Blairite retread George Robertson is set to lead Labour’s “Defence Review”, with former US Presidential advisor Fiona Hill on hand to keep it in line with US imperatives. The conclusions are flagged up in his premise, which is that the UK has to militarily confront a “deadly quartet” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. This is itself a variation on George W Bush’s “axis of evil” and flags up a sharp increase not only in direct military expenditure but also a pro war domestic agenda, trying to ramp up Cold War mentality and reflexes to enable a series of suicidal conflicts and silence dissent.

None of the four countries concerned are in a formal alliance and coordination between them is – needless to say – qualitatively below that which is permanently structured by the dominant US system of alliances, on “sharing arms, components and military intelligence”.

Taking his premise as a given – which we shouldn’t – this is the balance of military spending between the US and its allies (which includes the UK) and the so called “deadly quartet” 2023.

To spell this out. The US and its allies, who Robertson poses as being under threat, outspend the “deadly Quartet” by a factor of 3 to 1. So, who is the more “deadly”? If you were to put teeth on the US slice of this graph, it might reflect how US allies are seen in most of the world.

These figures were taken from NATOs own stats, and the wikipedia list of expenditure by country from SIPRI The NATO figures are worth a look because they show how rapidly NATO is increasing its spending (from $904 billion in 2017 to $1056 in 2021 to $1185 now) and that the number of countries spending 2% or more of GDP has doubled in the last year. The NATO figures, however, are lower than those in the SIPRI list. The US figure from NATO for 2023 is $755 billion, while for Sipri, it is a significantly larger $916 billion. So, the blue, biting pacman shown here probably has its jaws clamping down even more tightly. They also don’t include the exponential increases now being set by US allies, with Japan and Germany doubling their spending.

Robertson’s inclusion of Iran in the list also implicitly underlines the UK’s alignment with Israel. This is also evident in the current government continuing with Sunak’s attempt to exempt Israel from ICC jurisdiction and the fact that it is one of only two countries to be continuing with the defunding of UNWRA after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations about its staff being involved in Oct 7th. The other country (down from the original 16) is the United States – which is one definition of a “special relationship”. This alignment in the face of an ongoing genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, requires the domestic demonisation of the solidarity movement in this country; which we are already beginning to see.