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Any analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its current geopolitical role has to begin with a puzzle: Why did the institution outlive the enemy it was created to deter? Why is it still so beloved by Western liberals and neo-conservatives alike, despite the on-again, off-again grumbles by Trump and other neo-isolationists that it has become a burden for the coffers of the US Treasury? And what alternatives can socialists on both sides of the Atlantic propose in order to truly promote geopolitical stability in the face of a social, economic, political and environmental polycrisis (understood to be a situation in which “crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects”) engulfing the planet? In this article, we postulate that the North Atlantic left must advocate for a full decoupling from NATO and the social, political, and financial costs that sustaining the organization entails, and instead advocate for a vision of geopolitical security based on environmental sustainability, social equality, and democratic and inclusive multilateral frameworks that are not hegemonized by the US or any other individual neo-imperialist power.

For most of the North Atlantic liberal-left, NATO has long been part of the furniture of the international order: an institution whose particular wars might be criticized, but whose existence and indefinite expansion are taken for granted as the guarantee of a “rules-based order” or, at most, regarded with an ambivalence that never matures into opposition. The reflex is bipartisan and transatlantic. When thirty members of the US Congressional Progressive Caucus signed a letter in October 2022 gently urging the Biden administration to pair military support for Ukraine with diplomatic effort, they withdrew it within twenty-four hours under a hail of accusations of appeasement, a measure of how narrow the permissible spectrum of transatlantic debate has become. Socialists do not share that ambivalence, and cannot afford its silences. Our argument is that an European decoupling from NATO, in the military, digital, and environmental sense, looking for real independence and sovereignty is not one demand among many, but the precondition for social and ecological progress on either shore of the Atlantic.

The NATO puzzle has acquired a further layer of irony in the second Trump era. The President who muses about leaving “delinquent” allies to their fate, who has refused to rule out economic or even military coercion to annex Greenland (which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member) and who dispatched his Vice President to scold European allies from an American base on Greenlandic soil, has nonetheless declined to junk the organization. This article will address the reasons behind his strategy in the context of the current configurations of late-stage capitalism. 

NATO’s Original Purpose

NATO, the West’s quintessential Cold War security alliance founded in 1949, which aimed to shelter key European allies from the “Soviet threat” by including them under the US’ “nuclear umbrella,” was not discarded and deactivated as its counterpart Warsaw Pact was in 1991 (Miles 2023/2024). Instead, the Golden Years of the so-called Pax Americana that followed the disbandment of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s led to a surprisingly small decrease in military expenditure by the United States, which registered a mere –21% decline in its military budget during the period 1986–1994, as compared to a –49.5% drop in military spending in the non-NATO world (including the former Soviet Union) during the same period. During the Clinton years, NATO did not shrink or disappear, instead it expanded eastward and began a series of military interventions outside of its core area of influence: former Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN Security Council authorization, Afghanistan at the height of the post-9/11 “anti-terrorism frenzy” from 2001-2014, and Libya in 2011 far beyond its mandate, just to name a few.

Despite NATO outliving its original purpose, it began to repurpose its existence, while simultaneously revealing the purpose that it served all along, in accordance with the argument made by Panitch & Gindin in The Making of Global Capitalism (2012). According to these authors, NATO continues to be an essential part of the machinery through which the US State supervises global capitalism, with Western Europe’s ruling classes as junior partners in an imperial alliance. In this way, post-Cold War NATO has stopped acting as a guarantee of security and peace for the Western world, because it was never designed to principally function as a mutual security pact. From its founding, indeed, the alliance’s internal enemies mattered as much as its external one. NATO’s first decades were dedicated as much to insulating Western European states from their own Communist-friendly working classes (from Marshall-conditioned aid to the stay-behind networks later exposed as Operation Gladio) as about deterring the Red Army. An offensive imperial instrument can never be reformed into a defensive one, even under deeply transformed political, social, and military conjunctures.

