The March to War

As the government geared up for a military spending spree this June, retired generals took over the airwaves. ‘Things like welfare . . . are unimportant’, said the former Sea Lord Alan West, ‘when you lose a war and you have Russian Chechen stormtroopers coming down the street raping women and killing people.’ West was resolute: we must defund social programmes to expand the warfare state, so that our hungry children will at least be protected from roving hordes of Russians.

This is a doctrine that unites much of Labour, the Tories and Reform. The corridors of Westminster now hum with stock phrases like ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’ and ‘Hard power is the currency of the age’. In this collective fever-dream, Britain is a helpless island nation with barely a tank to its name, confronting an axis of adversaries who could invade at any minute. Its military has been ‘hollowed out’ and it is hurtling into an era in which support from Washington is no longer assured. An urgent course correction is needed to secure the realm. While this will initially come at considerable cost, we are told that it will soon be offset by surging economic growth, as military investment creates new jobs across the country.

Successive prime ministers have peddled this same narrative. Yet the facts tell a different story. Britain’s military budget is bigger in real terms than it was in 1980: the sixth largest in the world. Keir Starmer pledged to double it over the next decade by spending an extra £279 billion, and Burnham has vowed to follow through, giving the ex-defence secretary John Healey the keys to the Treasury. Britain is not a vulnerable, isolated state, but one of the most formidable military powers on earth, with bases from Belize to Borneo.

These bases are props in an American imperial project that seeks global primacy at any cost, and which, in the last three years alone, has left a trail of destruction that stretches from Gaza and Lebanon to Cuba and Venezuela.

The recent rise of the British war economy is the culmination of a wider effort to ensure that America’s allies can serve as heavily-armed subcontractors in the next phase of empire, as the hegemon tries to forcibly contain China and prevent other countries from entering its sphere of influence. Claims that the UK lacks the means for national defence are a cynical means to secure the growth of its military budget. And promises that this spending will lead to economic revival are belied by data — which shows, in no uncertain terms, that it will accelerate decline.

Target Practice

There is a long history of British war hysteria. Ever since WWII, Washington has tried to compel its European supplicants to spend more on their militaries. This not only provides an income stream for the US military-industrial complex and allows the Pentagon to pursue supremacy via its vassals; it also helps to enforce political discipline, encouraging states under the imperial umbrella to demonstrate loyalty by rewiring their economies around multidecade military programmes and industrial collaborations.

Time and again, America has invoked the threat of withdrawing military support for its transatlantic partners to force them into line. In 1953, four years after Nato was founded, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned of an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of American foreign policy unless West German rearmament was approved by fellow member states. A decade later, President Kennedy lambasted the Europeans for ‘living off the fat of the land’ and demanded they beef up their militaries. Washington has always wanted its allies to prove their subservience through military commitments — all the better if Lockheed Martin sees the benefits.

This loyalty, often euphemised as ‘burden sharing’, acquired a quantitative metric in the new century, when Nato members gathered at the Riga Summit and agreed to devote 2 percent of GDP to warfighting capacities. No military rationale was offered for this figure. Nor was it framed as defensive; on the contrary, the post-summit declaration stated that ‘contributing to peace and security in Afghanistan’ was the alliance’s main priority. Yet the target served a crucial political function in tying military spending to an arbitrary share of national income, which meant that it was duty-bound to increase. 

Last year, another number was plucked out of thin air with the Hague Summit Declaration, which mandated that Nato military budgets reach 3.5 percent of national income by 2035, with an additional 1.5 per cent to be spent on ‘national security’. Meeting this would imply a total increase of $2.7 trillion across the decade. Though the US and its allies already account for nearly four-fifths of the world’s military expenditure, Washington plans to pour hundreds of billions more into its war machine, and Europe has agreed to follow suit. 

Nato’s arbitrary target provides the drumbeat to Britain’s march to war. The Defence Investment Plan now being pursued by Burnham cuts departments across Whitehall to fund billions in extra military spending over the next four years. The stated aim is a warfare state with global reach, ensuring Britain’s continued engagement in West Asia, the Indo-Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caucasus.

Agent of Chaos

That Britain is a destabilising force across these regions could not be more apparent. Its military outposts in Cyprus have been used to supply weapons and intelligence to Israel throughout its genocide in Gaza, while joint US-UK attacks have killed scores of Yemeni civilians during the same period. London is a staunch ally of the Gulf dictatorships, supplying them with vital weapons and technologies as they repress domestic dissent, and backing them to the hilt in the ongoing conflict with Tehran.

Britain has also consistently inflamed Great Power rivalry. Last year it paraded an aircraft carrier through the South China Sea, and in recent months it has gambled on escalation against Russia, seizing oil tankers and supporting drone strikes on retail warehouses in the Moscow suburbs, rather than working towards a negotiated end to the Ukraine war (something that the majority of Ukrainians have supported for nearly two years).

Across Latin America, the British state has long bolstered US-led attempts to topple nonconforming leaders. Britain participated in Washington’s financial war on Venezuela, going so far as to set up a ‘Reconstruction Unit’ to prepare for regime change and embedding Royal Navy personnel in the US armada that surrounded the country in the runup to Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping.

The pattern is clear: Britain is a country that sows chaos, usually in support of American objectives. But the trick of the war lobby has always been to recast the aggressor as the victim. In the glory days of the British Empire, a so-called Committee for Imperial Defence, presented as essential for public safety, was tasked with maintaining British power overseas. Today the situation is no different. Support for the criminal war on Iran continues on the basis that RAF sites can only be used for ‘defensive strikes’, even as the White House boasts about laying waste to civilian infrastructure. Burnham invokes a ‘growing and evolving threat’ from hostile states while working to enhance Britain’s aggressive presence beyond its borders. Fear is the means, force projection is the goal. 

The effect on the domestic front? More and more public money is offshored to pay for American weapons. Nato boasts that European military spending sustains 195,000 jobs in the US, subsidising employment abroad at enormous cost at home. Britain’s path is one of fiscal self-destruction through political subjugation, pledging billions of pounds for F-35s to carry US-owned nuclear bombs. Both Starmer and Burnham have tried to claim that the warfare state will bring employment and growth — the much mythologised ‘defence dividend’ — but the truth is exactly the opposite. Forecasts show that the cuts used to fund the Defence Investment Plan will have devastating consequences. No government department will be spared: £600 million will be slashed from health and £300 million from education. The budgets for transport and net-zero will be hardest hit, losing a total of £3.5 billion despite the urgent need for climate investment. The result will be a loss of at least 10,000 jobs.

Healey, saying the quiet part out loud, avers that this investment is necessary to meet ‘commitments to international allies’. Not a matter of securing our safety, then, but of maintaining Europe’s iron-clad allegiance to the US. The government is reorganising British politics around a series of binary oppositions: the competing demands of welfare and warfare; the programmes that sustain life versus those that destroy it; the needs of the public against the priorities of Atlanticism. Only one side makes the world safer.