The reasons given for the west's hostility towards Belarus are that Lukashenko is authoritarian and a "dictator". This is an odd charge, given that the losing candidates in last September's presidential elections conceded that the incumbent president had won more votes than them. It is also strange for the west to revile Lukashenko when it courts so assiduously President Putin, whose own election, like all those in Russia since 1991, was outrageously rigged.

Most of the charges levelled against Belarus are absurd. It is often claimed that people are beaten for speaking Belarusian; in fact it is the official state language and Lukashenko himself speaks it frequently. It is also alleged that Catholics and Jews are persecuted there. But the Catholic hierarchy was restored under Lukashenko and the Oxford Institute for Hebrew and Jewish Studies has just confirmed that the Jewish community in Belarus is flourishing. It is also stated repeatedly, without evidence, that Lukashenko has had his political opponents murdered: these claims persist in spite of the fact that one of his alleged victims was discovered alive and well and living in London.

The real reason why the west hates Lukashenko has nothing to do with concern for democracy or human rights. It is instead that, as a genuinely popular politician who has preserved his country from the worst ravages which economic reform has inflicted on its neighbours, Lukashenko is not given to taking orders. In this respect, he is unlike any of the other senior former communist officials currently hobnobbing in Prague. The west's friends in eastern Europe today have their hands firmly on the commanding heights of political control in their countries, just as in many cases they personally did under communist dictatorship.

The west prefers such people because the demands it makes on post-communist countries are so unpopular. All eastern European states are required to sell off their national economic assets to foreigners, and close down their agriculture by accepting the dumping of subsidised EU food imports. This creates massive social disruption and unemployment. In addition, they must spend at least 2% of their GDP on defence, preferably on arms made in the US.

Consequently, a small country like Lithuania, whose economy has collapsed so catastrophically, has just announced the purchase of $34m worth of Stinger missiles, made by the Raytheon Corporation of Tucson, Arizona. When Tanzania announced it was spending $40m on a new civilian air traffic control system, there was an outcry; but Lithuania, whose official GDP is not much larger than Tanzania's, will have to spend $240m on arms every year as the price for Nato membership. And Lithuania is just one of seven new member states, all of which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on arms.

The economic interests driving Nato expansion are so blatant that the man who co-ordinates US policy on the matter practically has "military-industrial complex" as his middle name. Bruce Jackson, president of the US committee on Nato, is a former military intelligence officer in the US army who became vice-president of Lockheed Martin, the gigantic US arms manufacturer and biggest provider of financial control and accounting services to the Pentagon, from whose accounts trillions of dollars have disappeared.

Jackson left Lockheed Martin in August to take up his new full-time political job of "promoting democracy in a united Europe". But a good illustration of the economic agenda which is really behind Nato expansion was given when Jackson recently told Bulgaria that its membership of Nato would depend on it selling the national tobacco factory to the "right" foreign buyer.

Far from promoting democracy in eastern Europe, Washington is promoting a system of political and military control not unlike that once practised by the Soviet Union. Unlike that empire, which collapsed because the centre was weaker than the periphery, the new Nato is both a mechanism for extracting Danegeld from new member states for the benefit of the US arms industry, and also - ever since the promulgation of Nato's New Strategic Concept in April 1999 - an instrument for getting others to protect US interests around the world, including the supply of primary resources such as oil. It is, in short, a racket. Any state which refuses to play ball knows the consequences: the humiliating treatment meted out to President Lukashenko is simply intended pour encourager les autres.

· John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group