From Burden Sharing to Protection Racket

The need for maintaining a robust NATO in the post-Cold War, increasingly multipolar world began to be seriously questioned during the first Trump administration. Trump’s insistence on economic “burden sharing” came to the forefront of NATO’s agenda by 2018, when he pushed hard for European members of the organization to pledge 4% of their annual GDP for defense expenditure (up from a 2% commitment made by the Europeans in 2014). Shocked by Trump’s abandonment of Western mutual defense grand strategy, liberal foreign policy analysts began to wring their hands at the notion of an unmoored and underfunded NATO without the capacity to defend Fortress Europe from the evils of Vladimir Putin, cast as the new post-Cold War “boogie man” (despite or perhaps because of his similarities with the former Cold War “boogie men”) by Washington establishment elites. 

The complaint itself was hardly new. American elites have grumbled about European free-riding since Eisenhower complained privately that the allies were making a “sucker” of the United States. Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield spent the early 1970s introducing amendments to halve US troop levels in Europe; and Robert Gates devoted his 2011 farewell address as defense secretary to warning of a “dim if not dismal” future for an alliance in which Americans paid and Europeans merely philosophized. This grumbling is a signal of imperial decay. A hegemon that has full confidence in its powers subsidizes its allies, as post-WWII Washington did, because protection purchased markets, dollar seigniorage, and political obedience at a discount. A hegemon in relative decline, however, begins to monetize its protection directly.

As part of its intentions to restore US standing in the world through rejoining global alliances and reprioritizing multilateral commitments, the incoming Biden administration “bent the stick” in the opposite direction when it came to foreign relations with Western European powers. Under Biden, the US simultaneously returned to non-contentious relations with its traditional Western European allies and reinforced claims of the “indispensableness” of NATO (not only as a military shield but also as an instrument for democracy promotion), through actively encouraging the expansion of the geographic scope of the organization. While that expansion undoubtedly was a motive behind Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, its logic went unquestioned and even celebrated by Biden who was eager to unleash both the “hard” and “soft” versions of US imperial power on the European continent. As Biden stated at a 2024 summit celebrating NATO’s 75-year anniversary, “for those who thought NATO’s time had passed, they got a rude awakening when Putin invaded Ukraine. […] Some of the oldest, deepest fears in Europe roared back to life because once again a murderous madman was on the march. But this time, no one cowered in appeasement, especially the United States.”

Now, under the second Trump administration, the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to drag on, tragically transformed into yet another forever war that is being underwritten on both sides of the Atlantic by capitalist interests linked to the military-industrial complex. It is important to say that the motivations for Trump “staying the course” in Ukraine are quite different from that of the former Biden administration. For Western liberals, Ukraine is the legitimating war—the conflict that redeemed NATO after Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. It restored the moral vocabulary of the “defense of democracy,” and made alliance politics electorally viable again. Trump’s coalition has no need of that legitimation, as it organizes consent through civilizational nationalism at home, not liberal internationalism abroad, and the fractions of capital closest to it have different balance sheets. Fossil-fuel capital eyes sanctions relief and Arctic hydrocarbons; the venture-backed tech-defense complex of Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX profits from Pacific-facing rearmament regardless of what happens in the Donbas; and the MAGA strategic imagination treats Russia as a potential junior partner in a world of great-power spheres, with China as the only rival that counts. Ukraine, in this scheme, is a European liability to be offloaded, profitably, since the offloading takes the form of European purchases of American weapons. As US foreign policy towards Europe becomes more and more unilateral and erratic the NATO burden sharing debate is now back front and center, in a context underlain by mistrust on the part of European partners and inflated imperialist bravado exhibited by Trump.

An Alliance of Equals?

