Disintegration of Global NATO and the Maturation of the Bandung Project

By Horace Campbell – Apr 14, 2025

Horace Campbell analyzes the disintegration of Global NATO as it relates to the Bandung Conference in 1955, the increased confidence and cooperation among the countries of the Global South, and the rise of anti-imperial and anti-racists movements.

“Wars are precisely a mechanism for adjusting or adapting the military and political balance of forces to the new industrial-financial one, through the victory or partial victory of some, and the defeat or partial defeat of other powers” (Ernest Mandel, in The Meaning of the Second World War, London, New York: Verso, 1986).

Background to the diminution of Global NATO
This week is seventy years since the Bandung Conference was held in Indonesia, from April 18 to 24, 1955. That meeting was a pivotal event in the annals of the struggles for self-determination and shaping the future of international relations for all people on the planet. The primary aims of the conference were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism, racism, apartheid and neocolonialism in all its forms. In the past seventy years, the intellectual agenda of the Bandung scholars has been to give scholarly meaning to the demands of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ for bread, peace and justice. Frantz Fanon had been one of the intellectuals of that generation who articulated the struggles for self-rule, peaceful coexistence and mutual respect among nations while fighting against France and NATO in Algeria. In the past 70 years the Bandung Project defined the struggles of the oppressed peoples of the world incorporating the anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, Palestinian, anti-racist struggles along with the calls for a New International Economic Order. Humanity is now on the precipice of new wars as the pendulum is swinging against NATO and US military dominance.

It is in the planned wars against China where the US pivot to Asia sought to expand Global NATO via new military arrangements with Australia and New Zealand where the cracks are already evident. In our study on Global Nato and the Catastrophic Failures in Libya we identified the global alliances that constitute Global NATO. Veronica M. Kitchen in the book, The Globalization of NATO  elaborated on the expansion and adaptation of NATO’s roles and missions beyond its reputed Euro-Atlantic focus. The operations of NATO outside of the Euro Atlantic area as was witnessed in Afghanistan and Libya is not new. It represents a long-standing creation of proxy alliances such as the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) which was formed to assist France in South East Asia after the bloody defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 France was defeated in Algeria and is now on the verge of being driven out of Africa. Just as that military defeat of the USA in Vietnam sent SEATO to the dustbin of history, so the current wars on multiple fronts to enforce the weaponization of everything is accelerating the disintegration of Global NATO.

I have identified the Components of Global NATO as follows:

1. Partnership for Peace (PfP): This is the front of NATO that includes states such as Ukraine which were former members of the Warsaw Pact and other countries from the former Soviet sphere of influence. Since 1994 most of the European members of PfP have been incorporated into NATO.

2. Indo-Pacific Four (IP-4) (Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand)

3.Mediterranean Dialogue (comprising of Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia) 

4. Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE)

5. Gulf Cooperation Council (formed in 1981, comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates)

6.  AUKUS -defense pacts: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain 

7. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense agreements stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines.

8. US Africa Command – subordinated to the European Command, the dominant force  for the United States’ military occupation of Europe.

9 SouthCom: The Southern Command, base of the US military operations in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

Global NATO represents the incoherence and instability of the current relations between US imperialism and the rest of the planet earth. In each of these areas of the extension of US military dominance in NATO, the objective has been to dominate other capitalist countries under the rubric of interoperability.  Interoperability simply meant that the participating states would be dominated by US military equipment with this domination disguised within NATO as cooperation, standardization, and coordination. Of the areas of global domination, the United States is weakest in the Caribbean and South America. The existence of the Cuban revolution and the recent wave of democratically elected political leaders has weakened this flank of Global NATO.

