NATO is part of an infrastructure of transnational political and military control that gives Washington tremendous power over domestic politics. Some of that is overt. For example, when Joe Biden outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO in 1997, he called on us to deepen the neoliberal reforms that had already sold much of our industry off to Western capital. “Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized,” he said. Some of it is a structural consequence of the dependence that NATO membership creates. Questions of war and peace are removed from the purview of democratic decision making and shifted to a transnational structure that, as successive NATO leaders have admitted, is answerable primarily to Washington. NATO members are required to buy “compatible” weapons systems, which means that NATO accession requires funnelling a significant part of the national budget towards the US military-industrial complex. NATO funds think tanks and academic institutions to shift consensus on issues central to its interests. All of this has seismic downstream effects on the entire political system. Notice how readily the new cohort of Finland’s leaders has given up the country’s neutrality, for example by threatening to veto the EU-China trade agreement. This is one of many examples of how NATO transforms the political system of a country in ways that constrain the capacity for sovereign action by the bloc as a whole. Europe does not benefit from worsening relations with China, but the US does. NATO is ultimately the armed wing of global capitalism, and its center of gravity is in the US. I am not suggesting that giving up Finland’s forests was a condition of joining NATO, but that surrendering a part of your sovereignty to NATO carries consequences.