By Charlie Wilson
We are now in an extraordinarily dangerous situation in which a drive towards war is being presented as an attempt to secure peace and all right thinking people across all mainstream parties and media are agreed on it.
Discussions in the media right across Europe, and in Parliament here, are framed within the presumption of a Russian threat. No one questions the premise, largely because its false and can’t stand up to scrutiny.
On the principle of seeking truth from facts, the actual balance of forces between Russia and the European NATO powers is as follows.
- According to GFP – strength in numbers, the leading annual global defense review since 2005 the European members of NATO, excluding the USA and Canada, are spending $445.7 billion on their militaries this year,
- Russia is spending $126 billion.
So, without the USA and Canada, European NATO countries are already outspending the Russians by 3.5 to 1 on their militaries.
Add Ukraine’s $54 billion and the ratio gets to 4 to 1. See Fig.
If the USA and Canada’s $936 billion were to be added, the NATO total gets to just over 11 to 1.
But even without them, given this imbalance, it is absurd to argue that Russia has any capacity to attack NATO countries in Europe, even if they wanted to, which they have repeatedly said that they do not.
Orthodox military thinking lays down a 4:1 ratio for a successful military attack. European NATO already has that. Russia does not and, with an economy the size of Italy, never will have.
This is underlined by the current balance in military material shown by this graphic from Germany, which shows
- an upward trend in spending from 2014 onwards,
- and also the greater NATO power in every form of weaponry, even if the US is removed from the equation. The only area in which Russia has more material that European NATO is in satellites and, narrowly, short range rockets; in military personnel, artillery, tanks and other AFVs, ships, aircraft and combat helicopters, Euro NATO already has a very powerful advantage; with a million more soldiers, three times as much artillery and attack helicopters, five times as many tanks and six times as many ships.
This possibly explains why one of the EU’s military infrastructure proposals is to strengthen bridges to “allow the safe passage of tanks”. If they were concerned about columns of tanks heading West, they’d want to weaken them and wire them up for demolition, so its clear which direction these tanks would “safely” be heading; and whose tanks they’d be.
All this also leaves aside the political issue that an attacking power would have to have some degree of popular support to sustain an occupation. As the US and its allies found out in Iraq, even a crushing technological and military superiority is not enough to sustain a grip on a country if the people you are occupying hate your guts and want you to leave.
Peace and “defence” would be better assured by an attempt to reset the relationship, reduce tensions and find a mutually acceptable modus operandi across Eurasia that would ensure a lasting peace and allow funds now being diverted towards an arms race being put to useful ends. But the scale of the existing imbalance shows that, if the aim is “peace” and “defence”, there is no need for increased arms spending, even assuming a continued hostile stance between the EU and Russia.
Instead, we have a variety of panicky proposals to secure a pause to tool up for Round Two, with the massive 800 billion Euro EU military spending pledge from Ursula Von Der Leyen last week. Even Germany is relaxing its hitherto sacrosanct fiscal rules to make it possible and put a bigger, beefier Bundeswehr at the heart of it.
800 billion Euros is $860 billion. Add that to current Euro NATO spending and you get to $1360 billion.
Compare that to current Russian military spend and you get this crushing level of power.
As we can see from the graphs, this is not a response to a genuine existential threat, or an application of the imperative for governments to keep their people safe. If that were the case, the rules would be being broken, buttons would be being pressed, strings would be being pulled and magic words spoken to conjure up $860 billion a year to invest in combatting climate change – about the level the EU should be spending to rise to the “generational challenge” of overcoming it – something they have never been prepared to contemplate. This mobilisation then, is an attempt to reverse the defeat that NATO is now experiencing in Ukraine. Far more important to the European ruling classes and, ultimately, the US too.
So, this is not a necessary defence, it is preparation for war; a war that, with Russia prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend itself, would kill all of us if it were to be engaged in. This arms build up is designed to make such a war “thinkable” and doable; as is the current UK “defence review” which is premised on us being in a “pre war situation”.
A YouGov poll reported in the Guardian (7/3/25) shows that the Russian threat propaganda is working, up to a point. But this is fragile and before the costs of increased military spending hits home. The desperate avoidance of any discussion of the actual military balance of forces goes along with a flood of emotive media. In this context.
- 60% of respondents in the UK thought that Russia would attack other European countries within the next ten years. The figures for France and Germany were more sceptical, Italy even more so.
- Even with this view, only 24% of respondents in the UK thought that the current level of military support to Ukraine (£3 billion) should be increased and, despite the avalanche of emotive coverage in the last week or two, fewer than half in the UK support an increase in “defence” spending; which will mean increasing resistance to doing so as the cuts needed to sustain it start to bite. Support for increases is also a minority view in France, Spain and, especially, Italy.
- Only between a quarter and a third in each country believe that the European powers can substitute for the US in Ukraine, which makes Starmer’s current stance of being willing to “put British boots on the ground and planes in the air” conditional on a US backstop that he knows very well will not be forthcoming, as part of a “peacekeeping force” of NATO protagonists that he also knows the Russians will never agree to, a Potemkin village of a posture with nothing behind it.
- There is now a lot of hostility to the US within European populations; with 58% -78% now considering it to be “a big or fairly big threat to peace and security in Europe”. The paradox of a lot of the rearmament rhetoric from European governments is that it seeks to use the widespread hostility to Trump to give him exactly what he wants – huge increases in military spending that will drain the life out of the welfare state and attempts to tackle climate change, weaken European economies viz a viz the USA, give the US a free hand in West Asia, with Gaza and Iran the main targets, and in the South China Sea.
The imperative task for socialists is to get the truth out about this and build the widest and deepest possible united front against the arms spending drive, in defence of all the provisions scheduled for cuts to fund it and taking on the arguments for “military Keynesianism” being put about by some unions; which is very effectively demolished here.