WOMEN RESIST NATO: Debunking NATO’s “Women, Peace and Security” Strategy as Anti-Women and Anti-People
On July 9, 2024, global leaders on Women - such as Geeta Rao Gupta (U.S. Ambassador at Large for Women), Jennifer Klein (Chairwoman of the Gender Policy Council of the United States), and Irene Fellin (Secretary General's Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security) - led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) round table on Women, Peace and Security (WPS). Speakers from all over the world clamored about the key role NATO plays in ensuring the meaningful participation of women in the military, in "establishing democracy", and in advancing NATO interests around the world. However, the roundtable failed to acknowledge the significant role that Nato and allied militaries - led and funded by the US play in exacerbating instability and violence against women; talking points glossed over the damaging impact that NATO intervention has had on the majority of women around the world - resulting in rape, forced migration, displacement, and climate catastrophe. The WPS framework pushes a backwards narrative with false solutions for women's advancement towards equality and peace.
NATO’s Women Peace and Security Reception
NATO Gathering in DC:
NATO is a U.S.-led, imperialist war alliance created to maintain political and economic hegemony through military control of the world. Its 32 member countries represent an alignment of the US-led imperialist powers and their militaries. Since its founding in 1949 in Washington DC, NATO has been responsible for destabilizing regions with the sole purpose of supporting parasitic capitalist exploitation and robbing people of their right to self-determination. To celebrate 75 years of militarism, NATO states are gathering in Washington DC from July 9-11 to discuss "bolstering allied defense and deterrence; support for Ukraine; and strengthening NATO's global partnerships". These are important points of unity for imperialists as the U.S. doubles down on its support for the Zionist Israeli settler colonial state in its genocidal aggression against the Palestinian people; a stance which clearly reflects the United States's role as the dominant imperialist power. It also exposes that the US and its allies will do everything within their power to maintain control globally – especially crushing people’s resistance and funding and provoking genocide.
In the last few years, NATO has spread its tentacles beyond its member states' region, which historically includes states in Europe and North America. It is creating strategic partnerships with governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean to meet its objectives. Even the war in Ukraine amounts to a U.S. proxy war against Russia. In fact, NATO's very first Secretary General stated that a main aim for NATO was to "keep Russia out," a position that lives on in the U.S.-led military alliance's consistent expansion into Eastern Europe, an act of aggression towards Russia.
As host of the summit, the embattled U.S. and its imperialist and reactionary allies are attempting to show strength, despite evidence decrying their confidence in maintaining the global order. Facing rising discontent and challenges to their dominance, imperialists anxiously scramble for new strategies to hold on to a dying political-economic system. It is in this context that the NATO Women, Peace and Security round table was held in Washington D.C. on July 9, 2024.
NATO’s WPS Round Table July/2024
Women, Peace and Security (WPS):
WPS is a global policy framework that claims that women's participation in military, peace negotiations, and national rebuilding advances global stability. The WPS Agenda was adopted on October 31, 2000 by the UN Security Council and has since been adopted by foreign militaries, the United States government, and military alliances like NATO. While WPS claims to advance the rights and interests of women through their participation in nation building (such as peacekeeping missions, peace negotiations, elections, etc), it serves as a facade for ensuring that U.S. interests are advanced and enforced in countries that assert their independence (as in the case of Niger), are impacted by war or internal conflict (in the case of Haiti), or are fronts for US-led war (as in the case of Ukraine and Afghanistan).
WPS strategies crush true independence in conflict-torn countries, and result in more reliance on the US and their allies for military, economic and political support. Consequently, countries become aid dependent and fall victim to predatory loan programs facilitated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The UN currently considers Haiti and Afghanistan sites of "transition missions" (literally transitioning from dictatorship to democracy), but interventions in both countries have failed to ensure fair elections, and have exacerbated unsafe conditions which lead to instability and dictatorships; ultimately worsening the situation of poor and working women overall. In the case of Haiti – failed UN peacekeeping missions have resulted in the recent US-Kenya-UN invasion which has only heightened the crisis facing Haitians today. In Afghanistan, NATO participated in a 20-year long war of aggression that resulted in a US-led puppet government that did not serve the people's needs (and ultimately collapsed), leading to dependence on international aid and relief programs. Everywhere that NATO and the UN intervene, self determination is trampled, economic instability worsens as imperialists tighten their stronghold, and people suffer as a result.
NATO's WPS
Just this week, NATO held a WPS reception, during which Secretary of State Anthony Blinken emphasized a need for women in NATO leadership positions. However, we don't need more women in positions that call the shots on imperialist-led military intervention. Diversity within NATO's forces will not enable it to be a better global leader. We must debunk the idea that military intervention can ever be empowering for women. NATO also claims to "recognize the disproportionate impact that conflict has on women and girls." As a major instigator of military conflict, NATO must also recognize the leading role it plays in oppressing women and girls worldwide. Instead, we are likely to see NATO using the WPS and Conflict Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) to justify its interventions around the world, even when increased military presence is a leading cause of sexual violence.
