Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Western imperialism’s key military alliance, describe recently announced increases in European arms spending as a collective effort to “safeguard our freedom and democracy”. Some commentators have been even more emphatic in advocating stepped-up European armament. Writing in the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a">Financial Times</a> earlier this year, Bronwen Maddox, director of the London-based think tank Chatham House, called military spending “the essential public benefit above all”, placing it above expenditures on hospitals, pensions, education and other social services.
While such “public good” narratives dominate official chatter, another motive lies behind the rhetoric: consolidating Europe as the 21st century’s third global power alongside the United States and China. Three developments illustrate the scale and nature of the economic and military shift now under way.
First is the sharp increase in arms spending over the last decade. In 2024, European NATO members collectively spent nearly US$500 billion on “defence”—a 72 percent increase since 2014, adjusted for inflation. Over the past decade, military budgets more than tripled in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and more than doubled in twelve other European NATO members. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, nearly doubled its military spending in real terms.
Second is the ReArm Europe Plan (as though Europe is currently disarmed), announced by the European Council in March. ReArm authorises European Union member states to increase borrowing to boost military spending by €800 billion over the next five years. It marks a significant policy shift, overriding the debt and deficit limits set by the 2012 European Fiscal Compact—a treaty requiring governments to keep deficits below 3 percent of GDP—and directing the European Investment Bank to prioritise lending to arms manufacturers.
Third is <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_236705.htm">the Hague Declaration</a> coming out of last month’s NATO summit, which goes further again. NATO is the closest thing Europe has to a unified continental military command. On average, its members spend just over 2 percent of GDP on defence. While the March ReArm Europe Plan allowed for extra spending of up to 1.5 percent of GDP, the NATO summit in June committed members to allocating 5 percent of GDP annually to the military, including security-related infrastructure. It also requires annual progress reports demonstrating “a credible, incremental path” towards this goal.
The aim is to increase Europe’s economic and military power through substantial investments in military-industrial capacity and weapons production. As Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space, stated in a media release accompanying the announcement, “This is not just about military strength—it is about our readiness, strategic autonomy, and the future of Europe as a global player”.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for increased European military spending. In 2018, he suggested that it should rise to 4 percent of GDP. At the time, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-tells-nato-leaders-to-increase-defense-spend-to-4-percent-idUSKBN1K12BW/">according to Reuters reporters in Brussels</a>, NATO allies “shrugged off the demand”.
However, the astonishing surge of China’s industrial, technological and military capacities has left US strategists increasingly rattled about Washington’s declining relative power in the western Pacific. European leaders now appear to have recognised an opportunity as the US threatens to reduce its military commitments on the continent. In May, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared his ambition for the Bundeswehr to become the “strongest conventional army in Europe”. French President Emmanuel Macron, a long-time advocate of “strategic autonomy”—that is, less reliance on the US military—affirmed that the EU must become “a space power once again”.
New York Times correspondents <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/world/europe/macron-starmer-merz-trump-eu.html">Michael Shear and Jim Tankersley now report</a> that Britain, France and Germany, “are building parallel diplomatic and defense institutions for a future without the United States as the primary guarantor of economic and military security” in the region. The three countries, which have long been the dominant imperialist states in Western Europe, look to be entering an era of military coordination that is perhaps unprecedented.
The claims that current tensions signal a historic rift between the US and Europe is not particularly convincing, however. Those old enough to remember transatlantic discord over the Iraq invasion in 2002-03, which in part was a US attack on European interests, might recall a State Department spokesperson ridiculing Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg as “chocolate makers” after they held “a little bitty summit” to moot plans for an alternative military command to NATO. Or the time US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Paris and Berlin as irrelevant “old Europe” has-beens. There was even a directive to congressional cafes to rename “French fries” and “French toast” to “Freedom fries” and “Freedom toast”. (Childish, petty politics predate Trump.)
Today, the European powers will likely uphold and reinforce the broader Western imperial bloc by augmenting their own capacities and allowing Washington to refocus its energies. “The ‘triangle alliance’, as Britain, France and Germany are sometimes now called, are already partners through NATO and the Group of 7—forums that include the United States”, Shear and Tankersley note. “Officials for the three European countries are careful to say that the institutions they are building are meant to supplement those alliances, not replace them.”
Of course, there are no guarantees in this shifting geopolitical landscape. And the leaders of imperialist states rarely say publicly what they are thinking and saying privately. So time will tell how things pan out. 
Yet some outcomes seem certain—most notably, who will ultimately bear the cost of this military build-up. The exemption of military spending from the European Fiscal Compact is particularly significant. Along with the deficit limit, the agreement requires EU members to maintain public debt below 60 percent of GDP. Though only loosely enforced, the compact has long been cited to justify cuts to working-class payments, pensions and public services.
Fiscal restraint, long demanded of governments, has now been relaxed—but exclusively for funds directed to arms manufacturers and related contractors. For everyone else, ever more “restraint” is on the cards. Maddox quoted an unnamed senior European minister speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February: “For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare. Now, we will have to reverse that”. 
In a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">Financial Times column</a> the following month, Janan Ganesh, a prominent British conservative commentator, asserted that, compared to rearmament, “all other priorities are secondary” and argued for Europe to become “a more militarised, less welfarist continent”. He added, “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt”.
With European military outlays expected to more than double in the next decade, some governments are relying on increased borrowing or creative accounting to meet their targets. However, borrowing will be only a stopgap if the 5 percent mark is to be met. Many governments hold debt-to-GDP ratios <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w/2-22042025-bp">well above the average</a> (80 percent), and well above the level demanded by the Fiscal Compact. Greece (154 percent), Italy (135 percent), France (113 percent), Belgium (105 percent) and the UK (95 percent, albeit no longer part of the union) have already come under pressure to reduce spending to pay creditors. So even with fiscal rules being relaxed, the spectre of significant cuts to living standards looms.
Berlin has one of the more “balanced” budgets and therefore more fiscal room than most governments. It is embarking on a €400 billion borrowing binge to increase military spending from €95 billion in 2025 to €162 billion in 2029. Yet this month, the government announced that it will cut unemployment entitlements by between one and two billion euros, alongside reductions in rent support payments. “It should be called basic security and no longer citizens’ money”, <a href="https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-government-announces-unemployment-benefit-cuts">Chancellor Merz told Markus Preiss</a>, a presenter on one of the country’s public broadcasters, last week. 
In France, Prime Minister François Bayrou has announced sweeping spending cuts—including public sector lay-offs, eliminating public holidays and freezing tax brackets and welfare payments next year—to reduce the budget by nearly €44 billion. He described the country’s debt as a “mortal danger” that threatens to “crush” France. Yet he insists that military spending is “sacrosanct”. Last Sunday, President Macron announced a €6.5 billion increase to the defence budget.
While a few countries may have little interest in meeting a 5 percent military spending target—Spain has flatly refused to entertain the idea—the major European powers are moving decisively toward rearming and retooling their economies for geopolitical competition. If they succeed, the continent will increasingly come to resemble the United States: a society in which the military-industrial complex becomes economically overweight and increasingly politically influential.
That makes European rearmament a global problem. So too the attacks on European welfare. If some of the wealthiest countries in the world begin treating social welfare as secondary—to be sacrificed in favour of militarisation—it could signal a global shift. Workers worldwide have often pointed to Europe as evidence that governments have the resources to provide for citizens. If the message coming from European capitals is that this can no longer be the case, ruling classes everywhere will point to the new European model as the future, and paint social welfare as the legacy of a bygone era. Workers and the poor will face the prospect not only of being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly dog-eat-dog world, but of being enlisted to kill each other in a 21st-century-style imperialist Hunger Games.

