When Lockheed Martin reports a record year, you should ask what wars made it possible. When Raytheon's stock climbs on the news of a new NATO commitment, you should ask who decided that commitment was necessary. The expansion of NATO since the Soviet Union's dissolution is, at its material base, a story about arms procurement, energy corridor control, and the securing of political conditions favorable to US capital accumulation. The ideology — collective defense, rules-based order, democratic solidarity — is the packaging. The product is profit.
This is not a cynical reduction. It is what the evidence demands.
The Promise That Was Never Kept
In 1990, as German reunification was being negotiated, US Secretary of State James Baker told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" if the Soviets agreed to a unified Germany within the alliance. Declassified documents — released by the US National Security Archive and published in full — confirm this assurance was given. It was not formalized in treaty. It was not intended to be binding. It was a diplomatic convenience.
The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which was a signed document, contained language committing NATO to not permanently stationing "substantial combat forces" in new member states. By 2016, NATO had deployed four multinational battlegroups — roughly 4,000 troops — to Poland and the Baltic states under the Enhanced Forward Presence programme. By 2024, those numbers had expanded substantially following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whether this constitutes "substantial forces" is a definitional question NATO refuses to answer.
The point is not that Russia's government is a reliable or trustworthy actor. It is not. The point is that the Western narrative — NATO expansion as purely reactive, purely defensive, purely responsive to Russian aggression — is structurally dishonest. The expansion preceded the aggression it claims to be responding to. John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago argued as early as 2014 that expanding NATO into Ukraine would provoke precisely the response it received. He was not arguing for Russian imperialism. He was describing predictable great-power behavior under conditions of threatened sphere of influence — behavior that US strategists understand perfectly well when it is their own sphere being threatened.
Who Benefits From the Architecture of Threat
The arms industry does not benefit from peace. It benefits from the credible perception of threat — enough threat to justify procurement, not so much threat that the procurement chain is disrupted by actual war.
In 2023, US defense contractor Lockheed Martin reported revenues of approximately $67 billion. Raytheon Technologies — renamed RTX — reported $74 billion. Both companies saw share prices surge in the weeks following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Both companies are direct beneficiaries of every NATO commitment to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP. When NATO members collectively spend $1.3 trillion annually on defense — as they did in 2023 — the majority of that procurement flows through US contractors or their European subsidiaries.
This is not a conspiracy. It is how political economy works. The arms industry employs hundreds of thousands of workers in US congressional districts. Its lobbyists write defense authorization legislation. Its executives rotate between boardrooms and the Pentagon in the revolving door that defines US defense policy. When these interests determine that an expanded NATO — with more members, more commitments, more forward-deployed forces — serves their accumulation requirements, that determination becomes strategic consensus. It is laundered through think tanks, NATO communiqués, and news anchors who treat every Russian provocation as evidence for the expansion rather than, in part, a consequence of it.
The dialectical materialist analysis is clear: the contradiction between NATO's stated defensive mission and its structural expansion is not a failure of policy or a communication problem. It is the contradiction between two real functions — one ideological (collective defense) and one material (arms industry revenue, energy security, market access). The material function drives. The ideological function legitimates.
Energy, Markets, and the Eastern Frontier
The expansion of NATO correlates precisely with the expansion of US energy and financial interests in Eastern Europe. The Nord Stream pipelines — which offered Germany direct Russian gas access, reducing dependence on US liquefied natural gas — were sabotaged in September 2022. The attack has never been officially attributed, but investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's reporting, which the US government has not credibly rebutted, points to American involvement. Regardless of attribution, the effect was immediate: Europe became more dependent on US LNG imports, at substantially higher prices. The energy geopolitics of NATO expansion cannot be separated from the energy economics of who sells what to whom.
Similarly, the insistence that Ukraine move toward NATO membership — pressed by the US and UK while France and Germany expressed reservations — cannot be divorced from the question of what economic arrangements would follow Ukrainian integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions. Structural adjustment, IMF conditionality, and the privatization of Ukraine's considerable agricultural and industrial assets were not abstract possibilities. They were already underway before the 2022 invasion.
What This Means for Anti-Imperialist Politics
The Marxist position is not that Russia is progressive, that Putin's government represents working-class interests, or that Russian imperialism should be excused because American imperialism is worse. These are not the choices on offer. The materialist position is that the framing of the conflict as "democracy vs. autocracy" — the framework promoted by every Western government and reproduced without question by most Western media — is ideologically constructed to serve specific class interests, and that understanding those interests is a prerequisite for any honest analysis.
The people dying in Ukraine are working-class people on both sides of the front line. The people profiting from the conflict are defense contractors, energy exporters, and financial institutions that will manage the post-war reconstruction loans. This does not make the conflict morally equivalent — Russian military conduct in civilian areas is documented and constitutes war crimes. But moral clarity about atrocities does not require us to accept the geopolitical narrative of the power that benefits most from the war's continuation.
The task of socialist analysis is to name who benefits and to refuse the substitution of national loyalty for class interest. The business of encirclement has a balance sheet. We should read it.