At the June 2025 Hague summit, European NATO members adopted a target of 5 percent of GDP for defense and security spending by 2035; Spain, the only country to refuse, was answered not with coherent arguments but with Trump’s unilateral threat to make it “pay twice as much” through trade. When Madrid in March 2026 would not allow US aircraft to use the Rota and Morón bases for strikes on Iran launched outside the UN Charter, Trump ordered a full cut-off of trade with Spain. Alliances of equals do not behave this way; metropoles disciplining peripheries do. The discipline has a business model. Rosa Luxemburg called militarism a province of accumulation in The Accumulation of Capital (1913), and the description has aged well: according to figures cited in the Draghi report, 63 percent of EU defense procurement between mid-2022 and mid-2023 went to US suppliers. Rearmament on NATO’s terms is a historic transfer of European public money to American arms capital. The 5 percent target is less a strategy than a tribute schedule with a procurement funnel attached.

The Spanish Alternative

The case of Spain matters analytically because it shows how resistance is possible, what this strategy depends on, and why it is domestically and internationally important. The how is documented: at The Hague, as the Spanish government secured the alliance’s only exemption, arguing NATO’s own capability targets could be met at roughly 2.1 percent of GDP. It has since dropped the F-35 in favor of European aircraft (a substitution of suppliers rather than a reduction in lethality, a distinction whose importance will become clear below) and in March it conditioned any use of Spanish territory on conformity with principles enshrined in the UN Charter.

The why is material as much as political. Politically, the governing coalition depends on left and peripheral-nationalist parties for whom rearmament carries a price—above all on Sumar, the ecosocialist coalition led by Yolanda Díaz, which formally rejected the government’s rearmament plan. Sumar instead supports a different political project, based on strategic autonomy, European independence and real sovereignty, without subordination to the United States, and security as protection of people’s social and ecological conditions of life, not weapons procurement, as the EU already outspends Russia threefold in this budget line item. Materially, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity since 2019. Due to this, by early 2026 gas became the minority source of energy domestically, equalling only 9 percent of total megawatt hours. When the war on Iran sent European gas prices surging, Spanish wholesale power averaged €42 per megawatt-hour against €143 in Italy, while heavily gas-dependent Germany absorbed the full shock. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016) traces how fossil energy systems embed class power and imperial hierarchy; the Spanish case shows the inverse. Every gigawatt of domestically owned renewables removes a lever of external coercion.

The Spanish exception should not be idealized, however. As Ekaitz Cancela has argued, the same Sánchez government that refused access by the US to the Rota and Morón bases has presided over the largest defense budget in Spanish history, mutating from the “pandemic Keynesianism” of the post-COVID recovery period to military neoliberalism. In December 2025, the Defense Ministry adjudicated €15.8 billion to private contractors to comply with NATO targets, while the State’s digital backbone was quietly handed over to Silicon Valley: SpaceX satellites for military communications, Palantir software inside the armed forces’ intelligence systems (under NATO eyes), and Microsoft software licenses for federal administrative employees. What is marketed to European electorates as “military Keynesianism”, specifically, jobs and growth through rearmament, operates in practice as military neoliberalism: public spending to prop up the private military-industrial complex. A decoupling from Washington of this type would merely Europeanize the suppliers of militarism while leaving a NATO-focused political economy intact. That is why Sumar’s position within the coalition against the rearmament plan as a whole, and not just a veto of American vendors, marks the actual dividing line regarding defense policy in the Sanchez administration. 

Two Sovereignties

Here conceptual precision matters: the idea of “European sovereignty” is now being invoked to support two diametrically opposed projects. What the European Commission calls strategic autonomy—the €800 billion ReArm Europe program, hastily rebranded Readiness 2030—suspends neoliberal deficit rules for weapons purchases while leaving Europe’s deeper dependencies untouched, for example, US firms hold 85 percent of the European cloud market. 

The EU spending rules are notorious for their harshness. Since the ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1991, EU member states have been bound to keep budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP and public debt below 60 percent. After the 2008 global financial crisis, these restrictions were the building blocks of the austerity architecture that gutted Southern Europe’s health care, education, and social protection systems. In March 2025, the Commission moved to activate “national escape clauses” exempting increases in military spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP from precisely those ceilings, laying bare the real priorities of “social” Europe. These policies undermine any attempt at popular sovereignty, which would allow for budget priorities to be set on the national level in consonance with the real needs of each country’s working classes. 

