, the United States looked to draw together its allies for the stand off with the Soviet Union, but also to provide a counterbalance to a possible German resurgence.

Thus NATO served as a means to justify the United States’ sprawling “empire of bases”3 (or at least those that sprang up across Europe). Some of NATO’s defenders talk wistfully of NATO’s “success” at deterring “Soviet aggression” and credit it with “preserving the peace” during the Cold War. But the Cold War era saw a massive arms race, the threat of nuclear war, and various “hot wars” along the dividing line between the imperial superpowers (Korea, Vietnam, and various places in Central America and the Horn of Africa).

The doctrine of “mutual assured destruction”—with the descriptively accurate acronym MAD—lent the arms race the veneer of rationality. The idea was that each superpower could deter the other from launching an offensive nuclear strike because the threat of a retaliatory strike would guarantee the annihilation of whichever side launched the first strike. Thus the United States and the Soviet Union embarked upon a nuclear arms race that produced enough weapons to destroy the world many times over, and on several occasions the superpowers came to the brink of conflict (the best known episode is the 1962 Cuban missile crisis) before pulling back from the edge. Generations of people around the world thus grew up in a constant state of anxiety about whether American and Soviet political leaders were MAD enough to kill us all. Dr. Strangelove, anyone?

The other element of NATO’s Cold War strategy was to prepare for a possible ground invasion of Europe by Soviet forces. To that end, American and British spy agencies worked with NATO to train networks of paramilitary forces in country after country throughout Europe. The full extent of these networks wasn’t really known until the end of the Cold War when in 1990 Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti was forced to acknowledge the existence of such a network, code-named Operation Gladio (which means sword), on Italian soil. But NATO’s “secret armies” didn’t confine themselves to preparing to meet Soviet soldiers in Western Europe. According to Daniele Ganser’s book NATO’s Secret Armies:

The notion of the project in the intelligence services undoubtedly began as an effort to create forces that would remain quiescent until war brought them into play. Instead, in country after country we find the same groups of individuals or cells originally activated for the wartime function beginning to exercise their strength in peacetime political processes. Sometimes these efforts involved violence, even terrorism, and sometimes the terrorists made use of the very equipment furnished to them for their Cold War function.4

Thus, NATO also engaged in a covert war against domestic left-wing forces, carrying out a war on democracy in the very countries that NATO was supposed to protect from “anti-democratic” threats. In the words of historian Michael Parenti:

[T]hese secret units were involved in terrorist attacks against the left. They helped prop up a fascist regime in Portugal, participated in the Turkish military coups of 1971 and 1980, and the 1967 coup in Greece. They drew up plans to assassinate social democratic leaders in Germany, and stage “preemptive” attacks against social and communist organizations in Greece and Italy. They formed secret communication networks and drew up detention lists of political opponents to be rounded up in various countries.5

NATO beyond the Cold War

According to its own “self-defense” mandate, NATO should have been disbanded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. A 1950 State Department paper, NSC 68, which outlined a strategy of military containment of the USSR, also indicated that the permanent maintenance of military superiority was “a policy which the United States would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet Union.”6 Accordingly, the United States sought to enlarge NATO in order to press its advantage in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse by incorporating countries formerly part of the Eastern bloc. NATO has also embarked upon a broad expansion and reorientation of its operations and since 1999 has invaded three countries—Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya.

As Rick Rozoff details in his Stop NATO blog:

With the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe from 1999-2009, the US-led military alliance has grown by 75 percent, from 16 to 28 members. By 2009 all former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact member states had been incorporated into NATO, the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) being absorbed with its merger into the Federal Republic in 1990. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999 and Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia in 2004.

This is just the beginning, if NATO’s war planners have their way. NATO is also pursuing a military partnership with the African Union, which represents fifty-three member nations. According to a Kenyan news account of the negotiations, “the stated aim is to counter global security threats and specifically threats against Africa, [though] some observers read the pact as aiming to counter Chinese expansion in Africa.”7 Thus, NATO’s addition of more than fifty African nations to the military alliance is yet another reprise of its Cold War objective of advancing the interests of the United States against its global competitors.

