Global Women for Peace United Against NATO webinar spotlights protests against U.S. militarism that receives scant coverage in the U.S. media
In early April, an unidentified Irish man climbed onto the roof of a U.S. C-130 Hercules military transport vehicle parked at Shannon Airport in County Claire, Ireland, and sabotaged its wing and fuselage using a hatchet, causing $75 million in damage.
The heroic action was part of a wave of protests at Shannon Airport, which has functioned since the end of the Cold War as a transport hub for U.S. troops and refueling and transit spot for CIA and U.S. military planes, including ones that transported prisoners to Guantánamo Bay under the infamous rendition program.
Edward Hogan is a a regular participant in the protests at the Shannon Airport who was a featured speaker at a June 6 webinar hosted by Global Women for Peace—United Against NATO, which aimed to raise awareness about the widening protests against U.S. military bases in Europe and around the world.
A former member of the Irish defense force and UN peacekeeper, Hogan said that he has been arrested eight times in protests outside Shannon Airport, which are growing in scale because of popular anger at Ireland’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and Iran War—along with previous illegal U.S. and NATO wars like in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Serbia in the 1990s.
Hogan emphasized that, by allowing the U.S. military to use Shannon Airport, it has violated a neutrality policy that was signed into law by the Irish government in 1939.
Since 2002, more than three million U.S. troops have passed through Shannon Airport, many through flights classified as “civilian,” though most troop carriers are operated by Omni Air International, which the Irish government acknowledges has been allowed to carry weapons on board.
Additionally, the Irish Foreign Minister has granted permission for U.S. Navy and Air Force planes to land at Shannon—in violation of Irish law.
Hogan was followed up in his remarks by Ilse Terheggen, a Dutch punk rock musician and activist, who spoke about growing protests she is involved in outside the Leeuwarden Air Base in Friesland near Leiden.
Terheggen said that Leeuwarden Air Base is a front-line NATO base that hosts a NATO rapid reaction force and U.S. and Dutch F-35 Lightning stealth fighters and helicopter units and that the U.S. military was embedded there.
People living near the base are tired of the deafening noise from all the military exercises and jet flights which, she said, offers a “reminder of all the death and suffering” caused by the U.S. and NATO in its aggressive wars.
Part of the popular anger stems from the adverse environmental effects, which result from the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a toxic foam whose chemicals do not break down in nature and accumulate in the local soil, groundwater, livestock and fish.
Terheggen said that Leeuwarden, in essence, “represents a sacrifice zone for local residents” whose “land and water is being poisoned so NATO can carry out its aggressive and destructive wars.”
When specialists tested a canal next to the Leeuwarden base in 2024, Terheggen said they found PFAS levels 900 times the legal limit. High levels of PFAS have also been found in other local waterways and in fish and the eggs of chickens consumed by locals. Since the Netherlands lacks the proper incinerators to destroy the PFAS, they have to ship the PFAS waste to Belgium.
Terheggen ended her talk by discussing protest events at the base and presenting lyrics from a song she prepared for protests in June.
The song’s chorus goes:
“NATO power is tearing up the peaceful skies,
Fighter pilots ready to destroy thousands of lives,
American war-heads authorize the threat,
More pollution, more weapons, more war, more murder, more profit.”
The first speaker at the webinar, Sung-Hee Cho, spoke about the U.S. militarization of Jeju Island off the southern tip of South Korea, site of a major U.S. backed massacre on the eve of the Korean War, and how Hanwha Systems, the largest arms company in South Korea, has recently built a space center in the middle of Jeju Island in Seogwipo.[1]
This center has become a target of protests because it will be used for producing space-based satellites that will be launched by rocket and will assist U.S. intelligence and military operations.
Activists have noted that Hanwha Systems has previously entered into business partnerships with Israeli companies and contributed to the massacre of Palestinians, and continues to boost its stock price through arms exports.
The new space center is located about a 15-minute drive from the Jeju Naval Base, which serves as a U.S. outpost against China and sea-based launch platform. The proximity of the two facilities signifies that a structure combining the space industry and military infrastructure is now fully taking shape on Jeju.
In addition to all this, there is concern about contamination of the drinking water from the new space center and other adverse environmental effects, which is another reason for the protests.
The second speaker at the webinar, Corazon Fabros, co-president of the International Peace Bureau, discussed how her country, the Philippines, has come to function as a “foreign trip-wire state” for the aggressive U.S. military strategy aimed at China.
The Filipino people, she said, are being treated as expendable shields that can be dragged into conflict and a super-power rivalry they did not choose. Billions of dollars are being invested in war games in the Philippines while social services are cut and poverty deepens.
