Mark Brown: Nato’s northern expansion will only bring more war

Significantly, in accepting Finland’s ­application, the western alliance has ­greatly increased its land border with ­Russia. If that is a dangerous prospect, say the ­pro-Nato commentators, it is entirely the fault of Vladimir Putin.

The Russian regime’s invasion of Ukraine, they argue, not only justifies the ­expansion of Nato northwards and eastwards, it ­positively requires it. After all, goes the hawkish narrative, the western ­alliance is an essential bulwark in defence of ­democracy, human rights and peace in the face of the belligerence and ­totalitarianism of the Kremlin.

Such rhetoric has become the accepted wisdom among most of the mainstream ­media and political class across the UK. It is no less infantile for that.

To portray Nato as a force for good in this world does not stand up to serious scrutiny, whether in terms of the alliance’s origins or its modern history. Take the organisation’s early years, for instance.

Nato was established in 1949 as a ­nuclear-armed belligerent in the dangerous Cold War that menaced humanity until the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1989. The US was, of course, the dominant force in the alliance from the very beginning.

The horrifying American atom bomb ­attacks on the Japanese cities of ­Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were not, as the enduring myth has it, intended to end the war in Asia (which was, by then, a foregone conclusion). Rather, they were the first devastating military acts of the Cold War, a morally indefensible means of establishing the US’s military ­superiority over Stalin’s Soviet Union that plunged ­humanity into a terrifying nuclear arms race.

In 1949, Portugal – ruled by the blood-soaked fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar – was a founder member of the alliance. The membership of Greece (which had joined Nato in 1952) was in no way impeded by the far-right military coup in 1967.

Nor were the Nato democracies ­covering themselves in glory. In the years and ­decades after the Second World War, ­founding Nato members such as the UK, France and Belgium, were engaged in ­the brutal suppression of independence movements in such countries as Kenya, Algeria and Congo.

In east Asia, the demise of French ­imperialism in so-called “Indochina” in 1954 paved the way for the US’s ­devastation of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between the late-1950s and the Americans’ humiliating defeat in 1973.

First Britain, then France and, finally, the US have ensured that ­Israel has, since its creation in 1948, ­operated as a repressive, highly militarised and, ultimately, the nuclear-armed force for western ­interests in the Middle East. The cost to the ­Palestinians has been catastrophic.

Only a dedicated Cold Warrior could dare suggest that the Nato countries – whether dictatorships or nominal democracies – were paragons of freedom and an essential counterbalance to the Soviets’ “Evil Empire”.

In fact, despite Stalin’s rule of terror (complete with show trials and the Gulag) and his successors’ appalling invasions of Hungary in 1956 and ­Czechoslovakia in 1968, the western powers’ violent ­imperialism sent generations of ­liberation fighters into the arms of Moscow. From the Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba (murdered, with Belgian and American connivance), to ­Angolan ­freedom fighter Jose Eduardo dos ­Santos (who passed away on Friday) and, ­whisper it, the great Nelson Mandela himself, most of those struggling to break the chains of western imperialism and racial oppression turned to the Soviet Union for support.

Ultimately, the dead hand of ­Stalinism diverted and distorted every ­liberation struggle it came into contact with. ­However, we should never forget that it was the actions of Nato powers (the British castrating Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, the French torture of suspected resistance fighters in Algeria) that bolstered Soviet influence throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America.

One can add to this sorry history the US’s malignant influence in the ­Americas, where fascistic juntas from Brazil and Chile to Guatemala and El Salvador were aided and abetted by the CIA and its political paymasters in Washington DC. That’s to say nothing of The School of the Americas (the training centre for Latin American torturers and repressive paramilitary police established in ­Columbus, Georgia in 1946) or of Reagan and the ­illicit ­funding, arming and training of the murderous, far-right Contras in ­Nicaragua in the 1980s.

These early decades of Nato are far more than an embarrassing history. They are evidence of an organisation that is poisoned at the root.

Struggling to overcome its ­much-vaunted “Vietnam syndrome”, the American imperium dragged its allies – most prominently the UK – into a series of disastrous conflicts in Iraq (1990-91 and, again, 2003-11) and Afghanistan (2001-21). The outcome has been death and destruction on a horrific scale in both countries, to say nothing of the delivery of Afghanistan back into the hands of the faux-Islamic fanatics of the Taliban.

The horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have stood as brutal evidence of the irredeemable malignancy of US ­imperialism in the 21st century.

Nor have recent western interventions in Syria (where the hideous conflict ­appears to be intractable) and Libya (a failed state mired in civil war) done anything to bolster the fanciful notion that the western powers (Nato members all) hold the key to stability and security. ­ Indeed, in Yemen, the Saudi war ­machine – which has rained more death and destruction on the heads of desperate civilians than Putin has in Ukraine – continues to use British-made weapons purchased from such companies as BAE Systems, Raytheon and MBDA.

Nevertheless, the political ­leaderships in Stockholm and Helsinki have ­concluded that the only reasonable ­response to ­Putin’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine is for the smaller nations of ­Europe to shelter under Nato’s nuclear umbrella. To Scotland’s shame, the SNP leadership says the same, with its ­pipedream policy of asking Nato to both admit an ­independent Scotland as a member, and remove nuclear weapons from Faslane.

I defer to no-one in my abhorrence of Putin’s war in Ukraine – it’s worth repeating that while I, along with many friends in the anti-war movement, was protesting against the Russian dictator’s second war in Chechnya in 2000, the UK’s then prime minister, Tony Blair, was in St Petersburg, taking in an opera with Putin.

However, whilst Russia’s horrific war is inexcusable, it is not inexplicable. ­Nato’s efforts to encircle Russia – in a complete breach of American assurances to Mikhail ­Gorbachev in 1990-91 – have inevitably created nervousness in the Kremlin.

The eight-year conflict in the Donbas, the annexation of Crimea, Moscow’s ­support for the vicious Lukashenko ­regime in Belarus and the current bloody war in Ukraine must all be considered in that context.

It is understandable when people look on the horrors in Ukraine and feel instinctively that “something must be done”. However, the “support” for Ukraine from pro-Nato politicians and media editors should set alarm bells ringing as to the motives of the UK Government and the western powers.

To welcome white, European, predominantly Christian Ukrainian refugees while seeking to criminalise darker-skinned, often Muslim refugees from countries such as Syria and Yemen is not humanitarianism but rather opportunism and racism.

Putin is a horrible authoritarian who will – it is my fervent hope – be toppled by his own people. However, Nato’s involvement in Ukraine, and its expansion in northern Europe, is no more the answer to Putin’s invasion than the invasion of Afghanistan was the answer to the terrorism behind the 9/11 attacks.

The Nato powers are not seeking peace, but the weakening of Russia through a protracted proxy war in which the Ukrainian people themselves are overwhelmingly the victims.