For the past forty years the European members of NATO complained about the protection of the US armaments industry at the expense of European industrial transformation. ^[1] Scholars across Europe and the USA have been writing on the errors of NATO’s expansion and debating the ‘mistakes’ of NATO. Few of these European writers attribute the changes in the military political balance to the sterling resistance from the Global South as evident in the victories of the peoples of Vietnam and the defeat of NATO in Southern Africa.^[2] Emmanuel Todd, writing with the anxiety of the French intellectuals who seek strategic autonomy from the USA has written simply that NATO will disintegrate.^[3]

Other Intellectuals, queried “Is NATO Falling Apart?”^[4] More recently in March 2025, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the statements of the Trump administration in support of rabid right-wing elements in Europe were only surpassed by the criticisms of the Europeans that they were freeloading. In a leaked conversation in March, it was exposed where the Vice President of the USA JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confessed that they ‘hate bailing Europe out’. This attitude contradicts the reality that since the fall of the Berlin Wall the US continued to maintain over 60,000 occupation forces in Western Europe in the name of protecting Europe.^[5] The bellicosity towards Europe by the Trump administration is accompanying the declaration of the President to make Canada the 51st state, annex Greenland, take over the Panama Canal, and to displace two million Palestinians from Gaza.^[6] 

Threats to annex Canada hastening disintegration
Since the formation of NATO to protect colonial powers, Canada has been one of the most servile members of this military alliance. Canadian personnel served the interests of the United States in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Inside the United Nations system, the NATO forces used the liberal reputation of Canada to carry out dirty tasks such as in Africa and Haiti. However, with the crisis of US imperialism and the narrowing of the base of accumulation with challenges from the Global South, the president of the United States has mooted the question of making Canada the 51^st state of the United States. This has elicited such a massive reaction from the Canadians that the Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney led the attack on the US bond market on 9 April 2025 when the United States declared tariffs on the rest of the world.

“On the surface, it looked like a safe play, a hedge against economic chaos. But it wasn’t just defense. It was a loaded gun. Carney didn’t stop there. He took his case to Europe. Not for photo ops, but for closed-door meetings with the EU’s heavy hitters—Germany, France, the Netherlands. Japan was in the room too, listening closely. The pitch was simple: if Trump went too far with tariffs, Canada wouldn’t just retaliate with duties on American cars or steel. It would start offloading those Treasury bonds. Not a fire sale, nothing so crude. A slow, steady bleed. A signal to the markets that the U.S. dollar’s perch wasn’t so secure.”^[7]

Mark Carney, a banker who had previously served as the Governor of the Bank of England, increased Canada’s holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds and coordinated with other countries to signal a potential slow, steady sell-off of these bonds. The coordinated sell-off of Treasury bonds would have a devastating impact on the U.S. economy by pushing bond prices down and increasing borrowing costs. This financial pressure led Trump to pause his tariff threats and reconsider his approach. The Canadians then intensified their outreach to Europe and China. The most far reaching in terms of the future relationship between the United States and Canada was the strengthening of the relations with China through trade as manifest in the Transmountain energy pipeline. The Trans Mountain pipeline carries crude oil from Alberta to the British Columbia coast which then connects to China to feed the Rongsheng Petrochemicals complex of China. Those who follow the rhythm of the war in Ukraine and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline are closely following the new trade relations between Canada and China. The Canadian Prime Minister must have had the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in mind when he noted, 

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States … is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of economic leadership … is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”^[8]

The new reality that Carney mentioned was one other manifestation of the disintegration of NATO. The other area of the world where Global NATO is weakening is within the ASEAN societies where the maturation of the Bandung Project has accelerated trade and commercial relations.

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Maturation of the Bandung Project 
The 1955 meeting in Bandung had been called a few months after the colonial powers had created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954. SEATO was a military alliance to roll back the victory of the Vietnamese people over the French at Dien Bien Phu. SEATO had been one of those Global arms of NATO in its 76 years, but the defeat of the United States in Vietnam in 1975 ushered in the demise of SEATO. This military reversal of the USA in Vietnam accelerated the process of the disintegration of the military alliance that was supposed to have been fighting against communism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the solidarity among the ASEAN states that welcomed Vietnam to its fold and is now playing a leading role in confronting arbitrary economic domination. In 1979, the tensions between China and Vietnam descended into open warfare. Vietnam has emerged as a clear diplomatic and commercial leader in East Asia, patching up relations to the point where the President of China visited Vietnam this week to inaugurate a railway line to expand trade between China and Vietnam. Vijay Prashad had commented over a year ago on the new mood in the South that is accelerating South South cooperation.^[9]

The maturation of this Bandung Project has seen the strengthening of economic, political and military cooperation all across the Global South, especially with the rise of new political formations and initiatives such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) of ASEAN, CELAC, the African Union, and BRICS challenging western imperial hegemony. It is the EU and the Canadians who are now scampering to determine their future in NATO.

