Imperialist competition drives military build-up
Donald Trump’s decision to upend US relations with some of the country’s main allies heralds the intensification of imperialist competition and the acceleration of an already rapid military build-up in Europe and Asia.
The trigger for the current turmoil is the Trump administration’s decision to throw Ukraine under the bus. Keen to end the financial drain of a stalemated war, the US is trying to come to an agreement with Russia for a ceasefire and peace agreement to be imposed on Ukraine. The result will not be peace, as Trump boasts, but an imperialist carve-up in which Ukraine will surrender one fifth of its territory and most of its mineral wealth to be jointly plundered by the US and Russia, in a deal reminiscent of 19th century colonialism.
The Trump administration’s plan to cut Ukraine loose, along with its decision to impose onerous tariffs, has caused panic in European capitals as Trump overturns what European leaders have long regarded as a cast-iron US commitment to European defence.
Since the US threw itself into the European war in 1941, it has formed the military backstop for its allies. That put it in a commanding position when it came to dividing the continent as the war came to an end. When US-Soviet relations broke down in 1948, Western European governments looked to the US to defend them. The US, concerned that the Soviet Union would make inroads in Western Europe, introduced a major economic package for its allies, the Marshall Plan, valued at US$160 billion in today’s prices. It encouraged moves towards a common market, the forerunner of today’s European Union, and took the lead in forming NATO in 1949 with an initial 11 other nations, including Britain, France and Italy, Germany joining in 1955. There was never any doubt who called the shots. While the NATO secretary general was by convention European, he always took his orders from the US commander in chief of NATO forces.
The economic and military alliance suited both Western Europe and the US. For the US, it ensured that the Eurasian land mass would not fall under Soviet control—the US could never lay claim to be a leading world power if that occurred. It gave US corporations access to a growing market as Western Europe recovered from the war. US hegemony allowed it to persuade or coerce the European empires to withdraw from their colonies in Africa and Asia, creating openings for US multinationals to exploit new markets, resources and pools of cheap labour.
Western European leaders valued the US partnership because the US provided them with military protection against Soviet advances, relieving them of the expense of building up their own militaries sufficient to deter Russia. While the US was spending 6-8 percent of GDP on its military in the 1960s through to the 1980s, Germany, Spain and Italy, were spending only 2-3 percent. Lower military spending in Europe freed up more money for investment in civilian industries, which began to catch up on US rates of productivity in the postwar decades. US multinationals setting up in Europe provided investment and capitalist know-how to European business and governments.
NATO also suppressed the potential for a revival of imperialist tensions between France and Germany, responsible for three wars in three quarters of a century. First NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay accurately described the bloc’s purpose as “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many former Moscow-aligned states rushed to join both, leading to the expansion of NATO and the EU to territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border in places.
Much of the media coverage of Trump’s aggressive pronouncements portrays the European powers as victims of US bullying. The EU has a reputation of being a champion of “soft power”, emphasising diplomacy and economic and cultural ties with its neighbours rather than military force. There is nothing “soft”, however, about much of the EU’s operations. Like Russia and the US, the EU is an imperialist actor defending the interests of its big capitalists against the working class at home and the oppressed overseas. While the EU lacks an army or navy, its bigger member states are violent imperialists, as evident in France’s military interventions in Africa and Italy’s brutal treatment of refugees in the Mediterranean.
The EU has long insisted on neoliberal budgetary measures restricting spending on social services and the welfare state. Governments borrowing from the European Central Bank have been subjected to harsh austerity measures, while nations applying to join the EU are required to sign up to a full neoliberal program favouring corporate interests.
There is nothing progressive about the EU, and falling foul of Trump doesn’t change that.
With a $20 trillion GDP, the EU is the second largest economy in the world after the US, and represents around one-sixth of the global economy. In civilian aircraft, Europe’s Airbus have gone head-to-head with Boeing in the chase for big orders from Asia and Middle Eastern airlines. So while in the immediate postwar decades the US was the dominant partner in the transatlantic alliance, in more recent decades, the EU has begun to challenge the US on a range of fronts.
