Azra Sayeed<\/p>
June 27, 2025<\/p>\n
As a Pakistani, I have borne daily witness to relentless exploitation by Western imperialism. The lives of Pakistani workers and farmers, like those of millions across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, are defined by misery, hunger, landlessness, under-employment and untreated illness by imperialist design.<\/p>\n
Imperialist powers, led by the U.S., have ensured that our nations remain shackled to debt, dependency, and violence. And now, as NATO extends its tentacles into the Asia-Pacific under the guise of \u201csecurity,\u201d we must recognize this for what it is: a recolonization project, dressed in the language of \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201cstability\u201d.<\/p>\n
US-NATO has spent decades plundering our lands, propping up puppet regimes, and waging wars\u2014both hot and cold\u2014to maintain their stranglehold over our resources and our futures. NATO\u2019s 2030 initiative seeks to dramatically expand the alliance\u2019s global reach while designating both Russia and China as existential threats. The plan calls for deepening military ties with US states far beyond the north Atlantic, from Colombia to Kuwait, militarizing space, maintaining aggressive forward deployment of forces, expanding nuclear capabilities, and conducting increasingly provocative war games in the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n
The Iran-Israel conflict, the genocide in Palestine, the military buildup in the South China Sea, the US troop deployments in the Philippines, and the NATO summit itself are all part of a coordinated imperialist strategy led by the United States and its allies to crush liberation movements and preserve a dying global order.<\/p>\n
From the beginning, the U.S. orchestrated this war, arming \u201cIsrael\u201d to the teeth, green-lighting its attacks, and intervening when it found a smokescreen to finally launch a direct aggression on Iran. The US is repeating the same move that it made in 2003 when it falsely claimed that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. What followed was a brutal US invasion and occupation that tore the country apart, killed close to one million people, devastated the infrastructure including hospitals and schools, and has left the country\u2019s people in political chaos and dependency to US oil and development companies to this day. The US wants to see Iran and its people suffer the same fate.<\/p>\n
But as with Iraq, the US has committed an act that will drag it further down in its own spiraling collapse. The US under Trump is mired in a deep political and economic crisis from being overstretched and engaged in endless wars. This attack on Iran exacerbates the crisis, as the US will pour even more money into waging war, either directly or by continuing to arm Zionist \u201cIsrael\u201d to do its bidding.<\/p>\n
This brings us to NATO\u2019s expansion and influence in the Asia Pacific. In 2011, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, openly declared the Obama administration\u2019s \u201cpivot to Asia,\u201d framing it as an embrace of the region\u2019s \u201cstrategic importance.\u201d But we know what \u201cstrategic importance\u201d really means: domination. The U.S. does not engage with the Asia-Pacific as equals; it seeks to control it. The so-called \u201cIndo-Pacific Strategy\u201d is nothing but a blueprint for militarization and resource extraction.<\/p>\n
The very term \u201cIndo-Pacific\u201d is a calculated insult. It binds together two fascist allies\u2014the U.S. and India\u2014under the banner of containing China. India, a state that massacres its own people in Kashmir and brutalizes indigenous communities in mineral-rich regions, is now Washington\u2019s favorite enforcer in the region. Meanwhile, the U.S. demands that North Korea denuclearize while it stockpiles thousands of warheads and has conducted 192 nuclear tests in the Pacific alone. The hypocrisy is staggering.<\/p>\n
France, a self-proclaimed \u201cPacific nation,\u201d has no business in our waters, yet it maintains a permanent presence in colonial military outposts like New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and wages war games in Asia Pacific like RIMPAC in Hawai\u2019i, Balikatan in the Philippines and La P\u00e9rouse across 9 pacific nations. The U.S., for its part, has turned the Pacific into an armed camp, with installations from Okinawa, to the Philippines, to Guahan, to Palau, to Diego Garcia. This is evidence that NATO has no interest in defence, but represents a bloody marriage between the US and European imperialists and the puppet governments of countries in the Asia Pacific, doing the bidding of the West.<\/p>\n
Last year, NATO took its most brazen step yet: the formal inclusion of the \u201cIndo-Pacific Four\u201d (Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea) into its summit. It was the culmination of years of creeping militarization, now codified in the 2024 Washington Declaration, which explicitly labeled China as an \u201cenabler\u201d of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
This is not diplomacy, it is a declaration of war against national liberation movements and anti-imperialist nations.<\/p>\n
Of the three major conflict fronts in the world today, two are in the Asia-Pacific: the U.S.-China cold war and the genocide in Palestine and assault of the US on the sovereign nation of Iran. And yet, Western leaders speak of \u201cstability\u201d while fueling arms races and backing apartheid regimes.<\/p>\n
US-NATO\u2019s expansion is about plunder of our resources, especially minerals. In 2023, NATO publicly identified 12 critical minerals essential for its war machine. Who controls these minerals? Not the West. China produces 69% of the world\u2019s graphite; bauxite, the main mineral used in aluminum metal production, is concentrated in Australia, China, and India.<\/p>\n
This is why indigenous lands in India are being seized. This is why Adivasi communities and Maoist rebels are slaughtered\u2014not because they are \u201cterrorists,\u201d but because they stand in the way of corporate theft. The same logic applies to deep-sea mining, the next frontier of ecological destruction. The Pacific Ocean, already scarred by nuclear testing, is now being carved up for its mineral wealth. The U.S. will drown entire ecosystems in pursuit of profit.<\/p>\n
The need for global resistance<\/p>\n
The cracks within NATO\u2014over Ukraine, over Israel\u2014are real, but they will not dismantle imperialism on their own. The people must force them open. We have seen glimpses of this power: the millions who marched against the Iraq War, the workers\u2019 strikes in India, the Palestinian resistance that refuses to die. But posters and protests alone will not save us.<\/p>\n
We must organize and we must fight, linking arm-in-arm with oppressed and exploited people around the world. The colonizers will not relinquish power willingly. If history has taught us anything, it is that empires only fall when they are broken by the masses.<\/p>\n
The choice is ours: Submit to a new century of colonial horror, or rise up and reclaim our future. The time for resistance is now.<\/p>\n
Azra Sayeed, Secretary General of the International League of Peoples\u2019 Struggle, is convenor of the Resist NATO Coalition.<\/p>\n\n
Source: https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2025\/06\/27\/natos-expansion-and-why-people-of-the-global-south-must-resist\/<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Azra Sayeed June 27, 2025 As a Pakistani, I have borne daily witness to relentless exploitation by Western imperialism. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-food-sovereignty","category-resistance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2029,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions\/2029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rootsforequity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}