By Paul Atkin
An essential starting point is that we are already occupied by our own ruling classes, who are using a Russian scare to intensify their domination.
There are two pillars to their argument that an increase in war spending is needed to deter the Russians; capacity and intent, neither of which stand up.
Capacity: When dealing with matters of life and death I think it’s important to be precise and not emotive, unlike arms lobbyist and former Admiral Alan West, whose comment on Radio 4 last week that failure to increase military spending would result in “Russian Chechen stormtroopers coming down the street and raping women” in its emphasis on CHECHEN soldiers consciously plays up the far right campaign to attribute all sexual violence to Muslim ethnic minorities. If you look at the balance of military spending in Europe – for every £1 the Russian Federation (RF) spends, Euro NATO already spends £3.50. They have twice as many service personnel and combat aircraft as the Russians, three times as many tanks and artillery pieces, six times as many naval craft. And Euro NATO is aiming to double that. If you add the US to that – and I think you have to because the current rocket attacks deep into Russia are being organised by them – the NATO preponderance of force is 11 to 1. It’s hard to argue that such a massive accumulation of force is defensive.
Intent: What do the Russians want? In 2003 they wanted to join NATO. George Robertson recalls Putin asking him when they’d be let in. A slight digression here. If we define imperialist powers as states in which the ruling class sustains its wealth and power not simply on exploiting its own working class, but exploiting the working class of the entire world, with an annual transfer from the Global South assessed at $10 trillion, then NATO is the core military alliance of the European and North American imperialist states structured around the predominance – increasingly brashly and recklessly asserted – of the US. Smaller direct alliances in the Pacific with Japan and S Korea, and AUKUS complement it, with Israel as a West Asian frontier state. Countries seeking to join it are aiming to become junior members of the global predators’ club.
The reason that Russia was rebuffed was because they weren’t needed to overawe the Global South and the complementarity of its economy with that of Europe, combined with the weight of its armed forces and nuclear capacity, meant that the US would no longer be the dominant power on the European continent were they to be let in.
Having been shut out, and bearing in mind Anthony Blinken’s comment that “if you’re not at the table with us, you’re on the menu”; and with NATO advancing inexorably to its borders, and intervening from the Orange Revolution to the Maidan and beyond in Ukraine, and from the Rose Revolution on in Georgia, and open discussion in US foreign policy circles of the need for regime change, even Balkanisation of the RF, the Russian reaction has been a defensive aggression – intervening hard in civil wars in both countries.
However, their bottom line – and this is the crucial point – has been to have a modus vivendi with the rest of Europe. Which is why they proposed a mutual security pact in the winter of 2021, which NATO wouldn’t even discuss. This led directly to the war in Ukraine – which is as soul destroying as every other war – even more so from knowing that it could have been avoided. This war, partly because it is going badly for NATO on the ground, is very useful politically for the European ruling class to seek to use militarisation as the vehicle for imposing a huge political and economic defeat on their domestic working classes; as well as being immediately immensely profitable for US and other arms companies, and potentially for outfits like Blackrock, which have the contract for “reconstruction” – read asset stripping – of Ukraine after the war ends.
Maintaining the current war, and escalating towards joining in more directly, as Europe is currently doing, is a disastrous course, even if it doesn’t actually lead to open fighting across the whole of Eastern Europe.
The US demand for 5% of GDP on war is ruinous.
For the UK, for example, that would cost an additional £70 billion every year if met in full. Already, cuts of 1% from every other Department, bigger from the climate crucial transport and energy depts, to pay for the current £15 billion uplift is costing tens of thousands of jobs. “Military Keynesianism” is not a boost but a drag on the economy. Infrastructure will decay. Potholes remain unfilled. Bus services atrophy. Rail remains partially electrified. Schools, homes and hospitals remain unprepared for the excess heat and flooding that we can increasingly expect. And wages will be squeezed. Already this year there is insufficient money to fully fund the teachers’ pay offer – exacerbating a crisis of school budgets which will further hit a generation already scarred by COVID, struggling with suppressed anxiety about climate breakdown, the prospects for secure work, somewhere affordable to live, a pension in old age and – now – being caught up in war.
And not just the kind of nasty late colonial war fought in the global south with massive technological advantage, all of which have also gone badly – Iraq, Afghanistan, the mess in Libya – but a pan European slog against a near peer with the world’s largest stock of nuclear weapons.