That is not an exit from imperialism but an application for promotion within it—and the application will not be granted. Poulantzas explained why in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975): postwar American capital did not confront Europe from outside, as a rival across a frontier, but was replicated within European social formations themselves. In this way, a Western European capitalist class was created, that was neither a national bourgeoisie capable of an autonomous project nor a typical comprador class. Instead it was (and still is) a bourgeoisie with its own domestic base of accumulation but whose conditions of reproduction and valorization nonetheless depend on American technology, finance, and military prowess. The procurement and cloud figures are not deficiencies to be corrected by better industrial policy; they are the shape of the relation. An anti-imperialist Europe is therefore a project impossible to reproduce without dramatically transforming the inherently US-dependent nature of the modern Western European capitalist class. Sovereignty can only be reclaimed by another historical subject—the working class.

A socialist concept of sovereignty starts from a radically different focus on the well-being of peoples, not States. Popular sovereignty is inextricably linked to the concept of what Marxist feminists call social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017)—the everyday systems of energy, food, housing, care, tech and knowledge through which a society maintains its vitality. Whoever controls those systems governs, no matter what national Constitutions say; that is why popular sovereignty is built in grids and cloud infrastructure as much as in armaments and military readiness.

National and regional defense follows the same materialist logic. What principally matters is not how much is spent, but what is defended. NATO’s rearmament defends the circuits of accumulation—sub-Arctic shipping lanes, mineral extraction frontiers, capital’s investments far beyond Europe. On the other hand, a socialist concept of defense protects and uplifts the well-being of all peoples, and is therefore defined by its self-imposed limits by what it refuses to do as much as by what it protects. Where NATO doctrine is organized around the unlimited projection of “hard power,” a socialist doctrine of defense, independence and sovereignty is bounded: by the UN Charter’s absolute prohibition of wars of aggression; by the consistent application of human rights principles within and beyond Western borders, without the exemptions Washington and Brussels grant themselves; and by solidarity as an organizing principle (as expressed by energy interconnections, technology transfers, and robust protections for refugees and migrants) rather than protection rackets between States. 

Using a consistent socialist logic, we should also reaffirm that Russia’s war on Ukraine is also a form of imperialist aggression, and a left that answers NATO’s imperialism by excusing Moscow’s will never find emancipatory solutions to the existential challenges faced by the working class posed by competing fractions of global capital. Those fractions can be named. On one side stands the Northern Atlantic military-industrial-fossil fuel bloc, now enhanced by a venture-backed tech-defense complex. These fractions of Western capital need permanent rearmament and therefore a permanent enemy, in order to guarantee increased profit margins. In competition with Western capital is the Russian extractive-military oligarchy, for which war has become a dual strategy to ensure capital accumulation and political survival. Who gets left behind on both sides of this transnational duel for the spoils of extraction and exploitation is the global working class, including the Ukrainian and Russian workers currently being used as cannon fodder on both sides of the battlefront. As formulated by Bah, this war is an expression of the modern “banality of oppression” suffered by the global working classes, which serves to brutally reinforce ingrained economic, social and racial injustices. 

The Ecological Question

The ecological question is not a superfluous issue here; it provides a material base for any effective anti-war strategizing. The war economy and the fossil fuel economy are structurally fused not because the working class family heating its home with natural gas is complicit in war, but because both economies run on the same infrastructure, the same fiscal circuits, and the same premise of limitless extraction. It is undeniable that fossil fuel energy is still needed for material survival—people still cook, heat, and move with it. But this fossil fuel dependency was not inevitable. According to Malm (2016), it was engineered as a function of the current neoliberal capitalist order, and has created a form of thermodynamic and geopolitical path dependency. The US Fifth Fleet patrols the Gulf because the Carter Doctrine pledged military force in defense of hydrocarbon flows. The fiscal circuits overlap one another, petroStates recycle profits into weapons, and weapons then secure additional profits for these same States and for their imperial allies. Likewise, the world’s militaries are the fossil economy’s most voracious institutional consumers (Crawford 2022)—accounting for an estimated 5.5 percent of global emissions, a larger footprint than even Russia’s. 