Ben Hillier

Europe’s imperial power play

The line peddled by Western politicians and media outlets is that the US and Israel had to go to war because Iran was just weeks or months from developing nuclear weapons. 
<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">The White House claimed</a> that Iran could have produced a nuclear weapon “<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iran-produce-nuclear-weapon-couple-weeks-white-house/story?id=123016638">in a couple of weeks</a>”. Financial Times correspondents <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/46c60c82-7e5c-4013-a789-459e785d33fd">John Paul Rathbone and Charles Clover warned</a> of “the nuclear mountain that haunts Israel”. And Australian Defence Minister <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">Richard Marles asserted</a>: <a href="https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/defence-minister-richard-marles-stumbles-over-policy-gap-between-australiaus-in-iranisrael-conflict/news-story/5bf8bf19b4005ac6f1afc989a814dd9a">“T</a>he Iranian nuclear ballistic missile program is most definitely a threat to the peace and stability of not only the Middle East”.
The problem is that there is no evidence to support these claims, which have been repeated for more than 40 years by war hawks. 
As early as 1984, shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, British defence journal <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/iran-has-been-two-years-away-from-a-nuclear-bomb-since-the-1980s/389333/">Jane’s Defence Weekly reported</a>: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years”. Timelines have varied since then, but the claim has stayed the same. In 1992, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Benjamin Netanyahu asserted</a> that Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon, a claim he repeated three years later, and again in 2002. 
In 2012, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-netanyahus-rhetoric-on-irans-nuclear-ambitions">Netanyahu displayed a cartoon picture of a bomb</a> in front of the United Nations general assembly while claiming that Iran would be in the final stage of weapons development “at most by next summer”. Somehow, Iran has managed to bend the rules of time, being just a few months or years away from going nuclear for almost half a century.
Intelligence agencies themselves have reached different positions. 
<a href="https://archive.md/kbqyy#selection-355.0-361.59">A 2007 US national intelligence estimate</a>, touted by the director of national intelligence as the “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues”, concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had been trying to develop nuclear weapons, but ceased its program in 2003. It went on to admit: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005”.
Just three months ago, current US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, <a href="https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/congressional-testimonies/congressional-testimonies-2025/4061-ata-hpsci-opening-statement-as-delivered">in her opening remarks</a> at a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, included the evaluation: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003”.
This isn’t an intelligence failure. The Western ruling classes are manufacturing consent for a major war against a rival state in the Middle East by lying. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the Bush administration’s strategy in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Iraq, according to Western politicians and journalists at the time, had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbP8HGxrgo8">US President George W. Bush</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/18/foreignpolicy.iraq1">British PM Tony Blair</a>
and <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/what-led-john-howard-to-invade-iraq-the-question-remains-shrouded-in-mystery/3p4hsqleo">Australian PM John Howard</a> peddled claims that Iraq had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons.
There was no evidence to support these claims. In the months before the US invaded in March 2003, UN inspectors in Iraq found nothing. <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/disarming-saddam-chronology-iraq-and-un-weapons-inspections-2002-2003">The Arms Control Association later noted</a>: 
“UN weapons inspectors worked in Iraq from November 27, 2002 until March 18, 2003. During that time, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspections Commission conducted more than 900 inspections at more than 500 sites. The inspectors did not find that Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons or that it had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.”
This didn’t matter to Bush and his allies, who were determined to invade and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050629021102/http:/downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html">A July 2002 memo from the British Prime Minister’s office</a>, leaked to the press three years later, showed that a great hoax was being perpetrated:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record.”
Over the next decade, up to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256">half a million Iraqis</a>
were killed either directly or indirectly, as a result of the invasion, occupation and destruction of the country.
Two powers operating in the Middle East are known to have weapons of mass destruction and the willingness to use them: Israel and the United States.
Although Tel Aviv doesn’t publicly acknowledge its existence, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal">Israel’s nuclear weapons program is an open secret</a>. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons estimates that Israel has between <a href="https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_arsenals">90 and 200 warheads</a>. Israel is one of four nuclear powers that are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea), which means that there is no monitoring of its nuclear program.
Israel is also believed to have extensive <a href="https://www.nti.org/countries/israel/">chemical and biological weapons</a>
programs. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/">Amnesty International reported</a> on the military’s use of white phosphorus, a horrific chemical that burns flesh down to the bone, on civilian areas of Lebanon in October 2023. The group called for Israel to be investigated for war crimes. But this wasn’t the first time Israel had used chemical weapons—<a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/white-phosphorus-in-urban-environments">it did so in the 2008-09 war on Gaza</a>.
The United States has waged brutal wars to dominate the people of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East for the better part of a century, often involving the most heinous weapons ever produced. 
America was the first state to develop the atomic bomb, and later the even more deadly hydrogen bomb. It remains the only state to have used the weapon against civilian populations. <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/">The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists estimates</a> that up to 210,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US dropped atomic bombs on them in 1945. Hundreds of thousands of people lived, stripped of limbs or suffering from radiation poisoning, for decades afterwards.
The United States has also murdered thousands of people with chemical weapons. The US military dropped napalm by the ton on the people of Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, burning men, women and children alive. In Iraq, having denounced the regime for its non-existent WMDs, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/nov/15/usa.iraq">America admitted to using</a> napalm and white phosphorus.
If the US and Israel truly want to rid the world of WMDs, they should start by destroying their own nuclear and chemical weapons. And if they are worried about threats to peace and security, they ought to stop invading other countries.