The EU’s expansion and growth have given it more clout in the contest between competing imperialist powers. EU institutions have pushed back against US corporations, and the European Commission has levied big fines on US companies for anti-competitive practices. European governments have at times also challenged the US diplomatically, most notably in 2003, when Germany and France refused to back President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Some, Germany most notably, have also sought closer relations with Russia and China, reducing their economic and energy dependence on the US. In response, the US has demanded that its NATO partners increase their military spending to match that of the US and imposed financial penalties and export restrictions on European businesses operating in US markets and third countries.
For a while tensions between the US and EU were kept in check. The growth of the Republican right in the 2010s signalled a much more aggressive US approach to the EU. The Republican right regard the EU as a rival and, through its demands for military defence, a drain on the US treasury. They want to smash it up or at least severely weaken it. As “America First” politicians, they reason that the US will be in a better position to assert its leadership without an at-times oppositional EU. Trump’s MAGA project fitted the bill.
In his first term in office, Trump called the EU a “foe” and imposed tariffs on European steel and aluminium and frequently threatened to extend these to European cars. Trump backed Brexit, Britain’s departure from the EU, as it removed one of the EU’s biggest economies and its most battle-hardened military. Trump celebrated the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties, seeing them as a European incarnation of his own right-wing nationalist project.
Trump also attacked NATO, calling it “obsolete” in 2017. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, though, in demanding NATO member states meet the defence spending target of 2 percent of GDP. What was different now was Trump stating that the US might go its own way if its NATO partners did not meet the target. Underpinning this was a desire to pivot the US military and defence industries away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific.
Trump’s “America First” approach rattled sections of the US ruling class in his first term in office. Many wanted to stick with the multilateral approach that had served them well for years. They supported Trump’s identification of China as the most serious threat but opposed his attacks on traditional allies. Trump’s successor Joe Biden attempted to right the ship by lashing together a supposed alliance of democracies to resist what he called autocratic China and Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s watch exposed Europe’s military weakness. British and French leaders may object to US Vice President J.D. Vance describing them as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”, but they recognise the underlying reality—that the long period of peace from 1945 until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (interrupted only by war in the Balkans in the 1990s), has left them ill prepared for war against another imperialist power.
Even before the Ukraine invasion, European NATO members were raising military spending, but in the three years since, they have collectively increased spending on defence by one-third. EU powerhouse Germany, responsible for a quarter of the bloc’s GDP but a fraction of its military spending, sharply reversed years of declining military outlays. In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, governments increased spending even more dramatically. NATO has also expanded its borders, Sweden and Finland joining the bloc after decades of neutrality, and Ireland too drawing closer. At US prompting, NATO also officially targeted China as a “strategic threat” and drew in Australia, Japan and South Korea as participants in NATO forums to widen the bloc’s theatre of operations.
While the EU is an economic giant, it remains a military lightweight compared to the US. Trump is using this disparity to threaten European governments with unilateral withdrawal from mutual defence commitments enshrined in the NATO charter if they do not spend 5 percent of their GDP on the military, far above even what the US now spends (3.4 percent). Trump’s aggression towards other NATO members is also obvious with his stated desire to annex Canada and Greenland, a territory of Denmark. While it’s unlikely that the US will ditch its European allies—US global power still relies on maintaining a stake in Europe—Trump is certainly trying to bend European leaders to the US’s will, as Biden and Obama did before him, but in Trump’s case without the diplomatic niceties.
Trump is also using Europe’s vulnerability to advance US interests in commercial negotiations. For years, US politicians and business groups have objected to the European Commission’s trade rules that protect European capitalist interests at the expense of US corporations, ranging from rules governing hormone-fed beef and environmental standards to IT security. Big US merchandise trade deficits with the EU have rankled Congress.
During his first term, Trump attempted to impose swingeing tariffs on Europe, but faced opposition in Congress and from some of his advisers, some of whom were still attached to the idea of free trade. This time around he is much more likely to be successful since his political base is much more powerful and united behind his “America First” project.
