This June 2025 chronicle comes from the Marxist-inspired journal Recherches internationales. Click here to subscribe.
The European Commission, in a program titled ReArm Europe (renamed Readiness 2030), has decided to invest 800 billion euros in Europe's defence.Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen, formerly a proponent of strict adherence to the 3% deficit limit for state budgets, has decided to make an exception to budgetary rules to finance the defence effort to the tune of 650 billion, and to resort to debt for the remaining 150 billion. This comes in a context where some states are already heavily indebted and suffering from significant budget deficits.
Ce réarmement de l’Europe est présenté comme une mesure nécessaire face à ce que les médias et un très grand nombre de responsables politiques appellent « la menace russe ». Cette menace russe est cependant difficile à concilier avec les discours évoquant la défaite russe en Ukraine ou encore la lenteur des conquêtes territoriales de la Russie à l’Est et au Sud de l’Ukraine. La Russie est une dictature ou une démocrature mais menace-t-elle l’Europe ? Les pays de l’OTAN dépensent déjà beaucoup plus que la Russie pour la défense, les États-Unis à eux seuls dépensent environ 7 fois plus que la Russie et 3 fois plus que la Chine. Aux dépenses américaines il faut ajouter celles des pays européens qui à elles seules déjà dépassent celles de la Russie. Les pays européens viennent d’accepter de s’agenouiller devant le président américain et de porter leurs dépenses militaires à 5% de leur PIB, sauf l’Espagne qui a immédiatement été menacée de vengeance par le président Trump.
Countries that already spend significant sums on their defence are therefore agreeing to burden their budgets to face a threat that does not exist.This threat does not exist not because Russia is an exemplary or peaceful state, but because it neither can nor wants to attack countries that are part of NATO and have substantial defence capabilities, including nuclear weapons for some of them.
The very brutal and significant increase in military spending is obviously at the expense of social and environmental protection spending. Great Britain, led by a neoliberal Labour party, is cutting aid to the elderly but increasing its military spending; France is seeing its pension system crumble. Germany will increase its so-called defence spending to 153 billion euros in 2029. It is not certain that an overwhelmingly powerful Wehrmacht will reassure the neighbours of a country whose recent history is marked by aggressions.
What American President Eisenhower said in 1953 remains true today: "Every weapon that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in a final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Further on, he adds, "What we pay for a single destroyer represents housing that could have accommodated 8,000 people." Eisenhower was not a pacifist, but he knew the price of military spending. Today, Europe, which constantly claims it must become independent of the United States but blindly follows all the whims of the far-right American president, wants to join the militaristic drift of a country that sacrifices its infrastructure and social systems.The United States has no universal social insurance system but spends a trillion dollars on what is called its defence, but is mostly its military interventions worldwide to ensure its "full spectrum dominance."
The idea that military spending serves to boost the economy and thus refers to Keynes's ideas on deficit-driven recovery does not take into account the sector in which these expenditures occur.Building schools, hospitals, or funding researchers' salaries does not have the same social impact. The choice of increased military spending is a political choice whose primary effect will be to strengthen the European military-industrial complex, but above all, the American one. Orders are already flowing into the United States; Great Britain has just ordered 12 very expensive and fuel-guzzling F-35 aircraft. Each F-35 consumes more than 5,072 litres of fuel per flight hour, yet environmental parties, like the German Greens, support the EU's militaristic drift.
Austerity-driven Europe is abandoning its criteria to embark on rearmament, leading one to question the true reasons for this volte-face. It is not motivated by genuine fears of Russia and plays into Trump's hands, from whom it is officially necessary to protect itself. For Trump, an increase in European military spending to 5% of GDP represents a gigantic transfer of wealth from Europe to the United States. This transfer of wealth follows orders for American shale gas, 4 to 5 times more expensive than Russian gas.The destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, which investigative journalist Seymour Hersh attributes to the United States, had already proven to be a windfall for the United States, which is now preparing to benefit from a deluge of military orders that will also benefit the various European military-industrial complexes.
There is a line of continuity between the neoliberal austerity that has exploded inequalities and multiplied the number of both billionaires and poor people, and military spending, which will be accompanied by increased profits for some and a decline in living standards for the majority.The same decision-makers have moved from one discourse to another. The manufacturing of consent, a concept dear to Noam Chomsky, is in full swing: dominant media and leaders fuel fear of Russia to legitimise a transfer of wealth, not only from Europe to the United States, but also, and above all, from working-class and middle-class taxpayers to the profiteers of war or the fear of war.
The war in Ukraine is a complex phenomenon; it is illegal but also strongly provoked and fuelled by the West, which thwarted several negotiation attempts, notably in Istanbul in March-April 2022.The responsibilities for this war are not solely Russia's. The West clearly pushed for war, as indicated by a 2019 Rand Corporation study ( "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia" ), and then did everything to prevent diplomatic success. This does not exonerate Russia from its responsibilities but helps explain the current militaristic drift. The West—meaning in fact the United States, which has turned Europeans into vassals—wanted to use Ukraine in a proxy war to defeat Russia, even to dismantle it. This project is meeting great resistance on the ground, and the human cost, Ukrainian but also secondarily Russian, is very high.
The current militarisation is a continuation of the project and corresponds to a new Cold War in which the West opposes a Sino-Russian front and a large part of what is commonly called the Global South.The rearmament of Europe is much more an attempt to curb the relative decline of the US-led West than to face a totally imaginary threat of Russian invasion. War rhetoric has invaded the media space, as in historical periods preceding conflicts.
The wars supported by the West, including the Israeli massacres, which are not strictly speaking a war, are a human and ecological disaster.Weapons of war, especially aircraft, contribute to environmental degradation. A former French president once said, "Our house is burning and we look elsewhere" (Chirac in 2002 in Johannesburg). Today, we are actively participating in the burning of our planet in a suicidal attitude by refusing to address environmental problems and by choosing military spending. One can agree with Yanis Varoufakis, who, in a speech to the European Parliament on June 13, 2025, denounced the transformation of Europe into a war machine.
The same Europe that supports the genocide in Gaza and, through the voice of the German Chancellor, says that Israel "is doing the dirty work for us" in its war against Iran, chooses a path that is not one of peace and diplomacy.It endangers public services, social justice, and the necessary fight to protect the environment. It remains aligned with the United States despite the critical words of its clownish and far-right president. Speaking of Trump, the NATO Secretary General called him "daddy" —this assumed infantilism is a truthful statement about the dependence of childish vassals.
Pierre Guerlain, editor of this chronicle for Recherches internationales, is a professor of American civilisation at Université Paris Nanterre.
Illustration image: "Military Jets on the Runway", photograph uploaded on July 25th, 2016, by Pixabay (CC0 1.0)
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