Lucas Brunning-Halsall

West recycles old lies to justify attack on Iran

As long as capitalism survives, there will be no reckoning for the Gaza genocide or the naked aggression of Western imperialism in the Middle East. 
Every day, Israeli soldiers murder dozens of defenceless and starving Palestinians queuing for rations among the rubble of their now almost uninhabitable homeland. That no government in the world will do anything about it should be evidence enough of the impunity.
Now, Tel Aviv and Washington are exporting even more violence to yet another country, Iran. How many deaths in this region are they responsible for over the last 25 years? Up to 4.7 million, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Yet these murderers receive sinecures rather than sanctions. 
This perennial spectacle of mass murder, and the spectre of more of it, have not elicited a rethinking of priorities among those who rule the world, let alone contrition or reparations. Instead, they are launching more wars and preparing for others—everywhere. Twenty-seven million active-duty military personnel are spread across the globe. But even this is insufficient. 
“If you have weapons, don’t abandon them; if you have the ability to produce weapons, produce them. Weapons of all kinds”, Lithuanian Defence Minister Dovilė Šakalienė last week told Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “Saying let’s disarm, let’s be peaceful pigeons—that’s suicidal.”
This exhortation is but a reflection of what’s already happening. Global military spending is rapidly expanding, increasing by nearly 40 percent in real terms over the last decade to US$2.7 trillion (A$4.2 trillion) and accounting for approximately 7 percent of government expenditures worldwide. All indications suggest that this is only the beginning, as an increase in the means of violence in one country begets a commensurate increase in its neighbours’ and competitors’ capacities.
The US, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel together already possess more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2,100 are “kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles”—more than enough destructive capability to eradicate all human life several times over. 
Yet more countries are reportedly considering joining this nuclear club—a death cult by any reasonable definition. “The era of nuclear weapons reductions appears to have ended”, notes the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, released this month. “The signs are that a new qualitative nuclear arms race is gearing up and, compared with the last one, the risks are likely to be more diverse and more serious.”
It is too generous to say that the great challenges of the 21st century—the climate catastrophe and decimation of the planet’s ecosystems, the 700 million people undernourished and living in extreme poverty, the 2.2 billion without drinking water, the 3.5 billion lacking safe sanitation services, and more—are afterthoughts to the imperialist states and their capitalist ruling classes.
Increasingly, the primary feature of their system is destruction: destruction of living standards, destruction of life-support systems, destruction of cities and countries and peoples and spirit. The more it destroys, the wealthier the class of billionaires at the top becomes. The arms dealers, the fossil fuel barons, the tech oligarchs, the financiers—all of them profiting, and profiting all the more, as the destitution and destruction increase.
This is capitalism’s logic: unchecked, unending rapaciousness.
Last century, at least 180 million people were killed because of war; not a single year passed without cannons being fired or bombs being dropped. But every part of the world is now linked to the rest by some means. As long as this system grinds on, there will be no respite, let alone a reckoning, and no escaping the calamities resulting from so many natural resources and so much human energy being devoted to the military-industrial complex.
With the world entering a potentially even more destructive phase, there is an urgent need to tear down the existing imperialist order and replace it with a socialist order: a society run according to the maxim “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”, and in which cooperation, rather than competition, is the guiding principle.

Editors

Capitalism’s ruthless new order

The Trump administration’s decision to hold a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal has sparked concern across the Australian political and military establishment. Many are worried Australia will never get the submarines. Far from lamenting this possibility, we should welcome it. The nuclear submarines have one purpose only—to make war in the Asia-Pacific region more likely and more catastrophic.
The Pentagon review is the result of growing worry in the US defence establishment that its shipyards are way behind schedule and incapable of delivering sufficient submarines to equip both the US navy and Australia’s on the timetable set out in the 2021 AUKUS pact. There is a push on now, cloaked in Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, for the US to keep every submarine for itself and talk of a “Plan B”, in which Australia would provide bases for US submarines but not have any of its own. This is what is causing the most apprehension in Canberra.
The first thing to say about this is that the submarines have nothing to do with self-defence, of either the US or Australia. The media and politicians want us to think that China’s increasingly frequent navy and air force exercises indicate that an attack on Australia is a possibility in the not-too-distant future, and that submarines provide an effective deterrent against such an attack. But hard-headed military analysts have consistently dismissed the notion that an attack on Australia is imminent, and a series of defence white papers have all concluded that the likelihood of any nation invading Australia is extremely low. The only nation that has the capacity to do so is, ironically, the United States.
Insofar as China does pose a threat, it is not primarily to civilian lives but to the interests of Australian big business. For decades, the US has dominated the naval approaches to Australia through which pass hundreds of billions of dollars of cargo every year, including weapons from the US, oil from the Middle East and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia, along with Australian mineral exports to Asia. US dominance protects Australian trade, and by extension Australian capitalism, since building a navy big enough to patrol the extensive region from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific is far beyond Australia’s capability. Australia’s alliance with the US enables Australian capitalism to benefit from US power, and saves it having to foot the bill for its own naval force. 
In return for US military protection in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have provided the US with a safe base from which to operate intelligence gathering in Pine Gap in central Australia and a submarine listening station at Exmouth, along with friendly ports for the US navy. When the US goes to war, usually far from Australian shores, Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, send troops, aircraft and ships to back it up—Australia has supported the US in every one of its wars since 1945. Often these are only token deployments, but they are politically advantageous for the US in its efforts to rally military backing from other powers.
The US alliance—the imperialist pact that enjoys unwavering bipartisan support despite contributing to millions of deaths in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific since World War II—is therefore mutually beneficial. Australian governments do not support the US because they are weak or lapdogs, but because they understand that having the backing of a superpower allows Australia to punch above its weight in its region. When Australia intervenes in Asia, foreign leaders know it speaks as the US’s deputy sheriff, as former leader John Howard once described Australia’s role.
With the US protecting the broader region in the interests of the US-led imperialist bloc, Australia can get on and use its military—the most powerful in South-East Asia and the South Pacific—to dominate its immediate region, in particular what politicians and diplomats often refer to disparagingly as “our backyard”. That means treating Papua New Guinea and smaller island nations like colonies, extracting minerals, capturing markets and taking over their security forces for the benefit of Australian capitalism.
The “threat from China”, which we hear so much about from politicians and the media, is really about the threat it poses to US and Australian capitalism. They are worried that China’s increasingly powerful armed forces may at some stage be capable of pushing the US navy out of its traditional hunting grounds, overturning more than a century of Western domination in the Asia-Pacific. 
This explains the rapid expansion of US military forces and those of its allies in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The nuclear submarines are therefore not so much about preventing China from invading Sydney, but about equipping Australia with the capacity to carry out long-range missions to attack Chinese ships and Chinese bases close to China’s shores. They are designed to work alongside the growing US presence in northern Australia, ranging from port visits in Perth to air force and marine bases and fuel depots in and near Darwin, to increasingly ambitious military exercises and a troop presence in Queensland. 
The current mad dash for rearmament comes at a tremendous cost. In 2022, the Albanese government estimated the submarines on their own will cost $368 billion over 30 years. The final figure will be far higher. Military spending is projected in this year’s budget to rise from $63 billion to $100 billion by 2034, a rise from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent of GDP. With the Trump administration demanding that US allies boost military spending to 3.5 percent, the bill will only keep climbing. 
Money spent on the military is money taken from public housing and health care, education and social assistance. Instead of these important social services, we are getting a military juggernaut, the only purpose of which is death and destruction. In the event of war breaking out between China and the US, with Australia riding shotgun, the consequences will be catastrophic. This insanity must be stopped.

