1. Rejecting the necessary and urgent path towards promoting peace, collective security and cooperation, namely in Europe, the NATO Summit, held in Ankara, Turkey, persists with its warmongering policy, confirming that it is the US and its allies who bear the first and main responsibility for the unbridled rise in military spending, the serious arms race, and the instigation of confrontation, militarism and war, with all the consequences and risks they entail for the peoples of the world.
2. The convergence towards increased militarism and war reaffirmed at this Summit – which includes the accelerated militarisation of the European Union, while NATO’s European pillar – does not erase the obvious contradictions, divergences and difficulties, notably those resulting from the assertion of the primacy of US interests over those of its own allies, of the subordination and alignment of the latter with the strategy of hegemonic domination pursued by US imperialism, the difficult economic situation facing most members of this political-military bloc, and different stands regarding the worsening conflict in Eastern Europe, amongst other factors.
At a time when NATO members already spend more than all the other UN member states combined, NATO is announcing ever-increasing billions for arms and war, putting pressure on wages and pensions, attacking public services – in Healthcare, Education and Social Security – and the right to housing, driving up the cost of living, increasing the hardships faced by the workers, the elderly and youth, and exacerbating social injustices and inequalities.
3. NATO is responsible for decades of the arms race, for supporting colonial wars, for complicity in coups d’état, and for promoting terrorist activity. It has unleashed wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya, and supported the aggression and military occupation of Iraq. And its member states have generally supported and been complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, in Israel’s military aggression against other countries in the Middle East, and in the war waged by the US and Israel against Iran.
NATO continues to instigate and drive the prolongation of the war in Ukraine – unleashed with the 2014 coup d’état and escalated in 2022 – as well as to expand its military presence and infrastructure into Eastern Europe, with the serious risk of a conflict of catastrophic proportions.
4. The PCP denounces the Portuguese Government’s subservience to and alignment with imperialism’s warmongering escalation, and its submission to the interests of the US and the major EU powers, choices that run counter to the interests of the people and the Country. Portugal must distance itself from the aggressive policies and wars of the US, NATO and the EU, and must assert its national sovereignty and independence and, within the framework of its foreign relations, contribute to the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, to peace, to a system of collective security and to cooperation, in accordance with the principles of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic.
