No to NATO – Young Labour Motion

This group/branch/region notes:

1. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the relationship between ‘the West’ and the rest of the world has been one defined by imperialism, that is, a system in its broad outlines based on war, racism and exploitation of the less developed parts of the world.
2. Following the end of the Second World War and the advent of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed, in order to enshrine the dominance of American interests.
3. Between 1945 and 2000, American imperialism bombed at least 27 countries, assassinated or attempted to assassinate thirty world leaders and tried to overthrow forty governments.
4. Such episodes include the wars of aggression in Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, the coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA-funded death squads in Central America in the 1980s, and the starvation of a half a million Iraqi children to death in the 1990s.
5. The collapse of Communism post-1989 rendered any real logical justification for NATO moot, since the European glacis-states no longer needed defence, nor could the immense build-up of military material be justified.
6. In order to regain an ideological justification, NATO member-states, including the UK, pursued a policy of wars of aggression against predominantly Muslim countries, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq.
7. These wars did nothing to make the citizens of Western countries safer; instead they fuelled Islamophobia at home and intense resentment abroad.
8. These wars also triggered a crisis in the Labour Party, with voters turning away in disgust and public faith in parliamentary democracy falling.
9. Today Donald Trump stands astride NATO, most recently threatening to commit a nuclear atrocity in the Korean peninsula, whilst closing the borders to the refugees of war in the Middle East.
10. Jeremy Corbyn is a long-time opponent of imperialism and aggressive wars.

This group/branch/region believes:

1. From Guyana to Vietnam to Iraq, the Labour Party all too often been complicit in American overseas aggression.
2. NATO has been the lynchpin and institutional expression of American imperialism.
3. Like its Leader, Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Home Secretary, the Labour Party should be avowedly anti-imperialist.
4. Labour should commit to withdrawal from NATO on the basis that it no longer meets our collective security needs, is headed by a man variously viewed as an authoritarian and a fascist, and that its continual aggression makes people in the UK less safe than they otherwise would.

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