Tom Bramble

AUKUS deal should be scrapped

“I saw it with my own eyes. My father was blasted out of the house. His face was burned, and his ears were torn off.” Amin Ahmad, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/16/athlete-pilates-instructor-teacher-human-toll-of-israels-attack-on-iran">speaking to Al Jazeera’s Saeedeh Fathi</a>, recounted his father’s death in eastern Tehran, Iran’s capital, on Sunday afternoon. An Israeli airstrike on the family home left him and his mother trapped inside. 
“I had to force the window bars open and call out for help. Someone brought a ladder, and my mother and I escaped”, he said. Amin’s father was a teacher. He worked all his life with the hope that he would one day retire in peace. “Now he’s dead, and the house is destroyed.” 
Amin’s story is one of hundreds. Israel has so far <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-conflict-news/card/iran-s-death-toll-surpasses-450-rights-group-says-Y8tyR2w2VwItM2BII2Ae">killed more than 450 people</a>, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a nongovernmental organisation that monitors the country. The Western political establishment calls this Israel’s right to self-defence. But like in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Israel’s war on Iran is an act of naked aggression. 
The wounded come in waves to Tehran’s major hospitals. One doctor described it as a bloodbath. He told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">the Guardian</a>, “We were overwhelmed by chaos and the screams of grieving family members”. Many of the wounded had been struck by deadly shrapnel from Israeli airstrikes. Patients were found with metal lodged in femur bones and the soft tissues of the hip joints. 
Iranian petrochemical workers on Karkov Island, their workplace having been deemed a high-risk target, were left by their bosses to fend for themselves. In a statement on their Telegram channel, they said: “[The managers] have not even put a plan in place for the possibility of an attack. There is no shelter or equipment. There is no catalog [sic] of instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, where to go, or how to protect our lives”. 
It’s impossible to know the real toll of Israel’s air war. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/16/doctors-describe-carnage-iran-hospitals-israel-strikes">Hospital staff have reported</a> being told not to post online about the number of wounded or dead. But we do know that Israel’s attacks are widespread. 
A Children’s Hospital in southern Tehran. An assistant professor of neonatal medicine and her three-year-old child. A student sitting in her home with her family. They were destroyed in a flash of fire as bombs rained down. Israel says that they’re all “legitimate targets”—just like the hospitals in Gaza; just like the residential buildings in Lebanon. 
“[They have] directly targeted the country’s infrastructure, such as oil and gas resources, automotive industries, water, airports, the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation and even Farabi Hospital in Kermanshah”, a student in central Iran told Red Flag via Telegram. “Israel keeps saying that it’s only targeting military sites, which is not true at all.” 
The Middle East Monitor <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250616-report-israel-threatens-dahiya-style-assault-on-tehran-in-bid-to-destabilise-iran/">reported two days ago</a> that Israel is preparing for a massive, “Dahiya-style” attack on the capital:
“The plan, disclosed by Israeli broadcaster Channel 14, reportedly seeks to destabilise Iran’s government through systematic bombing of strategic sites while coercing mass evacuation from densely populated areas.
“The operation, said to have been greenlit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz, draws directly from Israel’s controversial military doctrine first employed during its 2006 war on Lebanon.
“That assault saw the wholesale destruction of the Dahiya district in southern Beirut—a stronghold of Hezbollah—marking the beginning of what military officials would later describe as a deliberate strategy of ‘disproportionate force’ and the targeting of civilian infrastructure to achieve political objectives.”
Indeed, Defence Minister Israel Katz warned: “Tehran will be treated like Beirut”. 
The Israelis are trying to exploit the deep unpopularity of the Iranian regime to gain support for their war. In a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO8WlACdCB8">
televised address</a> to the Iranian public, Netanyahu smugly asserted: “We are clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, which is freedom”.
This narrative—that bombing people while they sleep will facilitate their freedom from the forces of political oppression—has been repeated time and again over the last twenty months of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. 
And it continues. Western media outlets <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLqP7SAlrYg">such as the British Broadcasting Corporation</a> have given a platform to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the disgraced former dictator of Iran, who says that Israeli strikes will help “liberate” the country. As if 90 million Iranians are hoping for the return of a US-backed monarchy. As if freedom rises out of the rubble of an Israeli bomb. 
“Most people still oppose the government”, the student in central Iran said. “The rulers of Iran, like many other countries, are dictators ... but they believe the invasion [by Israel] is wrong.” 
World leaders speak of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while arming Israel with advanced heavy weaponry. Netanyahu’s war on Iran is made in America, where the Congress approves billions for “bunker-busting” bombs, where politicians and the media manufacture consent for war crimes. 
President Trump is now <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/17/world/israel-iran-trump#trump-iran">calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender”</a>, declaring: “We [Israel and the US] now have complete control of the skies over Iran”. 
Israel is unleashing hell across the Middle East with the backing of the world’s most powerful state and with the support of most of the “civilised” world. They speak of the “Iran-Israel conflict” when it’s an invasion. The Western media and politicians have tried to desensitise the world to such horror over the past twenty months of genocide in Gaza. 
Tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of Lebanese have been slaughtered with impunity. The calculation now is that hundreds or thousands of Iranians added to the toll will not be of any international consequence. But each death is more than a number. It’s a child who will never become an adult; it’s a family torn apart forever. 
Parnia Abassi was one of these lives: a student killed, along with three of her family members, as they slept in their home in Sattarkhan, Tehran. Parnia’s friends described her as funny and full of life. In interviews and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://hammihanonline.ir/%25D8%25A8%25D8%25AE%25D8%25B4-%25D8%25AC%25D8%25A7%25D9%2585%25D8%25B9%25D9%2587-23/40566-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25DB%258C%25D8%25B1-%25D9%2585%25D9%2588%25D9%2587%25D8%25A7%25DB%258C-%25D8%25B1%25D9%2588%25DB%258C-%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B4%25DA%25A9-%25D8%25B5%25D9%2588%25D8%25B1%25D8%25AA%25DB%258C-%25D9%2585%25D8%25AA%25D8%25B9%25D9%2584%25D9%2582-%25D8%25A8%25D9%2587-%25D9%25BE%25D8%25B1%25D9%2586%25DB%258C%25D8%25A7-%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B3%25D8%25AA&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1750205171857941&amp;usg=AOvVaw2c8RZUFj86VcTYEMPKZiN3">online</a>, they recounted their favourite memories. How she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she gave them gifts, how her sense of humour often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. 
All of that, gone, in a second. Parnia was an aspiring poet. One of her last compositions reads: 
I burn
I fade,
I become a silent star,
That turns into smoke
In your sky