The 2024 NATO Summit's WPS Roundtable reveals how NATO uses women as a pawn to justify and encourage U.S.-NATO military intervention and push back against attempts to expose the real impacts of U.S. militarism on women. To do this, they justify U.S. military presence by claiming that they are advancing women's equality and democracy in countries like Haiti, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and the Philippines. Of course, we know this is a complete lie. Wherever the U.S. and its NATO allies have occupied, they have brought with them sexual violence, forced prostitution, femicide, and the destruction of the local economy and infrastructure which has effects on the whole people, especially women.
During the WPS Roundtable, the Philippines was highlighted as an example of how women can participate in "bringing peace" under the direction of the UN WPS agenda during the 2011 peace negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. What they don't mention is the role the United States played in stoking this conflict, naming the Philippines as its second front in the "War on Terror" in 2001 and further militarizing the puppet goverment to establish control over the country. Despite this repression, Filipino women are fighting for peace by defending their ancestral lands from multinational corporations, building mass organizations to assert their rights, engaging in the labor struggle for their basic rights, and even taking up arms to defend their people's interests.
Women Resist Imperialism!
NATO also promotes women's participation in U.S. and allied militaries as a sign of progress. In a world where the people are overwhelmingly rejecting endless war, leading to reactionary militaries struggling to recruit new soldiers, NATO's push to include more women is nothing more than a means to address their severe recruitment crisis under the guise of advancing women's rights. Widening the recruitment pool to include women, older adults, and more adults with health concerns only seeks to ensure they have enough boots on the ground to win their imperialist wars. Additionally - NATO's WPS round table emphasized the over $7 million in funding for new equipment for women fighters in Ukraine - including boots and bulletproof vests. While this is framed as an example of equity and inclusion in NATO programs and in the Ukrainian armed forces - in reality it is an effort of US-NATO to overtake Russia, limit casualties, and to protect US interests in the region.
NATO’s attempts to hide the horrific violence against women that is rampant both internally and on the battlefield by claiming to utilize a “soft power” strategy emphasized by WPS. However, NATO’s claims to address violence against women by prioritizing diplomatic means rather than warfare fall flat while strong-arming its member countries into meeting or exceeding the target of spending 2% of their GDP on military by 2030. A woman in Palestine who dies due to engineered starvation enforced by blockade is a martyr just the same as a woman struck by a bomb. It is clear that NATO is only seeking to exploit women’s issues to benefit U.S. corporations and uphold imperialism.
While NATO celebrates the increase of women in leadership within its militaries, violence against lower ranking female soldiers continues to rise, and violence against women in conflict zones devastates communities wherever there is NATO intervention. Military recruitment preys on working class people, even here in the imperial core, where capitalist dominance forces workers, women, and children into working for the war machine just to make ends meet. The U.S. military and NATO remain the same violent institutions regardless of whether there are women in leadership. Working class people in the U.S. are closer to the exploited poor abroad than they are to the ruling elites who rely on military aggression like that orchestrated by NATO to secure cheap labor and resources. In fact, history teaches us that only by recognizing that our plight in the imperial core is intimately connected to the fight for better conditions waged by people fighting for freedom from imperial domination can we make material gains for everyday people caught under the combat boot of the U.S. corporate oligarchs.
To NATO, women are nothing more than pawns to be used in any form of warfare, from the NATO-backed Ukraine war to cyber and information warfare. By parading NATO’s WPS at the path to women’s liberation, NATO member countries attempt to justify imperialist warfare anywhere that NATO’s military strategy meets resistance. For example, U.S. Ambassador Eric Nelson cites that women's rights can be "divisive" and used to sow anti-U.S. propaganda. This strategy affectively allows the U.S. to use NATO backing to intervene in any country combatting US imperialism by claiming they are seeking women’s liberation. We know that the U.S. will use this justification to counter genuine movements of women and other gender-oppressed people that demand an end to U.S. militarism and expose its devastating effects on women.
The International Women's Alliance and the Resist NATO Coalition reject NATO's vision of a militarized, imperialist future with women at the helm of fighter jets or at the head of the table in the war room. What is a woman's true perspective on peace? Peace does not mean submission or a momentary lack of violence in an unjust world. Peace is achieved by eliminating exploitation against all oppressed peoples. Around the world, women are rising up to fight for our rights, for national sovereignty, for ecological sustainability, and for the rights of all people who are alive now and who are yet to come.
IWA members gathered in Malaysia in June 2024 to plan our campaigns and unite on continuing to fight US-led war and economic exploitation as the root causes of women’s subjugation globally (June/ 2024)
As the U.S. gears up for further war provocations against China, Russia, Iran and the DPRK and can be sure that they will continue to use women as props to justify their wars of aggression. It is therefore imperative that we prepare for these provocations by uniting all organizations of women and gender-oppressed people into a broad front against U.S. imperialism. We invite all organizations to join the International Women's Alliance (IWA) and the Resist NATO coalition, and the International League of People's Struggles (ILPS) so that together we can say: Women, unite to oppose U.S.-Led military alliances and to build a genuine peace!
IWA members mobilized in San Diego against the RIMPAC military exsersizes in June 2024. Members emphasized the impact US-led war has on women around the world. 1/3 of RIMPAC participants are NATO members.