Türkiye

NATO Is An Enemy of the Working Class and the Nations of the World

Marxism Now! Editorial Board

July 11, 2026

Today, the struggle against NATO is not merely a matter of foreign policy. It is an inseparable part of defending the democratic rights of the working class, trade union freedoms, and the struggle for social emancipation. Against imperialist wars, against the clandestine machinery of the state, against capitalist barbarism, the genuine alternative is the independent, united, socialist struggle of the international working class.

For days now, NATO, the West, and the propaganda of a “New Regional Power: Turkiye” have dominated the political agenda. At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is being welcomed in Ankara like a colonial governor, and NATO is striving to reinvent its own purpose for the remainder of the twenty-first century, it is time to recall, and to remind others some certain fundamental truths.

NATO Is An Aggressive Military Alliance

“NATO is a defensive alliance.” This claim is one of the greatest political lies that the Western powers, led by the United States, have propagated to the peoples of the world for decades. A close examination of the nearly eighty years since NATO’s founding reveals precisely the opposite. NATO was not merely a military alliance established against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. When considered together with other failed Cold War projects such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), its real character becomes unmistakably clear.

NATO is an international counter-revolutionary apparatus created to defend the imperialist-capitalist order against the revolutionary struggle of the working class. It is a military-political instrument constructed by the bourgeoisie to suppress working-class organization, socialist movements, and national liberation struggles throughout the world. The fact that NATO neither dissolved nor diminished after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, despite the disappearance of its alleged enemy, but instead expanded continuously, demonstrates that its true function has never been “defense against communism.” Its real purpose has always been the global defense of the capitalist order and imperialist hegemony.

While imperialist propaganda today portrays NATO as an alliance defending “democracy and freedom,” history tells an entirely different story. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Yugoslavia to Libya, military interventions carried out by the United States and its NATO allies have resulted in the deaths of millions, the destruction of entire countries, and the impoverishment of countless peoples. Yet NATO’s darkest face has appeared not only in wars abroad. It has also emerged through the clandestine organizations it established within its own member states.

Gladio (named for the Roman short sword) was organized secretly by NATO after the Second World War as a stay-behind counter-guerrilla network, officially intended to organize resistance behind enemy lines in the event of a future Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe.

Its national branches operated under different names: In Italy as Gladio; in Greece as LOK; in Belgium as SDRA8; in West Germany as Stay Behind and in Turkiye as the Counter-Guerrilla and the Special Warfare Department (later also known as the Mobilization Inspection Board). All of these organizations formed parts of the same strategic architecture.

Their mission was not simply to organize resistance against a hypothetical Soviet invasion. Their principal task was to suppress socialist movements, trade unions, workers’ strikes, and revolutionary upsurges within their own countries.

The eighty-year record of NATO and the documented activities of the Gladio networks clearly demonstrate that NATO is not a defensive organization but an aggressive instrument of counter-revolution.

The Real Purpose Behind NATO’s Creation

When NATO was founded in 1949, the official justification was the alleged threat of a Soviet invasion of Europe. However, a careful examination of the post-war political balance reveals a very different reality.

From the perspective of the Western ruling classes, the real danger was not Soviet tanks. It was the European working class beginning to question capitalism itself.

Following the Second World War, Communist Parties in many European countries counted millions of members. In Italy and France, large sections of the working class emerged directly from armed anti-fascist resistance movements. Greece was engulfed in civil war. Trade unions, workers’ councils, and popular assemblies had become integral components of economic and political life across much of Europe. The Left and socialism enjoyed enormous prestige and widespread popular sympathy. During post-war reconstruction and the redistribution of scarce resources, communist parties became economic political actors and even coalition partners in government.

For this reason, the Western powers responded on two fronts. The Marshall Plan constituted the economic pillar of this strategy. NATO constituted its military pillar.

NATO’s Invisible Armies

Beginning in the 1950s, NATO and the CIA coordinated the establishment of secret organizations known collectively as Stay-Behind networks across almost every country in Western Europe. Officially, these structures were intended to wage guerrilla warfare in the event of a Soviet occupation. But that invasion never came. Nevertheless, these clandestine armies remained active for decades.

Why? Because their real mission lay elsewhere. These networks infiltrated trade unions, monitored socialist organizations, carried out provocations, organized bomb attacks, planned coups d’état, and manipulated public opinion. Their ranks included ultra-nationalists, former Nazis, and fascist collaborators.

Today, numerous official documents, parliamentary investigations, and testimonies from former intelligence officials have confirmed the existence of these clandestine structures.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Operation Condor, coordinated by the right-wing military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, emerged in South America as a direct adaptation of this European model.