Bella Beiraghi

The human cost of Israel’s war on Iran

Israel’s military strikes against Iran are the latest evidence, if any more were needed, that the US and its proxies are rogue states.
Despite the US government’s earlier attempts to distance itself from Israel’s aggression, it is clear that Washington was in on it from the start. President Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Friday, US time, that he had spoken to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and knew “what’s going on”. The Financial Times on Saturday quoted “a person familiar with the situation” who indicated that the US had been informed of Israeli plans as early as Monday, “was in the know all along” and “raised no objection”. 
And so came another attack on another country and another people. Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. The Zionist state is off the leash, again, promising to continue indefinitely its assault, all the while stocked with weapons and backed by a US carrier group in the Mediterranean and B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. 
Netanyahu insists that Israel faces an existential threat from Tehran’s nuclear program. This flimsy pretext of “existential threats” has been trotted out again and again over the last twenty months to justify everything from the starvation of Gazan children to the flattening of hospitals and schools to terrorist attacks on Hezbollah members to the bombings of Lebanon and Syria to the ever-greater annexation of West Bank territory.
Like its cousin charge of “antisemitism”, which is casually levelled against even the mildest critics of apartheid, anything in the Middle East capable of sneezing in the direction of Tel Aviv is labelled an “existential threat” to the nuclear-armed, US-backed Israeli state. 
Whatever Netanyahu might claim, Tehran is considered enemy number one not because of its military capacities, but because of its recalcitrance. Iran is perpetually in the crosshairs of the US and Israel because no other country in the Middle East bends less to Washington’s will. 
Iran has been demonised, harassed and sanctioned ever since the Western-backed torture state of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979. Washington and London more than tolerated the horrors of Pahlavi’s regime. The two Western governments had conspired, in 1953’s “Operation Ajax”, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, which had nationalised the oil industry two years earlier.
“Since Venezuela and the Middle East are the only sources from which the free world’s import requirements for petroleum can be supplied, these sources are necessary to continue the present economic and military efforts of the free world”, noted <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v01p2/d159">a joint departmental report</a> to the US National Security Council eight months before the coup. “It therefore follows that nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world.”
Torture states are acceptable if they serve Western interests. So Pahlavi was installed to prevent popular aspirations from being realised and to ensure that Western companies could again exploit the country’s oil wealth. That is, he was brought in to rule with an iron fist. It went swimmingly for the oil companies and for US Middle Eastern strategy until the Iranian population rose from the dungeons to reclaim their country.
But miraculously, after 1979, the West suddenly became deeply concerned about the human rights record of the Iranian government. Washington and Israel have repeatedly declared it a rogue state and a threat to peace ever since.
The US was so concerned with regional peace that it funded Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, supplying President Saddam Hussein’s regime with weapons and intelligence. Several hundred thousand Iranians were killed during the war. The US also helped the Iraqis launch chemical weapons attacks. 
“[S]enior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks [in 1988]”, Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid wrote in <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">an exclusive investigation</a> for Foreign Policy journal in 2013. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
Unlike Israel, Iraq was no solid ally of the US. After he had done the work against Iran, Hussein fell out of favour with Washington. The US invaded in the first Gulf War (1990-91) before imposing sanctions that were responsible for killing an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. Questioned about this horror in 1996, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1T5JRVR53Eo">US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded</a>: “We think the price is worth it”. 
Then the US invaded again in 2003 after lying about Hussein’s regime, which, the Americans said, possessed weapons of mass destruction, was sponsoring terrorism and was an imminent threat to regional and even world peace. To keep the peace, US destroyed the country, left <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html">hundreds of thousands dead</a> in the first few years of the occupation, and created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State.
This criminal history isn’t deemed relevant to contemporary reporting of Israel’s attack on Iran. It’s scandalous, but of little surprise, that the media today is parroting the US and Israeli line when both countries have, in recent history, persistently lied, persistently invaded other countries, persistently supported dictatorial regimes, and persistently killed masses of people throughout the region. 
No doubt, the Iranian regime is despotic. It will be a welcome day when Iranian workers overthrow it. But any honest accounting of the last several decades in the Middle East shows the US and Israel to be partners in a criminality that throws shade on Tehran’s record.
It should go without saying that Israel’s aggression, backed again by the US, should be opposed. With its Gaza genocide, assaults in the West Bank, occupation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the latest attack on Iran, the Zionist state is attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East—a redrawing most favourable to fascists and dictators aligned with one of the greatest purveyors of violence in history.

