This is a brief letter to Labour List, which they published in their “Letters of the Week” section.

Marco Rubio’s speech to the Munich Security Conference was a call for a reassertion of unashamedly racist “Western” imperial dominance, for Europe to slash its welfare states and green transition, to prepare to compete for “new frontiers” of exploitation in the global South through assertions of raw military power. The audience gave him a standing ovation. This is a route to catastrophe; austerity and crumbling infrastructure at home, along with tearing our communities apart ICE style, and military adventurism abroad – replacing aid with raids. It should be utterly rejected, not greeted with “sighs of relief”. 

Laura Kyrke-Smith and Melanie Ward’s argument that Europe “must stand strong” on its own does not confront the projection by George Robertson that doing so militarily within the current framework of escalating  the confrontation with Russia, would cost not 5% of GDP but 7%. That’s an additional £135 billion every year. That would be ruinous in the immediate term and, in so far as it sucks resources away from the energy transition, will kill us in the longer term, even if the temptation to use all this hardware is resisted and it didn’t lead to nuclear war within the decade.

What we need instead is meaningful peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine to resolve this European civil war, reintegrate our economies within a mutual security arrangement that would also help us form a more developmental relationship with China and the rest of the global South.

With less concern for brevity I could have added that

• “Europe lay in ruins” in 1945 precisely because the dog eat dog rivalry between imperial powers that Rubio sees as a model for the future, came home to roost in the imperial heartlands in two World Wars once the global South had been fully carved up.
• Saying “we are not afraid of climate change” is an attempt to will it away instead of dealing with it; empty bragadochio an expression of fears that have been suppressed.
• In claiming the Rolling Stones as exemplars of White Western Civilisation, he obviously hadn’t done his homework on who the Rolling Stones themselves were inspired by, or heard anything by Muddy Waters.

Labour List published an article from Peter Hain this morning arguing that the government should take on debt to finance its war preparations. This is my letter in response, which I’m pleased to say that they published as the top letter. Some of the points will be familiar for anyone who reads these blogs, but bear repeating because they are routinely ignored in the mass media.

Peter Hain’s argument that the government should borrow to finance an armaments drive has three problems.

1. The quantity of money required to reach 5% of GDP on war would be £77billion every year. George Robertson’s projection for Euro NATO standing alone without the United States is 7%. The costs of paying the interest on this rapidly accumulating debt would be crippling, and it would act as an enormous financial black hole sucking resources away from everything worth while that government can do. Overseas aid was just the start. A militarisation drive would impoverish us across the board, as well as, with “a whole society approach”, copper bottom restrictions on dissent and pose questioning as treason. “Military Keynesianism” is also a mirage. Investment in weaponry does not build anything worthwhile that people can use, or that makes life better, as investment in sustainable energy, health services, public transport etc do. 
2. The presumption of an impending war with Russia – in which we should be prepared to “lose our children” -is a form of madness. It is posed as a defensive response to Russian aggression. But Russia has neither the capacity nor the desire to attack the rest of Europe. It has taken them four years to occupy parts of Ukraine that mostly speak Russian and where they have substantial local support. Trying to occupy Western Ukraine or, say, Poland, where they would face intense hostility from the top to the bottom of society would be, as US Conservative analyst John Mearsheimer puts it “like trying to swallow a porcupine” At the moment, Euro NATO, without the USA, already outspends the Russians by 3.5 to 1, has twice as many service personal and advantages in all kinds of war material that range from twice as many aircraft and tanks to three times as many artillery pieces. Trying to double this again cannot be seen as defensive, but is preparation for a possible offensive operation which, if carried out successfully, couldn’t help but trigger Russia’s nuclear thresholds so, to put it bluntly, this is a course that can only end in us all being killed by it. The alternative of finding a European modus vivendi with Russia through negotiation seems to have been lost in a red mist. Time to sober up.
3. There is no collision with Trump. European NATO countries will not stand up to him over Greenland, they will accommodate. Justified hostility to Trump is being used to give him exactly what he wants – a huge arms drive that will further disadvantage European economies, lock them into a confrontation with Russia, to the mutual harm of both – and leave him with a free hand to intervene at will across the rest of the world while preparing for the ultimate military showdown with China  before its too late (before the US is overhauled by peaceful economic competition and its fatal, fossil fuel based paradigm of modernity tossed into the dustbin of history by the spread of cheap Chinese solar panels). 