Italy: The Years of Lead

When Gladio is mentioned, the first country that comes to mind is Italy. From the 1960s onward, Italy possessed one of Europe’s strongest revolutionary movements. At the same time, workers’ strikes and factory occupations were spreading across the country. The period between 1969 and 1980 became known as the Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo).

During these years, hundreds of bomb attacks were carried out. The most infamous was the Piazza Fontana massacre of 1969. Immediately after the attack, responsibility was placed on anarchists. Years later, however, declassified documents and judicial investigations revealed that the bombing had been carried out by far-right organizations operating in conjunction with clandestine structures inside the state. Similarly, compelling evidence later emerged linking the Gladio network and neo-fascist organizations to the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing, in which eighty-five people were killed.

This method became known as the Strategy of Tension. Its logic was simple. First, bombs exploded. Then the blame was placed on left-wing organizations. Society was driven into fear and uncertainty. Police powers were expanded. Trade unions were repressed. Right-wing parties strengthened their political position. Right-wing terrorism became an instrument for reinforcing the authority of the capitalist state.

Greece: The Colonels’ Junta

In Greece, NATO’s Stay-Behind organization operated under the name LOK. The 1967 military coup, carried out by the Colonels’ Junta, exposed not only a decisive turning point in Greek history but also the true character of NATO. The democratically elected government was overthrown. Thousands of revolutionaries were arrested. Torture centres were established. Trade unions were dismantled. Political parties were outlawed.

Throughout the seven-year military dictatorship, NATO never opposed the coup. On the contrary, Greece remained fully integrated into NATO’s military command structure until the collapse of the dictatorship. Only after the Cyprus crisis did the first civilian government, during the country’s transition back to parliamentary rule in 1974, withdraw Greece from NATO’s integrated military command. Its return to NATO’s military structure became possible only with the approval of another NATO-backed military regime: the 12 September 1980 Junta that had seized power in Turkiye. For imperialism, democracy was never the decisive issue. The preservation of the authoritarian capitalist order was the real issue.

Counter-Guerrilla in Turkiye: The Special Warfare Department

For decades, the Turkish branch of Gladio operated under the name Special Warfare Department, better known to the public as the Counter-Guerrilla. It was established shortly after Turkiye entered NATO in 1952, following its participation in the Korean War. American military aid, CIA training, and NATO coordination formed the foundations of this organization.

Its official mission was identical to that of its counterparts elsewhere: “Resistance against a Soviet occupation.” Its actual activities, however, followed a very different course. Beginning in the 1960s, as the Turkish workers’ movement grew alongside the student movement, the revolutionary Left, Kurdish political forces, and labour organizations became the principal targets of increasingly violent operations. Turkiye’s Counter-Guerrilla became the centre of these campaigns. The violence that engulfed Turkiye during the 1970s cannot simply be dismissed as “clashes between the Left and the Right.” What unfolded was state intelligence-backed, fascist paramilitary terror, confronted by resistance led primarily by the revolutionary Left. During these years, Turkiye became the scene of systematic operations carried out by the clandestine warfare apparatus embedded within the state. Torture, political assassinations, disappearances, provocations and armed paramilitary organizations. All formed integral components of an international counter-revolutionary strategy.

The Bloody Record of the Counter-Guerrilla

This clandestine apparatus carried out its first operational interventions during the 6–7 September 1955 pogrom against the Greek population of Istanbul, while simultaneously encouraging and organizing ethnic violence in Cyprus. It became active once again during the 1968 Student Movement. On 23 September 1969, revolutionary student leader Taylan Özgür was assassinated in Istanbul’s Beyazıt Square, becoming one of the first “unsolved” political murders associated with the generation of 1968.

Throughout the 1970s, Turkiye witnessed one of the most profound class struggles in its history. Workers’ strikes spread across the country. The Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkiye (DİSK) expanded rapidly. The student movement grew stronger. Peasant struggles intensified. Socialist organizations became increasingly mass-based.

Internationally, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam had severely weakened the prestige of American imperialism. The Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974, the collapse of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, the revolutionary wave unleashed by the 1968 student uprisings, and the radicalization of youth throughout Europe placed the European bourgeoisie on alert against the possibility of new revolutionary upheavals.

For the Turkish ruling class and NATO, these developments represented not merely political competition. They constituted an existential threat to the capitalist order itself. For this reason, the Counter-Guerrilla ceased to function merely as an intelligence-gathering mechanism and was transformed into a systematic apparatus of counter-revolution. One of the defining characteristics of this period was the increasingly visible collaboration between state institutions and fascist paramilitary organizations.

