George Monbiot’s comments about the war in Ukraine on BBC Question Time last week are completely disorientated, and disorientating for anyone who swallows them.
His columns in the Guardian are often a haven of well argued, deeply felt sanity in a time when the impasse of capitalism, the decline of US hegemony and the ever mounting climate crisis are driving most columnists in most papers well off the rails and up the wall, but the one entitled A Trump win would change my mind about rearmament (Guardian 5/7/24), was profoundly confused, and underpins the line he took on QT.
He argues that Trump’s Second Coming should “end… our abiding fantasies about a special relationship” without reflecting that, in abusive relationships, abiding fantasies are often clung to harder to avoid having to face facts. There is no doubt that the British ruling class will cling to it as hard as it needs to.
As it is, few, now, have any delusions that this relationship is one of equals. A deferential cringe is built into it, and everyone knows it. The relationship was abjectly summarised by Tony Blair when he told the British Ambassador to Washington to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. We have seen what this looks like on film. “Yo! Blair!”
What makes it “special” is being one of the closest US henchmen in their global dominance: one of the “five eyes” countries that share Intelligence gathering (the US and what used to be called the “White Commonwealth”) that is at the core of their system of alliances.
George spells out what this has been about, listing just a few of the brutal and deadly military interventions and coups “we” have been party to since the Second World War – Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza – with the US as number one and the UK desperate to believe that its number 2.
Although he recognises that these alliances, with NATO as its core, defend a rules based order that “favours capital over the democratic state”, he doesn’t draw the structural conclusion that this also constitutes a Global North military bloc forged to keep the Global South in its place. So, the interventions he mentions were, and are, not random pieces of malevolence that just happened to happen, but systematic attempts to assert global power and dominance. This is posed in these countries as “defence”.
The military forces at their disposal are the tools do do this job, and the stronger and bigger they are, the more they can get away with doing it.
So if, as George argues, our principle is that we are opposed to “imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression”, we have to recognise that not only do we live in a core imperialist state ourselves; one that has committed many wars of aggression in our lifetimes, but that that state is integrated into the system of alliances that guarantees the existing unjust global order.
We therefore have to restrain its capacity to carry out these wars as an act of solidarity with its victims in the rest of the world; in the first instance those in Gaza.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz was a guest at the NATO summit in July and Israel has had representation at the alliance since Turkiye lifted its veto in 2016, and a cooperation agreement since 2017. The ongoing US, and UK, arms and intelligence supplies during the genocidal IDF operations in Gaza underline what this alliance is for.
George argues that the UK and EU have “leant on the US for security”. What this means is being part of the world’s most aggressive and high spending military alliance. NATO accounts, with its allies in the Pacific, for between 67 and 75% of global military spending (depending on how you measure it). The strongest powers within it – the US, Japan, Germany, France – are boosting their military spending rapidly (Germany and Japan doubling theirs); while simultaneously complaining that it is not “realistic” to expect them to stump up their promised $100 billion annual contribution to help the Global South develop sustainably. In fact, just the increase in NATO military spending since 2015 amounts to $543 billion a year (with a total spend in 2023 of $1341 Billion). So, building up military capacity gets five times as much commitment as the promise to alleviate climate breakdown in the Global South – a promise that has never been fulfilled.
That looks like this.
George, nevertheless, argues that a Trump restoration would be “a threat to our peace, security and wellbeing” not so much because the US would
- go full rogue state on climate – with an estimated 4 billion tonnes of additional emissions from pro fossil fuel policies and attempts to break up the Paris process – “drill, drill, drill!”
- give Israel carte blanche to double down on the Gaza genocide – “you’ve got to finish the problem”
- or seek to provoke a war with China,
but because he thinks he would break up NATO, supposedly in cahoots with President Putin; citing his remark that he would be quite happy for Russia to invade any NATO member not spending as much on its military as Trump wants it to and would “end US support for Ukraine” which would “allow Putin to complete his invasion” teeing up “an attack on a NATO country within five years”.
This is where George’s argument aligns with that of other Guardian/Observer columnists and editorials, including the increasingly frenzied Simon Tisdall; one of whose columns last year condemned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “overly fearful of nuclear escalation”. Perish the thought that anyone would be worried about that. Tisdall’s critique of last year’s NATO summit was, as ever, that it did too little to escalate the war in Ukraine. No fear of nuclear escalation for him; arguing for no fly zones in the West of the country and missile strikes into Russia, for an alliance that is not “afraid of a fight” in face of the threat that an incoming Trump Presidency would try to force a peace by accepting a partition of pre 2014 Ukrainian territory because he is, as the Observer editorial puts it on the same day, “a keen admirer of Vladimir Putin”.
This profoundly misreads whats going on. Trump is in no kind of bloc with Putin. He’d like to break Russia from its alignment with China, though that ship has long sailed. What Trump is trying to do now is to bully subordinate European allies into taking most of the military weight in Europe off the US. This is so it can concentrate on China; which he sees as the main challenge to the US world order. This will be costly for the countries that do it, but that is of no concern to Trump. Thats the price they have to pay to stay in the kind of “special relationship” with the US that allows them to be at the table and not on the menu, even if it means they will be increasingly relegated farther below the salt.