Though NATO insists that such expansions help to guarantee “security” and “stability,” the drive to enlarge NATO’s reach has already led to new military confrontations. The 2008 military conflict in Georgia, for example, was portrayed in the mainstream media as a case of Russian aggression against one of its former republics. But this only captures one aspect of what took place. As Lee Sustar wrote in 2008:

Certainly, Russia’s aim to dominate Georgia—which fell under Moscow’s control in the late 18th century and was formally annexed in 1801—is imperial in nature. But it’s revealing that after selling the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as exercises in “promoting democracy,” the corporate media is finally willing to characterize a great power’s expansionist military moves as “imperialist.” What’s missing from the mainstream account of the Russia-Georgia war is the role of US imperialism, which has sought to incorporate Georgia into NATO as part of an arc of US military outposts and alliances stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia. And while the Western press publishes accounts of civilians terrorized by Russia’s military, far less attention is given to the vicious attack of the Georgian military—trained by the US—on the disputed South Ossetia region.8

Today, NATO countries collectively account for more than 70 percent of world military spending, the US alone for nearly half—raising the obvious question: From what is NATO defending itself? After “testing” NATO’s military capabilities in the 1999 war on Yugoslavia (which incidentally killed more civilians than the Serbian ground offensive it was meant to stop),9 the United States has thrust NATO into more offensive operations designed to contain Russia and China.

A “good year” for NATO

In late December 2011, Admiral James Stavridis, commander of the US European Command, declared, “As I look back on 2011, I think we had a reasonably good year in the operational sense.”10

This assessment is far too rosy. In late November 2011, NATO air strikes killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers, supposed allies of NATO in its war on Afghanistan—triggering rage across Pakistan, further straining US-Pakistani relations, and prompting Pakistan’s closure of NATO’s critical supply routes to landlocked Afghanistan.11 More than two months later, those supply lines remained closed, and according to the Pentagon, the United States was forced to spend $104 million per month (up from $17 million) to keep supplies flowing to NATO forces (the overwhelming majority of whom are US troops).12

Stavridis glides over these strained relations so he can focus on the alleged successes of NATO’s operations in Afghanistan. He reports that roughly 50 percent of Afghanistan has been returned to the control of Afghan security forces with NATO troops there playing merely “a support, mentorship, and training role.” Given that this is the longest war in US history, and that the United States set out to transform Afghanistan into a stable client regime, this hardly seems the most positive result.

The US plan to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2013 and hand over control to Afghan security forces (announced with much fanfare by US defense secretary Leon Panetta in early 2012) seems unlikely to succeed—as so many other “turning points” and “milestones” announced by US war planners over the years have similarly failed to materialize. The main problem, according to the military intelligence firm Stratfor, is that while the United States and NATO have fought the Taliban to a stalemate, they can’t militarily defeat the Taliban nor can they rely on Afghan troops to do so:

The Afghan military must recruit troops, and some of the most eager volunteers will be Taliban operatives. These operatives will be indistinguishable from anti-Taliban soldiers, and their presence will have two consequences. First, the intelligence they will provide the Taliban will cause the Afghan army offensive to fail. Second, shrewd use of these operatives will undermine the cohesion and morale of the Afghan forces. Surprise is crucial in locating, engaging and destroying a guerrilla force. Afghan security forces will face the same problem the South Vietnamese army did; namely, they will lack the element of surprise and at least some of their units will be unreliable. Accordingly, the US strategy of using the stalemate to construct a capable military force accordingly looks unlikely to succeed even leaving aside the issue of the fragmentation of the Afghan nation and the Karzai government’s internal problems.13

The Vietnam analogy—though not perfect, since the United States still manages to hold on to Afghanistan—is also useful in another sense. The same US counterinsurgency strategy that failed to “win hearts and minds” in Vietnam has also failed in Afghanistan. As the New York Times reports,

The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate—a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation…. Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall. “There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents,” Sergeant Major Hall told troops during the videoconference.14

In early February 2012, an 84-page report authored by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis was making the rounds among Washington lawmakers when it was leaked to Rolling Stone magazine. Lt. Davis’ report explained in devastating detail that the March 2011 congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, then the top commander in Afghanistan, heralding the success of Obama’s troop surge to Afghanistan was either "misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate.” Contrary to the impression given by Petraeus, the number of insurgent attacks, improvised explosive devices, and US casualties in 2011 were respectively 82 percent, 113 percent and 164 percent higher than in 2009, the last year before Obama’s troop surge. The number of US dead and wounded skyrocketed during those years from 1,764 to 4,662. “Even a cursory observation of key classified reports and metrics,” Davis concludes, “leads overwhelmingly to the conclusion that over the past two years, despite the surge of 30,000 American soldiers, the insurgent force has gained strength.”15

As the dominant force within NATO, the United States bears the chief responsibility for the carnage caused by NATO’s war, and the scale of the carnage is substantial—more than 10,000 Afghan civilians killed since 2007, nearly 3,000 NATO troops dead, and a price tag approaching half a trillion dollars for US taxpayers alone. But despite the enormous human and economic toll, the US foreign policy establishment remains preoccupied with “victory” in Afghanistan because of the compulsion to counter the growing influence of China as an economic and political force in the region. In addition to Afghanistan’s location in the heart of Asia, it’s also at a strategic crossroads for the construction of a pipeline to transport valuable energy resources from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean (while, of course, avoiding Iran). This is one of the reasons that the United States first hoped to negotiate with the Taliban after it came to power in 1996 and then, after September 11, seized on the ideal justification to use force to accomplish the same goal.16