An ecosocialist transition starts from the opposite premise: the planet has biophysical limits, and production must be democratically planned within them. This means scaling down what is destructive for human existence, namely military and fossil fuel infrastructure first, in order to then expand what sustains life. That is the rift Marx saw opening between capital’s compulsion to grow and the natural cycles it exhausts—the ecology Saito (2023) has reconstructed from Marx’s late notebooks as degrowth communism. That transition cannot be financed from inside an arms race; a continent mobilizing €800 billion for weapons has already chosen which limits it respects. Decoupling from NATO across military, energy, and digital dimensions is therefore not a gesture but a precondition. This precondition, though, is not yet a binding program. We can perfectly imagine a unilateral exit from NATO by the Trump administration which would still keep the fossil fuel-military coupling intact under new national management. A real geopolitical transformation would transcend the issue of NATO per se, and point towards a national and transnational realignment of political values and economic priorities away from death and extraction and towards ecological sustainability and egalitarian social reproduction. 

A Transatlantic Horizon

The logic for an ecosocialist transition is equally applicable in Europe and in the US. As growing US defense and security expenditures are increasingly used to wage war both abroad and at home, with a hyper-militarized ICE terrorizing immigrant communities, and an emboldened CIA and Special Forces illegally kidnapping sovereign heads of state in America’s “backyard,” socialists must lead the fight against the devaluing and precarization of life on both the domestic and international fronts. DSA was right in including the abolition of NATO as a plank in its political platform approved at the 2021 Convention. And, on the other shore of the Atlantic, Sumar was right to say no to more spending in defense and to begin a process of decoupling from NATO grounded on energy sovereignty, technology and internationally-recognized human rights.

Now, as we gain organizational strength and greater political representation in both the institutional and extra-institutional spheres, DSA must take its “No to NATO” position to its next logical step, by working to build a new kind of peoples’ transnational mutual defense, based on the preservation and expansion of the global commons outside of any profit- or war-seeking logic, in conjunction with our foreign partners in networks such as the Foro de Sao Paulo (the standing conference of Latin American and Caribbean left parties and movements first convened in 1990 and of which DSA is an associate member), and Progressive International, the global coordinating body of left parties, unions, and social movements launched in 2020 of which DSA is a full member. We have a world to win, or to lose, depending on our willingness and capacity to promote popular, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist human security, in the weeks, months and years to come.

References

Miles, Simon. 2023/2024. “We All Fall Down: The Dismantling of the Warsaw Pact and the End of the Cold War in Eastern Europe,” International Security. 48(3): 51-85.

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.

Cancela, Ekaitz. 2026. “Pedro Sánchez contra el trumpismo.” Revista Anfibia, 5 March. Extended Spanish version of “Sanchismo’s Last Stand,” The Ideas Letter, 2026.

Crawford, Neta C. 2022. The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions. MIT Press.

Lenin, V.I. 1917. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. International Publishers.

Lundestad, Geir. 1986. “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952.” Journal of Peace Research 23(3): 263–277.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1913. The Accumulation of Capital. Routledge.

Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Verso.

Saito, Kohei. 2023. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press.

Photograph by Shealah Craighead.

Perspectives on base, superstructure, and nonhuman exploitation.

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Eighty of our neighbors, including fifty-five hard-working members of Teamsters 597, are losing their jobs.

On June 17th, the Dairy Farmers of America announced plans to “idle” their Saint Albans City facility. The effects of this idling will be catastrophic and will ripple out across Vermont and the Northeast: dairy farms will be forced to shoulder the financial cost of transporting their raw milk to facilities in faraway New York or Massachusetts where it will be mixed with milk from other farms during processing; markets will see distribution and supply of their dairy products change; local companies that produce dairy products, including Ben and Jerry’s, will grapple with supply chain alterations and changes in milk quality; the plant itself on Federal Street will sit empty save a skeleton maintenance crew; and most importantly, eighty employees will become jobless. The decision follows years of DFA slowly undermining farmer co-operatives throughout the Northeast with anticompetitive, antitrust monopolization that’s left local farmers struggling to break even while DFA reaps the spoils. Now we’re all hung out to dry. 