In response to Trump’s threats, Europe’s leaders are now dramatically upgrading plans for military spending. Germany’s parliament has just passed legislation to provide €500 billion to extra military spending, while the European Union has approved €800 billion in additional borrowing to pay for military spending. Denmark has announced a $7 billion rearmament plan, representing a 70 percent increase. Poland is raising its military spending to 4.7 percent of its GDP.
Nuclear proliferation is part of this militarist step-up. Germany and Poland, both non-nuclear powers, are discussing with French President Emmanuel Macron a way to extend France’s nuclear weapons to cover their territory as well. Britain, still a significant military force and nuclear power, has been drawn closer to European rearmament.
Such a massive rearmament raises the prospect of Europe developing its own military capability. The idea of an independent military force has been debated by European leaders over decades and every time rejected on the grounds that the US could always be relied upon to come to Europe’s aid if it is attacked. Times have changed. In the short term, European governments will continue to depend on the US for security because they are incapable of scaling up their own militaries quickly enough and lack a unified military command structure; a United States of Europe is still not a reality. We cannot rule out, however, that in coming one or two decades, European governments may try to pursue a more independent path, even if decades of entanglement in the US military will make this very difficult.
Nothing to do with this push towards greater independent firepower is politically progressive. Mainstream political commentators, and in some cases governments, in Europe, Canada, Mexico and Australia, have trumpeted their opposition to Trump by waving their national (or EU) flags. In Canada, for example, there is a big push going on to “buy Canadian” and to scrap US holiday plans. In Australia, the Greens are proposing a more independent defence policy. There is certainly an audience for such an approach. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada has gone from deadbeats to favourites in April’s federal election. In Australia, everyone from Malcolm Turnbull to Paul Keating has been applauded in liberal circles for denouncing Trump. But none of this is left wing or does anything to challenge the imperialist competition now unfolding.
If there are differences between the imperialist powers, whether in Moscow, Berlin or Washington, they are united in their determination to make the working class pay for rearmament. The talk in Europe now is of “warfare states, not welfare states”. When hospitals, schools and welfare beneficiaries knock on the government’s door for funds, the pantry is always bare. But when it comes to the military, money can always be found.
The Starmer government in Britain is already proposing to spend an extra £6 billion every year to lift military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP. Getting to Trump’s target of 5 percent would take the annual figure to £12 billion. That means taking from the budget money that could pay for thousands more doctors and nurses in the National Health Service or four new hospitals or 2,000 new ambulances or 75,000 new council houses. This is a global trend.
Then there is the militarisation of society that will accompany the arms spending. Poland is already proposing to more than double the size of its army to half a million and to ensure that every young man undertakes military training. The focus on the military, entirely dependent on fossil fuels, will weaken European governments’ already dwindling support for measures to tackle climate change. Policies towards migrants and refugees will become even more restrictive and racist. With military industries and facilities subjected to restrictive legislation, workers’ rights will come under further attack. The political right will be emboldened.
We see a similar push towards greater militarism in the Asia-Pacific. Every government is rapidly building its military. Australia is increasing military spending by tens of billions of dollars, with orders for new drones, ships and aircraft and plans to spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines. Acquiring US nuclear submarines is a bilateral priority because their addition to Australia’s arsenal will make the country a top 10 military power and a valuable US ally in any war with China. This ambition also explains the bilateral support for turning northern Australia into a base for the US Marines, Air Force and Navy. Two other big regional military powers, Japan and South Korea, are doing much the same.
Socialists must oppose all imperialism—whether Western or non-Western—while standing with ordinary people fighting for justice and self-determination. That Trump is screwing Europe today should not make us lend the latter any sympathy. Every power in the world is more urgently looking to build its military in the era of Trump and all of it will come at a terrible price for workers. We desperately need a stronger socialist movement to oppose this horror and fight for an alternative to this system of inequality, oppression and war.