Rogue empire

Starving Palestinians forced to walk kilometres under scorching heat in a desperate search for food are crowded into metal cages. Drone broadcasts direct civilians to aid distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire on them. The situation is so desperate that many decide to brave the gunfire and attempt to gather food for their families.
“People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food—then they fired from every direction”, Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, <a href="https://msf.org.au/article/project-news/gaza-dozens-massacred-us-israel-backed-food-distribution-sites">told Doctors without Borders</a>, a humanitarian organisation, earlier this week. “I ran 200 metres before realising I’d been shot. This isn’t aid, it’s a lie.”
Massacres occur almost daily. On 1 June, at least 30 Palestinians were murdered like this. On 3 June, there were another 27. Who can now deny that Israel is waging a war of extermination? As the horrific results of the Zionist state’s project are laid bare, the collaborators—politicians, media organisations and “respectable” capitalist institutions—are searching for alibis. 
Last month, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada for the first time <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/joint-statement-from-the-leaders-of-the-united-kingdom-france-and-canada-on-the-situation-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank">issued a joint statement</a> criticising Israel’s “disproportionate” escalation in Gaza. The asymmetry has been discovered just 600 days into a “war” between one of the world’s best-equipped militaries and a starved civilian population. They should not be allowed to feign ignorance. The architects of these crimes could hardly have been clearer in their intentions. 
At the invasion’s outset, Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze5w2wd4x0o">wrote on X</a>: “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. Two days after 7 October, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was “<a href="https://www.palestinechronicle.com/we-are-fighting-human-animals-dehumanization-of-palestinians/">fighting human animals</a>” as he announced a complete siege of the territory.
“It’s time to kiss doomsday”, Israeli MP Revital Gotliv wrote, also on X. “Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza ... with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!” 
Ariel Kallner, another member of parliament, wrote: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suddenly finds distasteful the use of starvation as a weapon of war. On 26 May, he told a press conference: “It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need”. But UNICEF began warning that all children under five were at risk of death from starvation in December 2023. And Israel has blockaded Gaza for almost twenty months. 
Albanese knew exactly what Israel’s endgame was when he refused to criticise US President Donald Trump’s plan for forced relocation back in February. “I’m not going to have a running commentary on statements by the president of the United States”, is all he had to say. Foreign Minister Penny Wong knew that access to food and water in Gaza had been cut off when she said on 10 October 2023: “I think it’s always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take”. 
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent statement that he “no longer understands” what Israel is doing has been <a href="https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/27/no-longer-comprehensible-german-chancellor-slams-israels-gaza-strikes/">hyped in some quarters</a> as an “unprecedented criticism of Israel’s Gaza operations”. But, like the rest of the world, Merz does understand. He understood it in February when he invited Netanyahu to Berlin, promising to find a way around the prime minister’s <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">International Criminal Court arrest warrant</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He understood it last year, when his party approved €161 million (A$284 million) of arms shipments to Israel. The entire German establishment understood it as they closed ranks to have opponents of the genocide <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250304-german-ministry-dismisses-lawyer-for-supporting-gaza-rejecting-genocide/">fired</a>, <a href="https://hyphenonline.com/2024/10/04/ava-moayeri-germany-pro-palestine-protest-free-speech-police-arrest-violence/">raided, arrested</a> and <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-palestine-activists-deportation-state-repression">deported</a>. 
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy recently labelled Israel’s actions “abominable”. But he’s comfortable with UK-manufactured drones being used by the Israeli army. According to testimony from a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7893vpy2gqo">retired British surgeon</a>, those drones target and shoot children who survive air strikes. Palestine solidarity activists who attempted to disrupt drone production have been <a href="https://thebristolcable.org/2025/02/filton-18-palestine-action-activists-treated-like-terrorists-elbit-israeli-arms-factory-action/">arrested</a> by “counter-terrorism” police and are imprisoned awaiting prosecution by Lammy’s government. 
Politicians in the West have united to defend their states’ economic and political relationships with Israel, a vital ally for projecting their power and influence in the Middle East. This has been more important to them than the 2 million people whose lives have been devastated in the Gaza Strip. Now that they have proven their loyalty, now that the job is nearly done, now that nobody is standing in Israel’s way, these politicians want to wash their hands of the inevitable results. 
For the same reason, a slight shift is occurring in media coverage. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post publishes <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/22/israel-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-genocide-2/">opinion pieces</a> decrying genocide. The BBC runs humanising stories on families decimated by Israeli airstrikes. Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the memo that a bit of equivocation and “balance” might be in order, if for no other reason than to begin scrubbing the stains from their reputations. 
But it doesn’t change the fact that corporate and state media outlets have spent 600 days acting as loyal agents for the Israeli military. They’ve treated Israeli accounts of events as facts, silenced dissenting voices and embedded their journalists with Israeli units to be taken on North Korea-style propaganda tours.
One of the most notorious examples occurred at the beginning of the war, when CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson accompanied the Israeli army to Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The network broadcast “evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives. Military spokesperson Daniel Hagari showed CNN a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas guards. “Every terrorist has his own shift”, Hagari told Robertson. 
The problem was that it wasn’t a Hamas roster—it was just an Arabic calendar. Despite the footage already being debunked by Arabic speakers and a protest being lodged by a Palestinian producer at the network, the lie was broadcast, giving the Israeli state cover for war crimes it may have committed at the hospital. 
The systematic bias against Palestinians and their supporters has been so overwhelming that many normally apolitical journalists at major news outlets—from American CNN to the BBC in Britain—have felt compelled to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/5/failing-gaza-pro-israel-bias-uncovered-behind-the-lens-of-western-media">blow the whistle</a>. In Australia, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staffs-concerns-over-gaza-bias-revealed">journalists have complained</a> that editors have effectively banned the use of the word “Palestine” in reports.
It’s not until the damage is done that the rewriting of history begins. Wars that can no longer be defended are re-framed by their perpetrators as unforeseeable and unfortunate mishaps. 
During the US invasion of Vietnam, opponents of the war faced a solid wall of capitalist institutions committed to its prosecution. Intellectuals overwhelmingly supported the war as a defence of freedom against communist tyranny. University heads called the police on protesters targeting their defence ties. American journalists identified with the objectives of “their side”, repeated government justifications for war crimes and assisted in their cover-up. Anybody who stood against this consensus was slandered as a “communist sympathiser”.
When as many as 3 million Vietnamese were dead, the occupation collapsed and opponents of the war were proved right. Then the war was rewritten self-servingly as a “tragedy of good intentions”, a noble mission gone awry. 
It was similar with Iraq. Sponsors of the war falsified evidence to justify the invasion, and suppressed, monitored and smeared opponents. Then, when it all fell apart, they shrugged it off as an intelligence failure. Hillary Clinton brushed aside her support for the war during her first presidential bid, saying: “If I knew then what I know now, I would not have voted that way”.
As in Vietnam and Iraq, so now in Gaza. From the beginning, the left and the Palestine solidarity movement have argued that Israel’s aims are clear: an extension of their decades-long project of ethnic cleansing and expansion. From the beginning, we argued that if Israel wasn’t forced to stop, the war would end with the brutal forced depopulation of Gaza. For telling the truth, we were sacked, suspended, slandered and put on trial. 
Israel’s backers now admit the reality of this war, yet they continue to persecute those who oppose it. Now that our leaders mouth rhetorical criticisms, we should demand real action. 
All political prisoners who have been demonised as “terrorist sympathisers” and threats to “social cohesion” should be released. All bogus charges of antisemitism against anti-war and anti-racist activists should be withdrawn. 
States should impose real sanctions on Israel. The “sanctions” announced by the UK government are nothing of the sort, consisting of the pausing of free trade talks and travel bans on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/violent-israeli-settlers-under-uk-sanctions-join-west-bank-outpost">a handful of West Bank “settlers”</a>. The government will continue to send weapons and share intelligence from surveillance flights over Gaza, assisting Israel in its targeting of civilians. 
As world leaders try to distance themselves from Israel’s crimes, we must continue to hold them accountable. They’ve been accomplices in this atrocity and implacable enemies of those who have tried to stop it. They must never be forgiven.