Fabros said that Filipinos succeeded in expelling U.S. military bases from the Philippines in 1991 but, less than ten years later, the U.S. military came back and is now carrying out large-scale military exercises called Balikatan and operating out of Filipino military bases that are being expanded under current President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.
CovertAction Magazine previously reported on how the Biden administration provided $100 million to Marcos Jr.’s government to refurbish at least nine Filipino military bases the U.S. has access to, along with four naval bases close to contested waters in the South China Sea.
Those initiatives garnered protests from Filipino activists who said that they did not want their country to function as a “footstool for American power projection and provocation [directed at China].”
Related to all this, Fabros detailed how the Philippines has become part of a tech alliance between the U.S. and other Southeast Asian countries called Pax Silica coordinated by the U.S. State Department, whose aim is to build supply chains outside of China.
Progressive activists are mobilizing against Pax Silica because it will provide a pretext for the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines, along with heightened exploitation of the Philippines’ natural resources and investment in AI and weapons industries.
The Philippines is coveted as the fifth most mineralized country in the world, with an estimated $1 trillion in untapped reserves of copper, gold, nickel, zinc and silver.
The activist Action Network announced the unveiling by President Marcos Jr. and U.S. officials of a 1,600-hectare artificial intelligence hub in the Luzon economic corridor in Clark City under Pax Silica, which will operate massive data centers and process critical minerals and further embed the Philippines in the U.S. military-industrial complex.[2]
A farmers’ group in the Philippines protesting Pax Silica described it as a “massive sellout” of the Philippines’s land, minerals, and sovereignty and “war production disguised as ‘so-called development.’” Fabros said that she and many other Filipinos reject Pax Silica because they “refuse to let out land be turned into a colonial enclave for the U.S. again.”[3]
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The third speaker at the webinar, Liz Remmerswaal is a New Zealander who spoke about protests outside the Waihopai Station spy base in the Southland region, which is used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the Five Eyes surveillance network, and about protests outside weapons exposes that were stopped in 2018.
Peace activists are also now initiating actions outside a rocket lab built on Maori land in Māhia Peninsula by a California-based company (Rocket Lab), supported by the New Zealand government, that has contracts with the U.S. Space Force.
The Māhia lab is launching rockets carrying satellites into space for BlackSky Technology, Capella Space and HawkEye 360 that will be used for various purposes by the U.S. and Israeli military intelligence. The satellites include shortwave infrared scanning that will enable imaging at night and through clouds.
A Maori woman, Sonya Smith, from Māhia who spoke at the webinar, said that locals called the people who worked at the rocket lab “the men in black.”
Smith, in turn, noted the popular perception in Māhia that the New Zealand government had betrayed its people by allowing a de facto U.S. military base into New Zealand covertly while presenting it to the public as a commercial rocket lab.
The next speaker, Margie Pestorius from Australia, spoke about protests directed against a) the military base at Darwin, which is used by the U.S. Air Force; b) outside the large military intelligence surveillance center at Pine Gap; and c) at Perth, which is a center for submarines.
The wave of recent protests reflects, in part, the concern that the U.S. is planning to use Australia as a staging base for potential wars in Asia, with the Australian government having agreed to host U.S. Marines and missile submarines under the AUKUS pact (Australia, UK, U.S.).
The USS Vermont is a nuclear submarine that docked in Western Australia, whose presence sparked protests from peace and environmental groups.
They said that they did “not want to spend billions of taxpayers money on nuclear submarines and turning our beautiful Cockburn Sound into a massive new U.S. base” and “did not want to get dragged into supporting the next illegal war or genocide pushed by the USA!”
The next speaker, from Italy, focused on Italy’s hosting of several dozen U.S. thermo-nuclear gravity bombs despite the Italian Constitution repudiating war in a 1975 article.
The U.S. has five major military bases in Italy, which have been the source of growing popular resentment in light of the unpopularity of the Iran War and U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. In March, two U.S. Navy helicopters landed in the heart of a World Heritage Site in Sicily, triggering a response from regional mayors and new rounds of protest.
Sophie Bolt from England noted that the increase in military spending promoted by the current Labour government under Keir Starmer is extremely unpopular, as was reflected in May elections where the Labor Party fared poorly. It lost parliamentary seats to new progressive parties that are promoting anti-militarism and peace, though the far right is also gaining support, Bolt said, by exploiting popular anger.
Britain currently hosts 19 U.S. military bases which it gave to the U.S. after World War II, and depends on the U.S. for its nuclear weapons systems.
When British Green Party leader Zack Polanski said that, if the U.S. decides to take Greenland, it would “close down all U.S. military bases,” 55% of the British population said they agreed with this position. Some 61% of the population also said they were against nuclear weapons and 70% of the population was against the Iran War.