The way that this is talked about in the media is beyond surreal. One gung-ho naval officer was cited in the Daily Telegraph a couple of years ago really keen to get after the Russian fleet, claiming that the Royal Navy would sink it in an afternoon and “be home in time for tea and medals”. I don’t know if he realised he was quoting “Blackadder goes forth” Perhaps not. Senior Army officers have been quoted as expressing concern that the British Army could only survive about a month of full-scale hostilities In Europe. As if such a war would not go nuclear and be all done and nuclear dusted in an afternoon. As if it would not be ruinous even if not.
The danger is that this aims to build a war psychosis and fatalism that war is inevitable. Which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why the Russian invasion in 2022? Because they believed, from NATOs refusal to discuss alternatives, that war was inevitable; so, better from their point of view to launch it before Ukraine had been fully consolidated as a NATO frontier state.
It’s very difficult, after four years of dreadful fighting, to row back from this, because those who have already died consecrate the deaths of those still to fight, but if we don’t want another four years, it’s vital that we do.
The “whole society militarisation approach” in the EU and UK aims to mobilise the whole of society around a mission to militarise. The contrast with the failure to do exactly this to deal with the climate emergency is instructive and revealing. This includes a drive for universities to push students towards military careers and do military research, for Combined Cadet Forces in many more schools (anecdote) and an increasingly overt drive to classify dissent on Gaza, Iran, Ukraine as support for “terrorism” and “treason”, with 14-year prison sentences hanging over the heads of anyone telling truths inconvenient for government foreign policy priorities.
However, the sheer enormity of this offensive, and the insatiable quality of the financial black hole in the heart of the state that it generates, means that every issue that requires government finance will collide with it. Even people in favour of more guns won’t be keen to have their butter taken away. So, every government that tries to implement this will become very unpopular and unlikely to survive the ensuing election or possibly make it that far. The drive itself will survive this churn so long as all the major parties are equally committed to it, but as opposition builds in society, so that will be reflected in shifts between and within parties that could begin to undermine it. Similarly in the unions. In the Uk there are, sadly, some big unions that are in favour of increased war spending – on a “British Bombs for British Workers” basis – but the majority TUC position voted at Congress last year is already for Welfare not Warfare.
We need to connect across Europe – as Stop ReArm Europe is doing, and across the World, as No Cold War is doing.
Discussing the war drive through looking at NATO can make the discussion a bit Eurocentric.
But the current US interventions in Latin America – backing the most barbarous far right leaders from the Bolsonaros to Kast to Bukele and de la Espriella- their intervention in Venezuela and attempt to crush Cuba – sits alongside their increasing activity in Africa, interventions in West Asia – from fuelling the Gaza genocide, to Syria to Lebanon and Iran – all cohere in a drive for “Global Energy Dominance” based on fossil fuels, for which the main target is China.
The paradox of the increasingly manic pace of this is that countries globally are seeing investment in renewable energy as a way of getting out for under US dominance – with a majority of countries now having passed their fossil fuel peak – and that battle is also being fought out inside the US and its subordinate imperial allies. The UK, for example, has no viable future as a petro state; so the demand to “reopen” the exhausted and economically unviable North Sea is a fantasy that only leads to a ruinous energy dependence on the US – which its supporters promote in the name of “patriotism”. All very comprador. The current overt demand from the US that Andy Burnham not appoint Ed Miliband as Chancellor of the Exchequer is a clear attempt to direct UK policy in this respect and will be symbolic of the extent to which the new PM will bend the knee – and puts Farage’s claim that Brexit was the UKs “independence day” in context.
In this situation, one of the jobs we have, alongside building the strongest possible movements of resistance in each sector on each issue – without requiring agreement on all issues – is for the core of campaigners to join the dots and see clearly how this all links up. Put rather well by EM Forster – “Only connect”.
For further exploration I’d recommend these five articles and associated links, which I hope can be circulated more widely.
https://transitionsecurity.org/trillion-dollar-bills/
https://nocoldwar.org/news/nato-3-0-alliance-or-military-industrial-investment-fund
https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/
The Aims of NATO/U.S.-Organized Missile Attacks Inside Russia Go Far Beyond Russia Alone – MR Online
https://greenerjobsalliance.co.uk/in-the-red-heat-a-transformative-response-to-the-war-and-energy-crisis/
https://stoprearm.org/
https://nocoldwar.org/
Image: Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attends a session during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee Conference in Warsaw, Poland Sept. 29, 2018. (DOD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro); Licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 Attribution 2.0 Generic Deed.