None of us has any interest in any of that. We cannot afford to sleepwalk into World War 3 the way that the Great Powers did into World War 1; any talk of war being “inevitable” tends to become a self fulfilling prophecy. As we won’t survive such a war, it is profoundly irresponsible and light minded to become a cheer leader for the course towards it.

Please note that Facebook blocks my blogs, and doesn’t reply tom questions why, so, if you think these argumenst are worth getting about, please pass them on through other media.

“If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children… then we are at risk.” Chief of French Defence Staff General Fabien Mandon

This brings to mind Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In the“season of peace and goodwill” the thoughts of our tiny leaders are turning to Armageddon. On the front page of the Daily Mail on 12th December, Minister for the Armed Forces, former Marine and MP for Selly Oak Al Carns is quoted as saying that “Britain is on a war footing” alongside NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte flagging up NATO intent with “Europe must prepare for the scale of war that our grandparents endured.”

There is something light minded about the way they pose this. As though it were conceptual. Something fictional. As if they can’t fully grasp the consequences of their actions, having never gone through anything on this scale – and lacking the inhibitions of previous generations that have.

In his foreword to Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkein writes “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often to be forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” Tolkein himself was at the Somme. As was my grandfather. And there is more than an echo of no mans land in the marshes of the dead outside Mordor, pale faces under water in shell holes reaching up to seize the minds of the living as they pass.

To be “caught in youth” in 2029 has every prospect of being not only “no less hideous” than 1914 or 1939, but also terminal for the rest of us too if we let them unleash the war they have in mind.

This is not solely a European problem, as this New York Times editorial openly calling for a US war with China, shows.

The UK Strategic Defence Review approaches this as a “whole society” mobilisation. That includes militarisation in our schools. Most of this will be about chilling dissent, but it will also involve a sharp increase in the number of Combined Cadet Corps that will be grooming our children to be killers (and be killed). In a secondary boys school I know of that has had a long tradition of having a CCF – as part of its aspiration to be as much like a public school in the 1920s as it can get away with – one of the consequences of it is that the War Memorial in the Hall is raw with recent names, former students barely into their twenties, dead in Afghanistan or Iraq. And those wars are side shows compared to what they are trying to get us to accept now. Like the late colonial skirmishes that preceded the mass slaughter after 1914. Just an overture.

In Germany a move to reintroduce “voluntary conscription” (as contradictory a phrase as you could even hope for – if its voluntary, it isn’t conscription, and if its conscription it can’t be voluntary) has already led to large scale youth and student mobilisations against it all across the country last weekend. We will need Refuseniks here too; and a movement of them.

In the spirit of Tom Lehrer’s remark that “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3 we had better start writing them now”, mourning the consequences of the war that the leaders of NATO in Europe are preparing for in advance is an essential part of preventing it.

There has been a sharp division on the Left over the war in Ukraine, but not such a division over opposition to increased military spending. Whatever anyone’s view of the former, its vital to be clear about the motivation of our own ruling classes. As they pose it, the need for increased arms spending and “putting our country on a war footing” is a response to “a rising threat” from Russia.

Leaving aside the strenuous effort that every power always makes in the run up to a war to convince itself and its population that its aggressive intent is solely defensive – Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers details this for all the Great Powers in the run up to 1914, also emphasising how far they all genuinely believed that the best deterrent to war was being stronger than their opponent, which posed an escalating cycle or rearmanent and preparatory planning that locked them into the apocalypse that followed – that poses three questions.