The Grey Wolves’ (Ülkücüler) commando training camps were paramilitary training facilities established by the far-right nationalist movement between 1968 and 1978 to provide guerrilla warfare and street combat training. As part of the broader Gladio operation, these camps were financed and armed by the United States. Many of their instructors were retired military officers who had themselves received American training. By 1970, dozens of such camps existed across Turkiye, training more than 100,000 individuals. Many of these trainees would later play leading roles in the political violence that followed. Countless attacks involving these armed paramilitary groups targeted revolutionaries, Alevis, socialist intellectuals, and progressive democratic forces.

The Turning Point: The Fear of the Great Workers’ Resistance of 15–16 June 1970

The Great Workers’ Resistance of 15–16 June 1970 marked a decisive turning point for Turkiye’s ruling classes. Hundreds of thousands of workers poured out of factories across Istanbul and Kocaeli and took to the streets. For the first time, the ruling class was confronted with the independent political power of the working class on a truly mass scale.

It was precisely during this period that the Counter-Guerrilla apparatus was significantly strengthened. For the bourgeoisie, the principal threat was not the Warsaw Pact armies advancing through the Balkans, nor Soviet forces crossing the Caucasus. The real danger came from the workers emerging from the factories of Istanbul and Kocaeli.

From that point onward, the Turkish state developed an increasingly integrated paramilitary structure that fused together fascist organizations, the security bureaucracy, and clandestine operational mechanisms. Its targets were not limited to revolutionary organizations. Trade unions, progressive academics, journalists, democratic mass organizations, and every independent expression of working-class organization also came under attack.

1 May 1977: The First Major Warning to the Working Class

One of the defining turning points in the history of the Turkish working class came on 1 May 1977. More than 500,000 workers and labourers filled Taksim Square, making it one of the largest demonstrations in the history of the Turkish labour movement. As the celebration continued, gunfire erupted from surrounding buildings. Panic followed. At least thirty-six people were killed, while hundreds more were injured. The massacre has never been fully explained. Attempts were immediately made to portray it as the result of clashes among left-wing organizations.

Yet numerous eyewitness testimonies, investigative reports, and journalistic inquiries that emerged in subsequent years pointed instead toward the involvement of elements within the state, sections of the security apparatus, and the Counter-Guerrilla network.

From a political standpoint, the objective was unmistakable: to send the working class the message that “taking to the streets comes at a price.” This was not merely a massacre in a public square. It was a psychological warfare operation aimed at breaking the momentum of a rising class struggle.

Assassinations, Massacres, and Counter-Revolution

Following 1977, covert operations directed against the growing socialist movement and mass popular mobilizations intensified rapidly. The Counter-Guerrilla became one of the principal instruments in preparing the ground for the 12 September military coup.

The Maraş Massacre of 1978 and the Çorum Massacre of 1980 have long been presented merely as episodes of “Alevi-Sunni sectarian conflict.” This interpretation conceals their political character. The Maraş Massacre, carried out in December 1978, resulted in the murder of more than 150 Alevis and socialists, many of whom were hacked to death, shot, or burned alive. Between May and July 1980, escalating violence culminated in the Çorum Massacre, where 57 socialists and Alevi citizens lost their lives. In both massacres, hundreds were wounded. Hundreds of homes and workplaces were looted and destroyed. Neither the perpetrators nor those who organized these crimes were ever held fully accountable.

These massacres were not simply products of sectarian hostility. They were organized provocations designed to fracture the labour movement, destroy trade union organization, and weaken the socialist opposition, in which Alevis had played a leading role. For days, fascist militias carried out coordinated attacks. The delayed intervention, or complete inaction, of state security forces became the subject of intense public controversy. The outcome was devastating: hundreds murdered, thousands displaced, entire communities terrorized.

On 8 October 1978, the Bahçelievler Massacre claimed the lives of seven university students, all members of the Workers’ Party of Turkiye (TİP). They were brutally strangled and shot inside their home in Ankara by far-right militants.

Earlier, on 16 March 1978, another massacre had taken place outside the Faculty of Pharmacy at Istanbul University’s Beyazıt campus, where a bomb followed by gunfire killed seven left-wing students.

During this period, journalists, intellectuals, academics, scientists, politicians, and public officials increasingly became targets of far-right paramilitary organizations. Journalist Abdi İpekçi was assassinated in 1979 by Mehmet Ali Ağca, the same man who would later attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II on 13 May 1981. Kemal Türkler, founding General President of DİSK and one of the foremost leaders of the Turkish working class, was murdered outside his home in 1980. Prominent intellectuals and academics, including Prof. Dr. Bedri Karafakioğlu, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bedrettin Cömert, Cavit Orhan Tütengil, and Ümit Kaftancıoğlu, also fell victim to political assassinations. Those who sought to investigate these crimes often met the same fate: Public Prosecutor Doğan Öz was assassinated in 1978; Police Chief Cevat Yurdakul was murdered in 1979.