Franklin County deserves better. Vermont deserves better. Our friends and neighbors, the hard-working members of Teamsters 597, deserve better.

This isn’t the first time that DFA has engaged in antitrust action: a 2020 lawsuit filed against DFA by Food Lion LLC and the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Cooperation Association claims that “DFA’s conduct threatens to and will result in antitrust injury as it tends to and will substantially lessen competition.” A lawsuit filed closer to home in Vermont two years later, S.R.J.F Inc vs. DFA, argues that “over time, DFA has taken predatory and exclusionary actions to position itself as the sole conduit for Northeastern dairy farmers to get their raw milk to market, and to control Northeast raw milk processing capacity, the only market into which Northeast dairy farmers can sell their perishable product.” Other examples of DFA seizing regional dairy industries abound, and a dairy processing plant in Connecticut currently faces similar unexpected closure.

This also isn’t the first time that DFA has proven itself a bad neighbor. Poor working conditions and unfair treatment from management led Teamsters 597 members to strike in October 2025, picketing on Federal Street late into the night. And ongoing discussions with Saint Albans City Council regarding rotten smells coming from the facility hit their most contentious note days before announcement of the plant's idling. DFA has proven itself more concerned with controlling our industry for their own gain than in supporting us, the dairy farmers, employees, and community members that call Vermont home. 

We all deserve better than an idling plant and hard-working union members without work, and we can’t allow monopolistic corporations with no regard for Vermont to strangle our dairy industry. We need legislators that use statute to create an economy where we can all succeed. We need laws that protect employees, to build strong participatory unions with greater investment from employees, and a pivot to co-operative worker-owned businesses over monolithic corporations without accountability. Our farmers and dairy workers deserve fair pay for the dairy products they produce instead of scraping by. Franklin County deserves better than a vacant DFA plant and the disruption of our dairy industry. And DFA needs to amend for the harm they’ve caused to our community and to the members of Teamsters 597.

On Wednesday, July 8, on day 54 of the National Peace Walk, two of us headed down Bradford Quarry Road in Alamance County, NC, toward Saxapahaw. The heat was oppressive. We had made a morning stop already at a church to refill our water reservoirs, taking a minute to tell a passerby about this nationwide pilgrimage that began in Brooklyn almost two months earlier. He remarked, as most tend to, that it seemed like a lot of walking. I tried, as I usually do, to downplay the physical challenge, as it is always made worthwhile by the spiritual nourishment of meeting with community at our destinations. Still, I had just bought a new set of insoles to replace the ones that I had walked to tatters, and I wasn’t sure how far this new two liters of hose water would get us. 

An hour later, Luther Livermon, a friend-to-be, slowed his car next to us and welcomed us to rest and refill at his house, a few yards down the road. When we arrived, we were officially introduced to Luther; his wife, Karen; and the two nurses who are her caretakers. Karen lives with dementia.

 Luther told us about his plan to eventually offer his 75-acre farm to Teepa Snow, a world-renowned specialist in care for those living with brain-change. Luther hoped that this offering would create a sanctuary for specialized care, as well as stewardship of the natural world, which could weather the impending changes of our society. He spoke on all of this unprompted, not aware yet that a core mission of our pilgrimage was to meet with communities working actively to create resilience through mutual aid in the United States. 

Luther also had posted signs along his farm’s frontage for the Preserve Alamance Coalition, an effort by Alamance County residents to halt the clearcutting of mature forest for construction of 1000 units of low-density housing by developers. A local friend and walk organizer, Krysten Voelkner, had coincidentally planned to meet us at the exact time we visited Luther’s farm, giving the two of them an opportunity to be introduced as neighbors and allies in the struggle to protect local forests and water. 