In a 2023 article, I wrote at great length on the importance of the RCEP as a component of the Bandung Project.^[10] The weaponization of everything by the United States crowned by the recent tariffs against all countries of the world has served to strengthen military, economic and commercial relations in Asia. Before the so-called reciprocal Tariffs of the Trump administration, Australia, China, South Korea, Japan and New Zealand were integrated into RCEP. In the aftermath of the tariffs, China, South Korea and Japan have embarked on unprecedented talks to deepen relations with China. The deepening of such relations will inevitably affect the US military posture in Asia. The conservative forces in India are auditioning to be the premier partners of the United States and Israel in the changed military configuration that is unfolding.  This audition is most manifest in the support for the Israeli actions against the Palestinian peoples.

Europe is seeking better relations with Asia while seeking to build its military capabilities. Space does not allow us to delve into how the provocation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine has punctured Europe. This will have to wait. For this contribution, what is noteworthy is how France and the EU are responding to the disintegration of NATO, feeding that same disintegration.

PESCO and European ambivalence inside NATO
During the first Trump administration, the French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO brain dead while pushing for the European alternative to NATO in the PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation). In an interview published by The Economist in November 2019, Macron stated:

“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO“. He added that Europe was on “the edge of a precipice” and needed to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power; otherwise “we will no longer be in control of our destiny.“

In 2019, at the time of the 70^th anniversary of NATO, I made the argument to dismantle Global NATO: A 70 Year alliance of Oppressors in Crisis, Limits of the Military Management of the International System.^[11] In the short six years, several struggles pushed the global battles to the fore including intensified warfare, global health pandemics, vaccine apartheid, climate change, and systemic racism accelerated the pace of the disintegration of NATO. Since the start of the second Trump administration and the open embrace of the Russians and Putin, there have been intensified discussions among members of the European Union on how to strengthen PESCO. The Trump Administration sent shockwaves among EU members of NATO, such as Denmark, when Donald Trump stated that the United States wanted to annex Greenland.^[12] 

Denmark had remained confident that with its deep alliance with the United States, it could remain aloof of PESCO, but with the talk of the annexation of Greenland, Denmark has signed on to PESCO. Britain, which had prided itself with the special relationship with the United States, now finds itself at odds with the USA and the European Union. Britain left the European Union with the express intention of forging closer relations with the conservative forces around the first Trump administration. The posture of the second Trump government has left the British dangling outside of the EU and outside of PESCO.

PESCO as a new military/economic alliance is a key part of the EU’s move toward breaking from the old fear of German militarism. For more than a century, France remained afraid of German industrial and potential military rearmament. France was saved three times in the last century from German domination by African soldiers and African resources. France was weakened after the defeat in Vietnam, Egypt (Suez crisis) and in Algeria. General Charles De Gaulle had left NATO in 1966 over his opposition to the exorbitant privilege of the US Dollar. Nicholas Sarkozy rejoined NATO in 2009 to access US support to destroy the plans for the African currency and the African continental free trade area. The ensuing destruction of Libya is still one matter which has to be settled between Europe and Africa. France remains inside NATO while actively working against NATO.

PESCO is dependent on the projection of military power of the European capabilities in Africa. The failure of the French operations in Africa since the attack on Libya demonstrated that France is inordinately dependent on U.S. intelligence, logistical, and aerial refueling support. In short, while bashing NATO, France has been dependent on the same NATO. The love-hate relationship between France and NATO is best manifest in the alliance between France and the USA in Libya, Palestine and in the push to support Morrocco to occupy the Western Sahara by naming Morocco as Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) by the United States in 2004. Not only is Morocco an ally of NATO inside its own designation as an ally, but Morocco and France are also allies with Israel via the Mediterranean Dialogue. 