Luca Tavan

Western collaborators in genocide now scramble for alibis

For the second time, in spite of notoriously censorious defamation laws, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been confirmed to be a war criminal. After spectacularly losing a defamation case against Fairfax Media’s Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe in 2023, Roberts-Smith’s appeal, heard by a full bench of the Federal Court, went down in flames on 19 May. 
Central to the case was claims, now upheld twice to be substantially true, that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes during Australia’s occupation of Afghanistan. These crimes included kicking a man off a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot him; murdering another man and encouraging other soldiers to drink alcohol from his prosthetic leg; and multiple instances of directing other soldiers to kill unarmed people.
In his repeated attempts to clear his name and punish his accusers for telling the truth, Roberts-Smith has succeeded only in proving more convincingly that he is, indeed, a war criminal. His arrogance is almost comical. He presents as a man who believes that he is untouchable. 
In 2021, Roberts-Smith fronted a court to explain why he had petrol-bombed hard drives in his backyard in 2018. This was after McKenzie broke the story that he was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for war crimes. Roberts-Smith explained: “If you don’t get rid of a hard drive, all of the data on the hard drive ... can typically be pulled off it”. Indeed. These were the actions he was trying to paint as those of an innocent man.
At the time of the original defamation case, barrister Bruce McClintock deployed a foolproof defence in the mould of another war criminal, Bill Clinton: “My client did not drink from the leg”. Unfortunately for Ben Roberts-Smith, video footage has recently emerged which shows that he did, in fact, drink from the leg.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging to work out where Roberts-Smith’s self-righteous arrogance comes from. He likely believed he could get out of trouble, like so many private school boys before him, simply by asking the question “Do you know who my father is!?” His own dear papa being, of course, a former Supreme Court justice in Western Australia. 
He is also backed by a who’s who of Australia’s rich scumbags, from Seven Media’s Kerry Stokes—who funded Roberts-Smith’s original defamation case to the tune of $30 million and gave him an upper management job—through to MAGA mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who has sprung to his defence in recent weeks.
He expected the establishment to defend him. He assumed, not without reason, that anything goes in the pursuit of Western interests in the Middle East—that a culture of impunity is an important part of hyping up soldiers to commit the sort of atrocities that are part and parcel of carrying out military campaigns. Australia’s most decorated soldier has become a symbol of the hubris of an empire which gave itself the right to kill not just four innocent Afghans, but thousands upon thousands in the course of a nihilistic 20-year slaughter and occupation. 
If that wasn’t enough, Roberts-Smith is ostentatiously remorseless. In 2023, he posed for a photo at a beach club in Bali alongside Zachary Rolfe, the still-serving Queensland police officer who shot dead Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu in 2019. In the comments, Rolfe mockingly wrote “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
Satisfying as it is to see Roberts-Smith lose again, the reality is that he is walking away with a slap on the wrist. Despite twice being found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes, he is not rotting in a cell, nor lying dead at the bottom of a cliff like one of his victims. Instead, he continues to wear his Victoria Cross—Australia’s highest military decoration—proudly on his chest. He was spotted doing so only a month ago, at Perth’s ANZAC Day dawn service. 
His uniform continues to be displayed in Canberra’s War Memorial, alongside a story of his award-winning “gallantry” in Afghanistan. Only now, it has a mealy-mouthed disclaimer: “In June 2023 a Federal Court judge determined that there was ‘substantial truth’ to the allegations that Roberts-Smith had been involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan”. It goes on to remind us, “Roberts-Smith has appealed this decision. Roberts-Smith has not been charged with any offence under criminal law”. 
The Brereton report, which was commissioned in response to news of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan surfacing, has been similarly toothless. Despite finding evidence of 39 “unlawful killings” perpetrated or participated in by 25 special forces soldiers, not one has been convicted of a crime. Only one, former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, has faced charges. Naturally, the report stopped short entirely of laying any blame at the feet of the generals and ministers who were ultimately responsible for the war. 
By contrast, former army lawyer David McBride, who leaked documents about the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan to the ABC in 2016, languishes in prison, serving a five-year sentence. Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, for the simple crime of telling the truth, McBride has faced far harsher consequences than any of the murderers in the ranks of the Australian army. 
Astoundingly, Roberts-Smith has indicated he will be launching a second appeal, this time to the High Court, presumably bankrolled by Gina Rinehart. Despite all the legal professionals who have so far deemed him a war criminal, he obviously thinks there is a chance of winning and getting revenge on those who dared bring his crimes to light. 
Real justice won’t be served until Roberts-Smith, and every murderous general, politician and media baron who enabled and decorated him, is locked up.

Jack Mansell

Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal

Global military spending is skyrocketing. The total spent on waging or preparing for war in 2024 was about US$2.7 trillion, 9.4 percent more in real terms than in 2023, according to <a href="https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024">the latest Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates</a>. This is the biggest year-on-year increase since the institute began tracking world military expenditure in 1988.
The United States remains the world’s biggest spender, outlaying US$997 billion and accounting for 37 percent of the global total. China was a distant second, spending an estimated US$314 billion. The top five spenders (including Russia, Germany and India) account for 60 percent of the global total. The top fifteen countries, Australia included, all increased military spending and made up four-fifths of the global total, spending a combined US$2.1 trillion in 2024.
The spending growth is part of a longer-term trend. Last year was the tenth consecutive year of increases in global military expenditures, the total being 37 percent higher in real terms than in 2015.

<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/military-spending-soars-to-2-7-trillion.png" alt="" /></figure>
While US military spending is more than triple that of China, Beijing’s ten-year real increase is nearly 60 percent, about triple America’s 19 percent. As tensions increase between the two biggest powers, other countries are marching in lockstep to hold their ground.
This includes Australia, where uncompromising allegiance to the US has been central policy for Labor and Liberal governments for decades. Australian military spending in 2024 was 25 percent higher than in 2015. However, the big increases associated with obtaining nuclear-powered submarines have yet to be felt. The government is set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on public housing, welfare and healthcare.
Europe’s trajectory is more dramatic. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more than doubled their annual military expenditure in the last decade. Among them is Germany, which in one year has increased its military spending by 28 percent to US$88.5 billion, making it the biggest spender in Western Europe.
These trends will only continue. And it won’t be the wealthy footing the bill—it’ll come at the expense of social services and working-class living standards.
Only a fraction of the money being spent on weaponry would be needed to end world hunger (US$48 billion a year, according to the World Food Program) and provide universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation to 140 low- and middle-income countries (US$138 billion a year, according to the United Nations).
But capitalism’s priorities are elsewhere. British conservative columnist Janan Ganesh, in a March Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989">opinion piece</a> titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”, put it plainly: “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal”.
Every dollar added to the world’s military budgets takes us closer to a potentially apocalyptic scenario of world war. The working classes of all countries have nothing to gain from this. The war drive must be resisted.

