Growing Militarisation of Imperialist Countries
Prabhat Patnaik
IN a declaration at the NATO summit held at the Hague in June this year, all NATO countries agreed to increase the share of military expenditure in their gross domestic product to 5 percent by 2035. The proportion in 2024 in the US was 3.5 per cent and in the European Union 1.9 per cent, which means a substantial step up, especially in the EU, in military expenditure. Likewise, Japan which had been committed to a pacifist policy after the war, and had capped its military spending at 1 percent of GDP, has been increasing this proportion over time: it spends 1.8 percent currently, but its new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has announced her intention, in the very first speech she made after assuming office, to raise this ratio to 2 per cent by the end of this fiscal year itself, that is, by March 2026. We thus have across all imperialist countries a substantial step up in the tempo of militarisation, which constitutes an altogether new development.
All sorts of threats are being invoked to justify this step up in militarisation, especially a Russian threat. The imperialist propaganda machine is active in projecting a spectre of Russian expansionism, of which the invasion of Ukraine is supposed to have been the first step. The fact that it is NATO that expanded its membership, in contravention of the assurance given by the Clinton administration to Mikhail Gorbachov, to include countries right up to the Russian border and hence to virtually encircle Russia; the fact that Russia remained resigned to this expansion and expressed its opposition only when NATO sought even to incorporate Ukraine; the fact that the Minsk agreement between Ukraine and Russia that would have prevented any military action by the latter was torpedoed by Western intervention, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flying across to Kiev to convince Ukraine to renege on it; all these facts demonstrate unambiguously the identity of the real expansionist entity. The Russian bogey is simply being used to justify a step-up in Western imperialist militarisation.
Such however is the intensity of propaganda in Europe that anyone pointing this out is dubbed a Russian agent, and an apologist for Putin: Sahra Wagenknecht, the German Left leader who broke away from Die Linke to form her own separate Party, has been attacked in the German media for pointing out the vacuity of the so-called Russian threat and arguing for cooperation with Russia as a means of ensuring European security.
In fact the European attitude to Russia appears quite intriguing. The unilateral sanctions imposed by the western powers on Russia have meant an enforced substitution of much more expensive American energy for Russian energy imports on which Europe had been relying earlier. This has led to a rise in cost of living in Germany and elsewhere, and hence greater hardships for the working class, and also to a rise in the cost of production that makes German goods uncompetitive, discourages investment in Germany, and causes a process of “deindustrialisation” there. There is of course American pressure on Europe aimed to secure a market for its own energy there, but Europe’s total capitulation before the U.S. in the matter of unilateral sanctions, even while sacrificing its own interests, appears quite baffling.
An obvious explanation for this phenomenon is the nature of European leadership at present. Much of this leadership has close ties to business, especially American business: the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for instance was the chairman of the supervisory board of the German subsidiary of BlackRock, the American multinational investment company. The current European leadership can scarcely be expected to champion any “European interests” in opposition to American interests, as the earlier European leadership consisting of the likes of Charles De Gaulle and Willy Brandt could.
This fact however, though not insignificant, is insufficient as an explanation for Europe’s apparent economic hara-kiri. Quite conceivably, the European leaders believe in, and plan for, a regime change in Russia if the war with Ukraine drags on, in which case Europe, together with the US, would have unrestrained access to the vast natural resources of Russia. Besides, Russia is now part of a group of countries, including China and Iran, that stand in opposition to western imperialism and have the potential to challenge its hegemony. A regime change in Russia will greatly dent this opposition.
Equally striking is Donald Trump’s attempt to effect a regime change in Venezuela through military intervention, for which the ground has been prepared by defaming its Left-wing President Nicolas Maduro, the successor of Hugo Chavez and legatee of the Bolivarian Revolution, as a “narco-terrorist” and the head of a drug cartel. Here again not only is Venezuela rich in natural resources, including rare earths, but is also part of an anti-imperialist grouping of countries that constitute a potential threat for imperialism; a regime change in Venezuela will thus be doubly beneficial for imperialism.
Donald Trump’s plans for regime change however appear to extend well beyond Venezuela. He has, again without a shred of evidence, called Gustavo Petro, the Left-wing President of Colombia, a “drug leader”, which appears to presage an attempt to effect a regime change there. And no doubt, if he succeeds, then he would feel emboldened to cast his net wider, to bring about regime changes all over Latin America, including even in Cuba.
The growing militarisation of imperialist countries is caused not by any increase in security threat against these countries from any source; it is caused by a desire to bring about regime changes all over the world by launching assaults against those countries that have governments which pose a threat to the hegemony of imperialism. The perceived threat to imperialism is thus not of a military nature, but related to political economy. The need to effect regime changes to curb this threat has acquired urgency of late because imperialism is now caught in a conjuncture where this threat, if not dealt with promptly, is likely to be greatly enhanced.
This is because neo-liberal capitalism has reached a cul-de-sac whose expression is the stagnation of the world economy, and which cannot be overcome within the framework of neo-liberal capitalism itself. The decade 2012-21 has witnessed the slowest rate of decadal growth of the world economy after the second world war. And this growth rate will be slowed down even further when the AI bubble currently characterising the US economy bursts; when this happens, the unemployment caused by the bursting of the bubble will be further aggravated by the unemployment caused by the introduction of labour-displacing AI itself.
The third world will be particularly hit by this rise in unemployment. In addition, Donald Trump’s tariff aggression, which itself is occasioned by the rise in US unemployment, as a “beggar-thy-neighbour” response to this rise, will be particularly hurtful to third world economies: the advanced capitalist economies will make mutually-accommodating tariff deals with the US, but the third world will be forced to lower its own tariffs against US imports even while facing enhanced tariffs compared to earlier in the US market.
All this presages greatly increased distress in the third world, and hence stronger pressures from below to move towards alternative economic arrangements from the current imperialist-dominated ones. Groupings like BRICS may not have any particularly marked anti-imperialist roles until now; but they can take on such roles if the intensified distress in the third world in the coming days throws up governments that are committed to improving the living conditions of the people.
The imperialist strategy in this context is three-fold: one, to encourage the ascendancy of neo-fascist regimes everywhere, especially in the third world; two, to use such regimes to weaken or sabotage the formation of alternative groupings of countries that put themselves outside of imperialist influence (the pressure currently being exercised by the Trump administration on the Modi government is aimed at achieving this); and, three, to use military intervention to effect regime changes wherever other methods of reducing third world countries to the status of “client states” fail.
The current conjuncture in short is one where imperialism, pushed to a corner by the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism, a crisis that cannot be resolved within the confines of neo-liberal capitalism itself, is planning to use military force to a much greater extent than before to keep the third world subjugated. The growing militarisation that we observe is a reflection of this.