Much of the peace activism in Britain has been directed at the Lakenheath base, the biggest U.S. air base in Britain, which hosts a new generation of U.S. nuclear bombers that were secretly delivered there last summer in an operation that was uncovered by activists who were able to track their presence.
Planes from the Lakenheath base have also been deployed in bombing runs over Iran, prompting activist efforts to blockade the base.
Other protests have been directed at the U.S. Air Force base in Gloucestershire, which is unique because of its long runway from which long-range B-1 and B-52 bombers that have been used for attacking Iran can take off and land.[4]
Bolt ended her talk by noting that a major point of struggle now is the U.S. effort to build a huge ground-based radar station in Pembrokeshire in Wales to track and create targeting capabilities directed against Russia and China that will be capable of launching space-based satellites built by Northrop Grumman under contract with the U.S. Space Force.
A dynamic local campaign has sprung up against the base that Bolt said was similar to a campaign in the Czech Republic, which stopped a radar base from being built there.
In the May elections, leadership of the Wales assembly was taken over by the Plaid Cymru Party, a left-leaning nationalist party which supports the sovereignty of the Welsh people and has an anti-war, anti-nuclear position. Bolt said that the Plaid Cymru Party is against construction of the radar station, putting it at odds with the British government.
After Bolt, Kristine Karch came on to speak about protests that have occurred regularly outside the Ramstein base in Germany, a key hub for U.S. global military operations, which is like a city in itself with more than 50,000 people living there with apartments, stores and restaurants.
Ramstein has been particularly important in coordinating military operations in Ukraine in a war triggered by the U.S. and NATO that has resulted in major atrocities directed against the eastern Ukrainian people and cost millions of lives.
Juan Hosea Ruiz followed Karch in discussing the anti-military movement in Spain where, she said, American military bases are a consequence of the Cold War and fascist Franco dictatorship which brought them in.
Since 1986, peace activists have organized an annual march to the Rota Naval Station in Andalucia, which served as a launching post for U.S. bombing attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Iran, and where nuclear submarines are sometimes docked. During the early 2000s, numbers of flights transporting prisoners to Guantánamo Bay flew through there.
While Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has opposed the Iran War and is not allowing Spanish bases to be used as a launching point for air attacks there, he is not trusted by peace activists because of his staunch military support for Ukraine, fealty to NATO, and expansion of the Rota base and a U.S. Air Force base in Morón, where a mega-contract was awarded by the Pentagon to modernize the base.
Ruiz said that public services in Spain are at risk, as in many other countries, because of heightened military spending along with the government’s push for more privatization and austerity measures, which have also been a target of political activism.
At the end of the webinar, a woman from Sweden came on to highlight the Pentagon’s push for the expansion of military bases in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway) from which the U.S. can launch direct attacks on Russia.
When the woman asked why Swedish anti-war activism was not featured in the webinar, others said they would have liked to but that, unfortunately, there was not much anti-war activism there except for some small actions.
The woman agreed that, unfortunately, this was true and lamented that the entire Swedish parliament had supported an agreement that would allow the U.S. to use Sweden’s 17 military bases to attack Russia.
Despite a conservative political climate reminiscent of the Cold War and insane war escalations being carried out in Washington and Tel Aviv, the June 6 Global Women for Peace—United Against NATO webinar made clear that there is a growing grass-roots opposition across Europe and parts of Southeast Asia, which is beginning to make some political headway.
Many speakers emphasized a widening coalition at anti-base and anti-war protests involving pro-Palestinian groups, climate change activists, trade union activists, feminists and pacifists, along with a growing number of young people who are experiencing a political awakening.
If they continue to expand, these networks may threaten the hold on power of ruling classes whose war-mongering and fealty to U.S. imperial designs have put them on the wrong side of history.
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019) discusses the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” policy and its contribution to a military build-up in the Asia Pacific and the militarization of Jeju Island. ↑
In a letter to President Marcos Jr. asking him to reject the deal, the Action Network wrote that “this project [Silica] risks turning Philippine land, infrastructure, and resources into tools for foreign military and corporate interests while Filipinos are left to suffer the brunt of the energy crisis. We reject the Philippines’ growing complicity in Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Philippine resources should serve the Filipino people, not fuel war, repression, and displacement abroad.” ↑
The farmers’ group raised significant concerns about mining expansion as a result of Pax Silica and its effects on the local environment in Zambales, Palawan and Nueva Vizcaya. It stated that, under Pax Silica, the government is “opening our mountains and ancestral lands to more destructive mining and industries that serve foreigners rather than the Filipino people. There is no doubt that Pax Silica is really meant for the U.S. war effort….Pax Silica lays the foundation through critical minerals and then pushes production to meet the needs of the U.S. in its warfare.” ↑
The Starmer government has claimed that British bases have only been used for defensive actions, which people know to be untrue. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