The simple, grounding activity of walking has led to many encounters like these. Our visit with those on Luther’s farm that morning was an affirmation that this project is one of making a path toward continual serendipity, walked by those who are ready to encounter it. 

Last fall, I was part of the organizing committee for the Quaker Walk to Washington, and the work that has continued from this act of public witness now has me on a pilgrimage bound for Minneapolis. Throughout my life, my tendency to be drawn toward egalitarian communities has kept me in overlapping circles of Quaker and socialist groups. 

Since beginning pilgrimage work with Brooklyn Quakers in early 2025, I have literally and figuratively followed a tradition that is older than what is known now as the United States. Quakers have been walking pilgrimages on this continent for nearly four hundred years as an act of peace. This simple act continues to be an effective way to step outside of many oppressive, interconnected systems to meet with friends in true intention. 

Quakerism has always had much to offer fellow socialists. Our historic mode of governance prioritizes long, thoughtful discernment which necessarily resolves in consensus. Quaker governance serves as the basis for the theory of sociocracy. In what was then known as New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant famously banned Quakers from practicing their religion. A 1657 petition called the Flushing Remonstrance was a call by residents of the borough for ratified religious liberty. Over a hundred years later, the petition inspired the Founders to include freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights, connecting Quaker society to this essential feature of spiritual freedom in the United States. 

The National Peace Walk 2026 follows this tradition of publicly expressing faith as an immovable societal foundation, one that weathers all periods of change. Walking to bring this good news to friends extends from a literal and metaphorical lineage that exists both on this continent, and throughout the world. Dozens of folks we have met along the way speak of the Camino de Santiago, currently experiencing the highest number of pilgrims since the 16th century. 

More recently, in our own country, a group of Buddhist monks walked 3,500 kilometers and gained international attention for the cause of peace and understanding. Their walk extended to Sri Lanka after the U.S. phase was finished. The tradition of pilgrimage in the United States in modern times has been upheld by a few notable figures, including Peace Pilgrim, who walked for nearly 30 years, crossing the United States seven times, speaking before crowds and on radio. According to her story, she rested when offered lodging, ate when offered food, and carried nothing except the clothes she wore. 

In the days before the United States. celebrated “America250,” the National Peace Walk finally crossed the North Carolina border, leaving only two days of walking to the next Quaker meeting in Raleigh. Those days in Virginia proved to be a challenge unlike the prior 300 miles between New York City and Washington. The heat and fatigue were factors, but the size and remoteness of Route 1 outside of Richmond were staggering at points. On this section, we could no longer count on a nightly station with Quakers, other faith groups, or communities of people activated toward building peace. We saw instead a kind of cultural blight: towns that had emptied after the dissolution of an unsustainable industry or the construction of I-95/85. In earlier days, when we might have stopped at some center of community for rest and water, there was now just a Wawa store, and then at a certain latitude, a Sheetz. We took our overnight rest on an abandoned porch or in the prohibitively expensive, soulless interior of a hotel room.

The act of intentionally meeting with friends at times can feel utterly inaccessible without acquiescing to a number of oppressive systems, installed by the force of convenience. “America at 250” on its face would like to be a celebration of a unity among states, but the lived reality for most in the Covid-era is an encroaching stasis of isolation, even “post” lockdown. 

The recent work of pilgrimage by NYC Quakers has been a modern effort to transcend these divides and to meet with friends as companions and partners in the realization of a peaceful world. Our intention as walkers is to reach Minneapolis by November, in order to celebrate the work of residents of the Twin Cities to build resilience under the pressure of full-bore state violence. From where we stand now, in Boone, North Carolina, a walk to Minneapolis could seem like an untraversable distance. What is certain, as it has been revealed to us many times over at this point, is that applied faith shared by community will open a way. The serendipity of the journey will be found by those who set out to meet it. 

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Former members of the U.S. Communist Party recount their "Red Lives."

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