Danica Rachel

World military spending explodes

It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history as troops of the North Vietnamese Army and South Vietnam National Liberation Front took complete control of Ho Chi Minh City (then called Saigon) and the few scattered areas of the south that had not yet been liberated.
The Vietnamese victory was the culmination of more than three decades of struggle against Japanese, British, French and American imperialism. At the time, the United States was, as it still is today, the world’s leading military power. And yet that incredible power was defeated by a small, underdeveloped, mostly rural society.
The US war against Vietnam at some stages involved well over half a million regular US troops. During the war, the US unleashed previously unimaginable firepower against the Vietnamese forces and the population in general. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam was approximately three times the total for all theatres in all of World War Two. The US also employed chemical warfare, such as defoliants containing dioxin, which are still today causing deaths and genetic damage. 
Vietnam received limited military supplies from China and the Soviet Union, but they were never enough to be decisive. Surface-to-air rockets, for example, increased the US Air Force’s military losses but never came close to stopping the US air war.
And yet all this firepower was unable to prevent Vietnamese victory. Something proved more powerful than massive weaponry. That reality is the lesson that the imperialists want us to forget.
The liberation of Ho Chi Minh City provided a striking emblem of the limitations of technological military power. As helicopters flew the remaining Americans and some of their Vietnamese agents to warships waiting offshore, the US Navy pushed each emptied helicopter overboard into the sea to make room for those still in the air.
What eventually defeated US military power? First and foremost was the heroism and endurance of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese resistance gradually widened doubts and divisions in US society, opening time and pathways for opposition to the imperialist war within the US and eventually on a massive scale worldwide. 
Combined with the US’s inability to inflict a decisive military defeat, this continually growing political opposition contributed substantially to the US rulers’ calculation that continuing the war could cost them more than they were likely to gain. They could see that, around the world, oppressed and exploited peoples were concluding that the US was not invincible and that it could be successfully resisted.
Earlier struggles similarly influenced the antiwar movement. After the 1940s and ’50s era of McCarthyism and “red scare” reaction and house-breaking of most labour unions, things began to shift with the rise of the Black civil rights movement and the ’60s cultural and political radicalisation. The opponents of the Vietnam War who organised the early teach-ins at universities were, in part, following the example of the combination of propaganda and action of early fighters for Black rights, particularly in the US South.
The influence went in both directions. In April 1967, I was conscripted (“drafted”) into the US Army in Chicago. By chance, this occurred on the same day that boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been ordered to report for induction—which he had publicly announced he would refuse because of his religion as a member of the Nation of Islam and his ethical objections to the war. 
Ali, who had a talent for concise and colourful explanations, said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”. (“Viet Cong” was the name the US military and media gave to the National Liberation Front.) A week before his scheduled conscription, Ali added:
“I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people, they wouldn’t have to draft me; I’d join tomorrow.”
There was considerable public interest in what Ali would do, and one of the soldiers staffing the Chicago induction centre had turned on a radio tuned to a news broadcast. With the report that Ali had refused to be conscripted, I heard one of the Black soldiers mutter, barely audibly, “Damn, wish I had done that”.
As Vietnamese resistance forced the US to increase its troop numbers in the country, conscription also necessarily increased, including of inductees who were either opposed to the war or at least suspicious of it. For thousands of young Americans and their friends, relatives and partners, the war stopped being a strange conflict in a distant country and became an immediate threat to their wellbeing. The impact was all the stronger for their ability to view scenes of the war on nightly TV news.
The US ruling class was beginning to learn something that had only begun to be evident during the 1950-53 Korean War: there is a significant difference between a “citizen army” in which the citizenry feels its interests are seriously threatened by a menace such as fascism, and one facing an abstract enemy such as “communism” that poses no immediate threat—or an oppressed people fighting for their liberation. People who had witnessed or participated in mass antiwar protests tended to have their opposition increased, not weakened, by induction into the military.
During my two years in the army, 1967-69, all within the United States, the challenge was not to convince fellow soldiers that the war was wrong. We had to persuade other soldiers that they could do something about it. This was the period during which the publication of rank-and-file antiwar “newspapers” (really newsletters) proliferated at military bases in the US and overseas. 
At Fort Dix in New Jersey, we called ours the Ultimate Weapon, because the base’s main function was infantry training, and the Army liked to call its infantry “the ultimate weapon”. In the early ’70s, the Student Mobilization Committee, the most radical of the antiwar coalitions, launched a GI Press Service, which sought to provide information, exchange and cooperation among the varied military antiwar publications. We eventually knew of more than a hundred of them.
The spread of antiwar activity in the US military was aided by higher-ups’ bureaucratic efforts to suppress it. A battalion commander who learned of “subversive” activity within his domain, fearing that it would hamper his chances for promotion, would arrange for one or several suspected “ringleaders” to be transferred to a different base, hopefully distant. It could not have been better designed if the object had been to encourage the spread of antiwar activity. The eventual situation was described by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971: 
“The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not nearly mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.”
In short, the US rulers were worried about the effect of the war, not only on their troops in Vietnam, but on their armed forces more generally. President Nixon tried to ameliorate this situation through his program of “Vietnamization” of the war, which essentially meant withdrawing US troops from Vietnam and supplying the puppet “Republic of Vietnam” with sufficient weapons and financing to fight on for US interests. 
From the US standpoint, this was always a forlorn hope, which became increasingly evident after the departure of US ground troops in 1973. When the liberation forces launched their final offensive in early 1975, the “RVN” forces largely melted away or collapsed.
The impact of the Vietnamese victory is still with us, something that capitalist rulers are still trying to overcome. In the US, that impact was often called the “Vietnam syndrome”, as though it described some sort of unfortunate disease. In fact, it referred to the reality that large sections of the US public had seen that their rulers lied shamelessly about a major military conflict. Consequently, they tended to look sceptically at further military operations. 
It has since become standard US political doctrine that any new military adventure needs to be carried out quickly so that there is no time for large parts of the public to become really aware of it. To restore their ability to intervene militarily around the world, the US rulers found it necessary to abolish conscription and to rebuild their army as “voluntary”—meaning using social and economic coercion to enlist mainly the poor and oppressed racial minorities. 
The ending of conscription was a major setback for US imperialism, and its rulers are today, half a century later, wondering whether they can get away with reintroducing it.
You can see another lesson ruling classes have drawn from Vietnam in government responses to the widespread upsurge of solidarity with Palestinians against the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza and the West Bank. The speed and extremism of government reactions against the first university protest encampments showed their fears of protests growing and spreading as they did with Vietnam. It’s the reason for the attempts to suppress free speech and the almost hysterical attacks on protesters. And just as imperialist propagandists of the Vietnam War sought to discredit opposition as “communism”, today supporters of Zionist genocide try to label any opposition as “antisemitism”.
Our side has also drawn some lessons, which is a part of the reason the Palestinian protests have taken the form they have: both the initial encampments and reaching out to broader layers through large and vocal rallies and marches. Around the world, there are uncountable numbers of oppressed and exploited people who may know little or nothing of the Vietnam War but who have absorbed the understanding that imperialism is not invincible, that it can be defeated by determined struggle, and that “If you don’t fight, you lose”.

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