Countless students, teachers, trade unionists, journalists, intellectuals, scientists, workers, and labour activists were killed by fascist terror throughout these years. Between 1976 and 1980, nearly 33,000 violent incidents claimed the lives of approximately 5,000 people. The scale of this violence was not accidental. It formed part of a systematic strategy of counter-revolution directed against the organized power of the working class and the socialist movement.

The 12 September Coup: NATO’s Operation for Stability

The military coup of 12 September 1980 was not merely a counter-revolution carried out in the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie. It was also an operation that served the strategic interests of NATO.

In the aftermath of the coup: 650,000 people were detained, 1,683,000 people were placed under state surveillance and blacklisted as “politically suspect”, 18 revolutionaries were executed, more than 300 revolutionaries died under torture or as a result of prison conditions, 30,000 workers were dismissed from their jobs, 4,000 public employees were expelled from the civil service, All political parties, trade unions, and 23,677 associations were suspended or permanently dissolved. Strikes and collective bargaining were banned indefinitely. Universities were restructured under the newly established Council of Higher Education (YÖK). The neoliberal economic programme known as the 24 January Decisions was imposed through military repression, paving the way for the subsequent rise to power of Turgut Özal, the principal architect of these policies.

The support given to the coup by both NATO and the United States was later confirmed by the infamous remark attributed to CIA official Paul Henze: “Our boys did it.” Following the coup, Turkiye rapidly consolidated its role as the principal stronghold of NATO’s southeastern flank.

The 12 September Coup was therefore not simply a military change of government. It was a class coup. Its essential purpose was not merely the suspension of parliamentary democracy or the establishment of an authoritarian regime. Its fundamental objective was to destroy the organized power of the working class and clear the way for the restructuring of Turkish capitalism.

This counter-revolutionary operation laid the political foundations of the regime that continues to shape Turkiye today.

The Cold War Ended, but Neither NATO nor Gladio Did

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, one might reasonably have expected NATO to dissolve as well, since its official raison d’être had disappeared.

The opposite occurred. NATO expanded on an unprecedented scale. Eastern European countries joined the alliance. Former Soviet republics were incorporated into NATO programmes. Yugoslavia was bombed. Afghanistan was occupied. Libya was devastated. NATO member states also participated, in various forms, in the occupation of Iraq.

This historical trajectory demonstrates a simple truth: NATO was never merely an alliance established against the Soviet Union. Its real function has always been the preservation of the imperialist world order.

In Turkiye, the weakening of the socialist movement following the 12 September coup coincided during the 1990s with the intensification of armed conflict in the predominantly Kurdish regions of the country. Thousands of villages were emptied. Hundreds of people, including journalist Musa Anter, became victims of unsolved political murders. The role of the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Unit (JİTEM) in these killings has since been partially documented through judicial proceedings, although those responsible have largely escaped punishment. The Counter-Guerrilla apparatus inherited from the Cold War thus found a new mission through JİTEM: the systematic use of enforced disappearances, political assassinations, and state terror against the Kurdish people.

In 1996, a traffic accident in the town of Susurluk exposed the hidden architecture of the Turkish deep state in an event called as “The Susurluk Scandal”

The occupants of the crashed vehicle included: a senior police official, a notorious ultranationalist paramilitary leader wanted by the state for political murder and drug trafficking, and a Member of Parliament representing one of eastern Turkiye’s powerful political families. This single accident became concrete evidence of the intimate relationship between the state, organized crime, and the Counter-Guerrilla. The scandal permanently established the concept of the “Deep State” in Turkish political life. More importantly, it demonstrated that the Counter-Guerrilla had not disappeared with the end of the Cold War. It had merely adapted itself to new historical conditions. Each of these episodes should not be understood as isolated incidents.

They constitute different moments within the same historical process. The Counter-Guerrilla apparatus, constructed within NATO’s strategic framework, became one of the principal instruments used against the Turkish working class, the Kurdish people, and the socialist movement.

The Transformation of Gladio and the Counter-Guerrilla

During the Cold War, the clandestine armies primarily targeted revolutionaries, socialist parties, and trade unions. Today, the methods have changed. The classical Gladio networks have largely been replaced by far more complex security structures.

These include: special operations forces, intelligence agencies, cyber warfare centres, psychological operations units, private military companies, digital surveillance systems, media manipulation, social media operations and artificial intelligence-driven intelligence networks.