Trump is not a diplomat. He does not issue quiet threats on secure telephone lines to allow appearances to be kept up, as Joe Biden did for Obama. He is a corrupt wheeler dealer with mob boss characteristics. He doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings. He bullies openly, so everyone is clear who the boss is. Remember his official visit in 2018? That calvalcade of armoured limousines that was longer than the Mall? Those hideous Osprey aircraft repeatedly buzzing London’s airspace?
And it is already working. 23 of NATOs 31 non US members now hit the 2% target, “more than twice as many as two years ago” according to Jens Stoltenburg and the only way is up, with Germany already committed to 3.5%. Job almost done.
So, when George says the “UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies” he misses the point that the UK and EU countries are the allies of the US and, as everyone in the new cabinet is keen to point out, the UK will accomodate to whoever is in the White House because it has to, so they will remain core allies of “the Trump regime” too. David Lammy is quite explicit about that, saying that Trump is “often misunderstood” over NATO, and pledging increased UK spending to stay in the club. Increases in military spending by European countries is exactly what Trump wants. It won’t be used “against a Trump regime” but to facilitate it, and cover its back in Europe so it can go after China.
The key point for the climate and labour movements therefore is that the policy choice to sink or swim with the US alliance will clash with having to break from it to resist climate breakdown. A very concrete way that this is posed is, when it comes to priorities, will the Starmer government jump to Trump’s tune and increase military spending to 2.5 or 3% or even 5% of GDP, or does it put those resources into its mission for clean energy by 2030? They are unlikely to be able to do both.
Trump wants to pull some US military resources out of Europe to concentrate on China because the US can’t do both any more. Thats why commentators like Tisdall are spinning fantasies. NATO has been unable to supply Ukraine with enough material to “win”, because it can’t.
Some pro EU commentators like Timothy Garton Ash argue that this gives the EU the chance and need to step up and become a serious military power in its own right and George now argues “I now believe we have to enhance our conventional capacities, both to support other European nations against Russia and…perhaps to defend ourselves”.
This presumes that the Russians are at war because they are on some crazed mission of global conquest. In fact, their stance throughout has been to seek mutual security pacts so that they don’t feel under threat from NATO; which, at the moment, they do. This has been the case since Gorbachev proposed a “Common European Home” in 1991. The US and NATO have never accepted that and it has been a US mission to break up any mutually beneficial economic arrangements, partcularly between Russia and Germany, the better to maintain US dominance of the continent.
Seeking such a peaceful arrangement, following a ceasefire in Ukraine, using the war as a terrible example of what everyone in Europe should agree that we need to avoid, is the preferable, alternative course to rearmament and war preparation.
Because George should think about what he’s saying. If there is a war in Europe, even if it stays conventional through some miracle, it will look like Eastern Ukraine or Gaza on a gigantic scale. The attempt to “defend ourselves” militarily will be suicidal, even if nuclear weapons can be kept out of it. War won’t “defend” anyone. Mutually assured destruction can be done conventionally if alliances are not “afraid of a fight”. The danger in proposals to seriously retool the UK, and other, military industrial complexes to be able to fight just such a conventional war of attrition with Russia by the end of the decade, is that this carries its own momentum and will become a self fulfilling prophecy, displacing diplomatic alternatives. If the UK military gets into a position to “fight and win a war in Europe”, the UK ruling class will be tempted to try to do so.
An alternative approach that would avoid economic ruin and a step by step escalation towards war, would be to welcome the US departure and seek mutual security arrangements with Russia in a “common European home”, as Gorbachev put it. A localised version of that was, after all, what the Russians were asking for in the Winter of 2021, which NATO refused even to discuss.
The US uses NATO to maintain its own dominance over Europe – political, military, economic. Which is why Trump’s threats to reorder it, with the US pulling back its commitments to nuclear and air cover and the European powers expected to dramatically increase conventional forces on the ground could end up as an own goal.
A recent poll showed strong majorities in the UK in favour of both NATO and retaining the UK’s nuclear weapons. This is because these are framed as a way of keeping the population safe from overseas threats.
This begins to crack – and you get a mass anti war movement – when that mask slips. In 1980, the incoming Thatcher government, eager to turn the screw in the Cold War and gain compliance with stationing US medium range cruise missiles in the UK, scored a spectacular own goal by issuing a civil defence booklet to every household in the country called “Protect and Survive”, as a guide on how to survive a nuclear war (with no more equipment than you’d find in the average garden shed). After decades in which the “nuclear deterrent” had been motivated as a way to make nuclear war unthinkable, it suddenly became apparent to every household in the country that 1. the government was actively contemplating having one and 2 that the self protection measures outlined in the booklet – like making a do it yourself shelter (for one) by unscrewing your bathroom door and putting it over you as you took shelter in your bathtub – were absurd.
Millions of people realised that it was our government that was putting them at risk and the sense of vulnerability that had always generated a strong anti nuclear and anti war sentiment in Glasgow – as the nearest city to the Holy Loch base of Polaris, and then Trident, submarines – became more widespread – and linked up with the reaction against the monetarist crash that also came in with Thatcher. “A few more years of this government”, as one old campaigner in Bermondsey put it, “and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.
Urban ramblings 
well said
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