NATO and European alliance with Israel with their support for the occupation of Palestine remain the most flammable portion of the current international landscape.  Trump’s suggestion that the United States “take over” Gaza and expel Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan promise to weaken the political alliances inside Egypt that have kept the forces of counter revolution in power since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. This plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza along with the accelerated plans of Israel to attack Iran expose great dangers for major warfare in West Asia to the point where sections of the US military establishment have recoiled from the plans of Israel to militarily attack the nuclear facilities of Iran in May. The New York Times reported on April 17th that, “Israel developed plans for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities that would have required U.S. assistance. But some administration officials had doubts.”^[13]

“Wars are precisely a mechanism for adjusting or adapting the military and political balance of forces to the new industrial-financial one, through the victory or partial victory of some, and the defeat or partial defeat of other, powers” ^[14]

Ernest Mandel, writing about fascism in Europe and the convergence of capitalist competition, had argued how the rise of fascism inevitably ended in global warfare. The disintegration of NATO is forcing new alliances, and it is slowly becoming clearer that Africa holds the balance in the new phase of reorganizing the world.

Reparative Justice, anti-racism, peace and reconstruction
The anti-imperialist and anti-racist forces that have coalesced in Africa has led to intense discussions in Europe and NATO over the future of NATO in Africa. Mainstream European scholars are calling meetings about NATO 2030 to carve out the development of new Strategic Concepts in the wake of the formation of the Alliance of Sahelian states.^[15]African opposition to European imperialism, especially the opposition to French imperialism in Africa has hastened the turn towards new alliances. PESCO and its legal fig leaf of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) requires African human and natural resources.  In the period that France has been thrown out of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, US companies have shown new interest in investing in the uranium resources of Niger. US capital is biding its time in the acquisition of the Ouricha-3 Uranium exploration license with the explicit intent to render France more dependent on the USA. The increased interest of US companies in Niger’s uranium deposits poses challenges for France in terms of energy security, economic interests, geopolitical stability and above all ‘prestige.’ The shock of the US genuflection before Putin has forced new discussions about Europeans outside of NATO, with France beseeching the Germans, Italians and Spaniards to strengthen military relations in PESCO.  PESCO is a central aspect of the disintegration of NATO.

NATO Was Founded To Crush Communist, Socialist, and Anti-Colonial Movements Worldwide

The anti racist struggles have been central to the Bandung spirit
It was not by accident that African descendants who were fighting against racism in the United States attended the Bandung Conference in 1955. From the Bandung conference through the World Conferences against racism, the anti-racist debates have been linked to anti militarism. Inside the United States, the ascendancy of the most extreme white racists has led to a purge of black officers in the US military apparatus rendering great instability and insecurity among the US military forces.

The United States and its military apparatus were at the base of the NATO project. Frank Kofsky in his book, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation,^[16] outlined in detail how the ‘war scare’ and subsequent formation of NATO was necessary to lay the foundations for what former President Eisenhower termed the Military Industrial Complex. In this and many other studies, it was established how the US government used the fabricated threat of Soviet expansionism to push through the Marshall Plan, the formation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine while also establishing the foundations for war capitalism. This war capitalism matured to become the military industrial complex to what is now called techno-fascism.^[17] Kyle Chayka. in his contribution on “Techno-Fascism Comes to America,” has argued that advanced technology has exerted control over society. While critiquing the techbros who have decried democratic relations and pushing for dictatorial powers in the USA, there is very little reflection on how racial capitalism is the logic of this phase of the crisis of imperialism.

Alfred McCoy has been one of the consistent commentators who over the past four decades provided a comprehensive view of the factors contributing to the potential disintegration of NATO.^[18] McCoy emphasized the gradual weakening of American global power, the geopolitical and economic challenges, and the internal political instability that collectively threaten the cohesion and effectiveness of the alliance. In a more recent contribution on the quicksand of disintegration coming from the Trump and Musk alliance, McCoy questioned, “Is 2025 the New 1984?”^[19] The missing part of this analysis is the consistent anti racist and antiwar forces that shaped the opposition to US militarism and racism. From the Caribbean to Africa to Asia, anti war forces noted that the mandate of NATO in the ‘Cold War’ was a ruse to support racists and colonialists. In an earlier article, I outlined how, out of the 12 original members of NATO, seven were colonial powers: Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NATO supported France, Belgium, Portugal and Britain to oppress those fighting against colonialism and apartheid.

Gerald Horne in numerous writings has argued that the Cold War was a pretext to preserve and promote white supremacy.^[20] His arguments in books and articles have been made more significant in the expansion of NATO after the disintegration of the planned economies and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. It is usual that after the collapse of the adversary, a military alliance formed to combat that adversary would be wound up. Instead, NATO expanded warfare and destruction, laying the base for its own disintegration in the process. NATO was built on lies and disinformation but was defeated by the forces who are still fighting to end the last scourges of apartheid, genocide and occupation. The intense struggles in West Asia have meant that the lies and cover up cannot continue without global revulsion and opposition.