Counter-revolution is no longer conducted solely through guns. It is also waged through information, algorithms, economic sanctions and digital propaganda. Today’s doctrine of hybrid warfare represents the contemporary form of Gladio.

The New Cold War and NATO

The NATO meeting held in Ankara on 7–8 July 2026 revolved around the concept of “NATO 3.0.” Although NATO attempted, in the post-Cold War period, to redefine itself as the guardian of the so-called “Global War on Terror” and the police force of the new world order under U.S. leadership, it ultimately failed to establish a stable strategic mission.

Today, NATO’s official strategic documents identify Russia as the “most direct threat” and China as a “systemic rival.” As the strategic focus of the United States increasingly shifts toward the Indo-Pacific, NATO is expected to assume primary responsibility for containing Russia in Europe.

As part of the United States’ strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, Israel is being granted greater regional latitude. The replacement of U.S.-NATO cooperation in the Eastern Mediterranean with an increasingly strategic partnership centred on Israel, together with proposals to integrate Cyprus into NATO, forms another dimension of this geopolitical transformation.

The world has entered a new era of great-power rivalry. Military spending is rising at an unprecedented pace. Europe is being re-militarized. Artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems, and space technologies are becoming central components of modern military doctrine. For these reasons, NATO is unlikely to diminish in the coming years. On the contrary, it is likely to become even more aggressive.

At the same time, internal developments point in the same direction. Security states continue to expand. Surveillance mechanisms are becoming increasingly pervasive. Democratic rights are progressively restricted under the pretext of “national security.”

The deepening crisis of global capitalism, intensifying class struggle, and sharpening imperialist competition are driving the ruling classes toward new methods reminiscent of Gladio. These mechanisms may no longer take exactly the same organizational form. Their purpose, however, remains unchanged: to monitor, contain, suppress and ultimately neutralize the independent political struggle of the working class.

NATO from the Perspective of Class Struggle

As Leon Trotsky argued before the Second World War, imperialist states may compete fiercely among themselves, yet unite whenever confronted by the revolutionary advance of the working class. NATO represents the institutional expression of that unity.

Today, NATO’s role in ongoing wars, together with its relentless pressure on member states to increase military expenditure, serves neither peace nor the welfare of ordinary people. Its purpose is to guarantee the profits of the arms industry and preserve the global balance of imperialist power.

For socialists, therefore, opposition to NATO is not merely a question of foreign policy. It is one of the central fronts of the class struggle itself. The demand to withdraw from NATO also means exposing the organic relationship between the ruling classes in our own countries and imperialism, while fighting to build the independent, internationalist political leadership of the working class.

Yet from the standpoint of the working class, the issue is not simply determining which state happens to be imperialist. No political support should be given to either side in the rivalry between U.S.-NATO imperialism and the emerging capitalist powers. The vanguard of the working class must not line up behind the geopolitical calculations of Washington, Moscow, or Beijing.

The interests of the international working class do not lie in strengthening one imperialist bloc against another. They lie in weakening all imperialist alliances.

Opposition to NATO is not simply another form of anti-Americanism. The central question is the political independence of the working class. Likewise, subordinating the struggle against imperialism to bourgeois nationalism is a political dead end.

To oppose NATO means: to demand the closure of all imperialist military bases; to insist upon the dismantling of every clandestine apparatus of state repression; to defend the independent self-organization of the working class; and to refuse political support to any bourgeois government merely because it claims to be “anti-imperialist.”

Dissolve NATO!

The historical record leaves no room for ambiguity. NATO has served not only as one of the principal instruments of imperialist war, but also as one of the principal mechanisms of counter-revolution against the working class inside its own member states: the Years of Lead in Italy, the Colonels’ Junta in Greece, the Counter-Guerrilla and the 12 September 1980 military coup in Turkiye etc. and numerous similar operations all emerged under different historical circumstances, yet formed parts of the same strategic framework.

The emancipation of the working class cannot be achieved through reliance upon imperialist military alliances such as NATO. Nor can it be achieved by lining up behind rival imperialist blocs or authoritarian capitalist regimes. The only road forward lies in strengthening the independent political organization of the international working class and advancing an internationalist struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

History has repeatedly demonstrated the emptiness of NATO’s promises of “peace” and “security.” Those murdered in Taksim, Maraş, and Çorum, the revolutionaries tortured after 12 September Coup and the victims of the political assassinations and enforced disappearances of the 1990s, remain the clearest witnesses to NATO’s true character. The liberation of the working class and the oppressed peoples can only be achieved through exposing this imperialist apparatus and building an internationalist struggle against it.