In March 2000, just one year after the outbreak of NATO’s aggression to dismantle Yugoslavia—known as the “Kosovo War”—the fledgling NATO Watch Committee published a modest four-page “NATO Alert No. 1.”

Clearly, back in March 2000, we would have preferred that there never be a “NATO Alert No. 100”; we would have liked to have been “out of business” long before that. But no: NATO is more than ever a threat to global peace, and its shadow has spread far beyond the “North Atlantic region.”

No. 100… Unfortunately, there isn’t much to celebrate today. The global situation isn’t taking us back 26 years, but more than 100. The sound of marching boots is growing ever louder; “sacrificing one’s children for the fatherland” has once again become fashionable in Europe; and the delusional excesses of Russophobic war propaganda would not have looked out of place in Goebbels’s press.

As for the leader of the world’s undisputed military superpower—our great “ally” within NATO—he looks directly to the 19th century for inspiration: the good old days of piracy and massacres, without being burdened by that tiresome concept of international law. The era of brutal colonization and the genocide of Native Americans is being blatantly replicated by Israel, NATO’s privileged ally in the Middle East, assured of impunity and the unconditional support of the Atlantic world, no matter what it does, however openly it does it.

In the editorial of the first issue, Marcel Poznanski already wrote: “NATO is driving up the military budgets of Belgium and its 18 other members.” - this was in 2000... - “The eastward expansion of the NATO zone, particularly under the guise of the ‘Partnership for Peace,’ foreshadows a desire to tighten the noose around Russia.” Here we are. The noose has been tightened just right.

The Kosovo War, which gave rise to our Committee, served as the starting point, the blueprint for the wars to come. Under the interchangeable guises of humanitarian aid, the war on terrorism, or—the height of irony—the defense of international law, it is solely the desperate attempt by one part of the world to impose by force its increasingly faltering order that has been the central driving force behind all these wars, in which NATO intervenes more or less openly, from the invasion of Afghanistan to the current aggression against Iran—right up to this war supposedly “between Russia and Ukraine”, but which is in reality already, and increasingly clearly, “between NATO and Russia.”

That first issue lambasted the passivity, the neutral stance, and even the more or less tacit approval of virtually the entire peace movement in the face of the aggression against Yugoslavia. At least that much, 26 years later, we would no longer write: today, the massive mobilizations and demonstrations across Europe show that an increasingly significant portion of the population is rising up against these wars, and are bringing together the struggles of peace movements, unions, students, healthcare workers, and workers in all sectors under attack by militarization.