Then there was NATO’s seven-month strafing of Libya with 26,000 air sorties that destroyed some 6,000 targets.17 NATO’s own rationale for its military campaign was first to prevent a massacre in Misrata, which quickly morphed into removing the brutal dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi. The real reason was to give Western powers a foothold in the region that would allow them to make a grab for Libya’s prized oil resources, as well as provide them leverage in the unfolding events of the Arab Spring.18 The NATO invasion also exposed the hypocrisy of Western leaders, including the Bush and Obama administrations, which had both enjoyed friendly relations with Qaddafi as an ally in the “war on terror” until just weeks before the NATO bombing began.19

To summarize, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has looked to expand NATO’s role as global policeman, considering it to be more strategically valuable as a means to expand its dominance in the world. “NATO has left Western Europe a long time ago,” writes Asia Times analyst Pepe Escobar.

[T]oo small, too provincial. It’s already in Central and South Asia as well as Northeast Africa, interlinked with the Pentagon’s AFRICOM…. Way beyond the Afghan killing fields, NATO is fast becoming a huge “forward operating base” for policing the Middle East, Africa, Asia and even the South Atlantic, where the Pentagon reactivated the Fourth Fleet.20

The G8: The global 1 percent

The group of powerful countries that became the G8 got its start in 1975 in the context of a world oil crisis and global recession. Since then, the G8 heads of state have met annually to spread the gospel of neoliberalism, prying open markets, privatizing lucrative state-owned industries, and designating what they consider “intrusive” environmental safeguards and workers’ rights as “trade barriers.” The G8 countries, which contain 15 percent of the world’s population but account for more than half of global nominal GDP, find themselves at the top of the global capitalist food chain, and their agenda is to make sure they stay there.

Today, with the eurozone teetering on the edge of solvency and a global economic downturn that has created stubbornly high unemployment rates throughout the industrialized world, the G8 countries are frantically seeking ways out of the economic crisis that began in 2008. Their solutions are based on trying to offload the costs of the crisis—in particular, the budget deficits caused by trillions of dollars in bailouts to the world’s largest financial institutions—onto the 99 percent. This means cutting social services like health care and anti-poverty programs, attacking the living standards of public-sector workers, raising the retirement age, and privatizing state industries.

The annual G8 summit is therefore a forum for discussions about how the G8 countries plan to use their international financial institutions—such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization—to allow for the greatest possible freedoms for multinational corporations while imposing discipline on any nations that don’t accept free markets and neoliberal orthodoxy. Greece is merely the latest country to receive a “lifeline” of loans and incentives that “saves” the national economy from financial ruin—by plunging the 99 percent into poverty, devaluing the life savings of millions of people, and cutting wages.

The heads of state of the world’s eight most powerful countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and Canada (included in 1976 at the insistence of the United States)—make sweeping decisions that affect the entire world. The G8’s summits have become annually rehearsed charades in which the world’s wealthiest nations pledge a tiny fraction of the resources they have plundered from the rest of the world to address poverty, famine, and disease in poorer countries. At 2011’s G8 summit in the French resort town of Deauville, British prime minister David Cameron explained what he describes as the G8’s image problem by saying, “I think what people think back home about these summits is a bunch of people in suits get together make some promises, particularly to the world’s poorest, and then they go in and have a big lunch and forget about the promises.”21 But the image problem exists not because it’s an image problem, but a well-deserved reputation.

The issue of agriculture subsidies, for example, is a case in point. While G8 countries give generous subsidies to their own agricultural sectors, which are dominated by a handful of megacorporations, they maintain tariffs and other barriers to the importation of agricultural products from the less developed world. This maintains a lopsided economic arrangement in which artificially cheap agricultural products from the rich countries drive local producers in the less developed countries out of business and undermines food self-sufficiency in the rest of the world. According to journalist Julio Godoy:

Perhaps the most important issue for African development, one that few have mentioned, is the need to reduce the subsidies that most G8 countries shell out to their farmers and the trade barriers that protect their own markets, which numerous studies show contributed heavily in the past two decades to undermining development in Africa and other poor regions of the world. This is not something unknown to politicians and analysts in the G8 capitals. Already in 2005, the United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR), which had the premonitory title “International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world,” said it quite clearly: “The basic problem to be addressed in the World Trade Organization negotiations on agriculture can be summarized in three words: rich country subsidies.” The document went on: “In the last round of world trade negotiations (launched in Doha, Qatar in 2001) rich countries promised to cut agricultural subsidies.” But, as the UNHDR remarked, since then, subsidies for agriculture in the G8 countries have steadily grown. The world’s richest countries spent just over one billion dollars for the year 2005 on aid for agriculture in poor countries, and just under one billion dollars each day of that year for various subsidies of agricultural overproduction at home. “A less appropriate ordering of priorities is difficult to imagine,” concluded the U.N. report (emphasis mine).22

To state this using hard numbers, the average European cow received $2.50 in government subsidies per day in 2002 and the average Japanese cow clocked $7.50 per day, while 75 percent of people in Africa were living on less than $2 per day. American subsidies to its cotton growers amounted to $3.9 billion in 2002 alone, which was three times US foreign aid to Africa that year.23

The 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland, was celebrated by international celebrities such as U2’s Bono as a breakthrough because of the pledge to provide Africa with $50 billion in additional aid by 2010.24 But the legitimacy that Bono’s support lent the G8 wasn’t deserved—then or now. In the words of Canadian politician Stephen Lewis, who served a term as a UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, “Bono and company do their best to flatter the contributions of the G8, but even they are forced to say that the increases from 2005 to 2010 ‘have fallen far short of what was promised.’”25 By 2011, according to the G8’s own accountability report, G8 countries were already behind by $19 billion on their 2005 pledges. But that didn’t stop them from promising even more at their 2011 summit. “It seems unrealistic for the G8 countries to commit to such huge amounts when there is still a deficit of about $19 billion from previous summits,” Egyptian activist Ragia Omran told reporters.26 In 2007, Oxfam predicted that a $30 billion funding shortfall would lead to the deaths of 5 million people, disproportionately children.27 It should be remembered that this figure of $30 billion does not represent even .01 percent of the combined GDP of the G8 countries.

In the conclusion to the 2004 book Fatal Indifference: The G8, Africa and Global Health, the authors explain that not only have the G8 countries broken their promises to the less-developed world, but it can’t be assumed that their promises were in the best interests of the less-developed world in the first place. There’s a simple reason for this.

The current development policy model appears to be one that promotes growth only in ways that are (a) consistent with the financial interests of the industrialized world, and (b) require minimal or no redistribution of income and wealth from the rich world to the poor. Certainly, that is the message conveyed by the long-term decline in ODA [official development assistance] flows from the G8 countries, even as their wealth has greatly increased.28

Why oppose NATO and the G8?

According to Forbes magazine, 2011 was a year to celebrate for the world’s ultra-rich because both the total number of billionaires and their combined wealth shattered the previous record.29 The combined wealth of the world’s 1,210 billionaires amounted to $4.5 trillion in 2011. To get some idea of the scale of this number and how it relates to the vast expanse of unmet human needs, $5.5 trillion could eliminate extreme poverty around the world, end world hunger, provide access to potable water for everyone, and end the HIV/AIDS crisis—for the next 20 years. In other words, redistributing the wealth of the world’s richest 1,210 people could eradicate the world’s most pressing inequalities.

Some 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. For them, there’s no such thing as stability, only a daily and terrifying instability. For the AIDS-ravaged continent of Africa, orphaned children wonder where their next meal will come from. For the campesinos throughout Central America trying to feed their families, each day raises the question of whether to stay on the land or join the urban poor in one or another megalopolis where begging may provide more nutrition than tilling the land. And for the people of Afghanistan, the daily thrum of unmanned drones flying overhead poses the question, “Will today be the day that a bomb falls on me?”

NATO and the G8 stand as the ultimate guardians of a broken economic and political order that sustains such gargantuan inequalities—and marching against them is an opportunity to point out how they do this, but also to draw attention to the larger problems of the system of global capitalism.

Nearly a decade ago, global justice campaigner George Monbiot challenged the “democracy hypocrisy” of the G8 heads of state for their double standards. “[The G8 countries] leave the rest of the world out of their deliberations,” wrote Monbiot in his book The Age of Consent. “We are left to shout abuse…. They reduce us, in other words, to the mob, and then revile the thing they have created…. They, the tiniest and most unrepresentative of the world’s minorities, assert a popular mandate they do not possess, then accuse us of illegitimacy.”30

Nothing could be more legitimate than standing with the rest of humanity against the global 1%. So whether you are concerned about better public education or the crisis of housing foreclosures and evictions, whether you are driven by the growing climate crisis or the scourge of war, you have a reason to come to Chicago in May and be a part of a mass mobilization to oppose the G8 and NATO.