When NATO was formed in 1949, the US military apparatus had been torn in the previous ten years between its own history of militarism, whiteness and genocidal traditions and its most recent participation in the war against fascism in Europe. In 1948, the newly formed General Assembly of the United Nations had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an international document to enshrine the rights and freedoms of all human beings. It was the same year that apartheid was enshrined as the official policy of the racist minority government in South Africa. Thus, in 1945 at the end of the war against Germany and Japan, the political leadership of the USA was faced with the option of deepening the alliance with white supremacists and colonialists or to support the rights of those fighting against racism. The history of racial capitalism and the super exploitation of black and brown peoples dictated that US capitalists choose to form NATO. It is not accidental that the forces around the Trump administration want to bring back apartheid to Southern Africa.

In 2021, after the public lynching of George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis, Minesota, an international commission of Inquiry found that the

“widespread and systematic racist violence in policing against people of African descent in the United States of America (U.S.) has resulted in a continuing pattern of gross and reliably attested violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The Commissioners find a pattern and practice of racist police violence in the U.S. in the context of a history of oppression dating back to the extermination of First Nations peoples, the enslavement of Africans, the militarization of U.S. society, and the continued perpetuation of structural racism.”^[21]

Up to the present in 2025, the United States military doubled down on supporting white supremacy and supporting colonialism. The recent efforts to resegregate the US military under the guise of promoting merit-based officers by the Trump administration have only exposed the depth of racism in one section of the US political leadership. Back in 1949 when NATO was formed, statements on white supremacy that highlighted US racism was termed communism. Similarly, in the Global South, any movement fighting for freedom was termed communist.  The USSR supported anti colonial movements. This did not mean that those fighting colonialism were communists. Whether it was Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Abdel Nasser, Martin Luther King Jr or Felix Moumie, those opposing NATO and colonialism were called communists. 

NATO has seen major failures in its operations since the end of that period called the Cold War. These failures included the mess in Europe in the wake of the bombing of Serbia in 1999, the twenty year debacle War in Afghanistan (2001-2021) which ended in defeat for the USA and NATO; The failed adventure in Iraq, the catastrophic failures in Libya with continued destruction since 2011, the NATO supported genocide in Palestine, and the aborted effort to ensnare the people of Ukraine into the NATO alliance. In my earlier work on Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, I documented the flawed logic behind the NATO intervention and how that military engagement had strengthened the resolve to oppose external military rule.^[22]

There have been numerous commentaries reflecting on the disintegration of NATO, made more manifest since the coming to power of the second Trump Administration. Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, famously observed, ‘You can do many things with bayonets except sit on them.’  No amount of advanced weapons and new weapon systems can stop the tide of opposition to racism and colonialism. NATO is disintegrating while exposing the strategic military failures of the United States. A “strategic military failure” refers to a situation where a military operation or campaign falls short of achieving its stated goals, often due to a flawed strategic plan or execution. 

After the provoked invasion of Ukraine, Emmanuel Todd, a French intellectual piled on to state firmly that “NATO will disintegrate.” 

Conclusion 
In this intervention we argued that the bellicosity of Global NATO and war capitalism did not come out of the blue but from the dead end of the military management of the international system. This dead end has been sharpened by the anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, West Asia, South America and East Asia. These anti-imperialist struggles are driven by geopolitical and geo economic shifts, the confidence of the Global South, the weaponization of everything and the calls for humans everywhere to chart a new course to save the planet. It is not enough to identify the disintegration of NATO, one major task is to consider new modes of social and economic organization that usher in the New International Economic Order.

Mwalimu Horace Campbell is a peace and social justice activist. He is also Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University and Chairperson of the Global Pan African Movement, North American Chapter.  He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013. 

 

Endnotes
[1] Maye, Diane L. “Autarky or Interdependence: U.S. vs. European Security and Defense Industries in a Globalized Market.” Journal of Strategic Security 10, no. 2 (2017): 33-47

 

 

Horace Campbell is a peace and social Justice activist. He is also Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University and Chairperson of the Global Pan African Movement, North American Chapter. He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013.

(Pambazuka News)