After a very intense campaign aimed at justifying the arms race to public opinion, the meeting of NATO Heads of State and Prime Ministers held in The Hague on June 25 has just confirmed and formalised decisions at the highest level that worsen international tension, especially in Europe, and increase the danger of military conflicts of catastrophic proportions.
Particularly serious is the decision - demanded by the US and subserviently accepted by its allies - to increase military spending to 5 per cent of GDP because of what this represents in terms of the militaristic escalation of this aggressive alliance and the planned diversion to the military-industrial complex of resources that are essential for improving the living conditions of the workers and peoples.
The PCP rejects and combats the warmongering drift of the Hague summit, a drift that highlights the real nature of NATO as an armed arm of imperialism, which increases the demand for its dissolution.
The PCP denounces the PSD/CDS government's sheep-like stance of national submission, a shameful stance in which any hint of patriotic pride is completely absent (as is clearly evident in the yielding of the Lajes base for the US aggression against Iran), which openly affronts the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic and carries with it the danger of Portugal's tragic involvement in imperialism's military adventures. The diversion of resources to the war that the government is proposing has the firm opposition of the PCP, which denounces the semantic engineering and ‘creative accounting’ with which it is trying to hide the serious social consequences of such an option.
The agenda of the Hague summit was designed to respond to the demands of the US and its affirmation as the dominant imperialist power, to hide the difficulties and differences that NATO faces and, above all, to project it as ‘the strongest alliance in history’, protector of the “West” and of the ‘world order with rules’ dictated by imperialism to which the workers and peoples of the whole world should submit. The support given by the major powers of NATO and the EU to the US and Israeli aggression against Iran, as well as their complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people, is extremely serious.
The PCP points out that the promotion of a war economy in which NATO and the European Union are engaged is accompanied in many countries, including Portugal, by an attack on labour rights and other fundamental rights and by the trivialisation and promotion of the extreme right.
In view of the serious worsening of the international situation and the dangers resulting from the arms race that this NATO summit is fuelling, the PCP calls on the workers, the youth and the Portuguese people to give more strength to the struggle in defence of national sovereignty and independence, for peace and in solidarity with all the peoples fighting against imperialist interference and aggression.