1. Does such a threat exist, is it “rising” and, if so, what scale of response is needed to face it?

This is the current balance of forces between Russian and the European NATO countries, leaving the USA and Canada out, as printed in the Observer during the Summer. To spell it out, it shows that Euro NATO, leaving aside Ukraine, has twice as many service personnel, three times as many tanks and artillery pieces and twice as many combat aircraft as the Russians have. And thats now. Are they seriously trying to convince us that doubling what is already a huge advantage is necessary to stop an attack from an evidently weaker power?

Doubling military expenditure only makes sense if they are not contemplating defence but attack. They would have a 7 to 1 advantage in military spending. Its a conventional military cliche that, to be sure of success, an attacker has to have a 3 to 1 advantage. 7 to 1 seems a bit excessive even for that, but for the powers planning to build it to be posing that as “defensive” – because they feel threatened by a power that currently has less than half their capacity stretches credulity a bit far.

2. What does Russia want? Strenuous efforts go into avoiding even posing this question. The source of the war in Ukraine is put down either to some inherent expansionist quality in the Russian character, or megalomaniac psychic flaws in its current leadership. What they have said they want is an end to NATOs eastward expansion – because they feel threatened by it – Ukraine to be a neutral country, a mutual security treaty with the rest of Europe and NATO; and for the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine to be recognised as having seceded and become part of the Russian Federation. Russia has no desire for a war with the rest of Europe. They will fight one if they are attacked, but they are not going to try to expand Westwards.

You don’t have to accept that this is solely from peaceful intent to recognise that any such ambition is militarily and politically impossible. The areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that consistently voted for Russia leaning Parties before 2014 could be absorbed into the RF and there be some prospect of peace afterwards. Absorbing Western Ukraine would be like “trying to swallow a porcupine” as US conservative analyst John Mearsheimer puts it. Poland and the Baltic States even more so. Let alone anywhere further West. As the USSR found out in Afghanistan, and the USA (and UK) in Iraq, you can’t hold a country that really doesn’t want you in occupation of it. There just aren’t enough troops.

3 How would such a war go? If we get to a point that the war preparations stumble, or are manipulated, into a confrontation that escalates into full scale war, there are two scenarios.

• The better one is that it rapidly bogs down into the sort of horrific slog that has been going on in Ukraine for the last three years but on a bigger scale, killing, brutalising and impoverishing all of us as it consumes more and more of our children, lays waste to all the towns and cities on and around the front line, devastates energy and other infrastructure far behind the front. Thats the better scenario.
• The other is that, it all goes very well for Euro NATO forces and they stand poised to break through deeply enough into the RF to crush and dismember it. At that point, Russia’s nuclear weapons would be deployed. Russia’s nuclear war fighting doctrine is that these weapons would be threatened/used in the event of an existential threat to the state. They do not have a “no first use” policy. Nor, in fact does any other nuclear armed power with the exception of China. US nuclear war fighting doctrine has been based on the notion of a succesful nuclear first strike since the early 1960s. So, in the context of Euro NATO “winning” there would be every prospect of the Russian leadership invoking a Europe wide Samson doctrine and bringing the whole continent down with them. A nuclear strike on that scale would not spare the rest of the world, as the nuclear winter effect from even the self immolation of a single continent would have a devastating impact, posing a sharp drop in temperature, harvest failure and global famine.

Remembrance for the victims of all this is best done in advance; and to take the from of mobilising to stop it and make sure there aren’t any.

In 1922, just after WW1, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote part of his 5th Symphony as a battle between the percussion, representing war, and the rest of the orchestra, representing the forces of life. In the opening movement there is a point at which the snare drummer is asked to improvise “as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra” as loudly and intensely as possible to try to drown it out in volleys of explosive detonations, before the forces of life finally triumph and the drums retreat in an elegaic mourning for their previous frenzy.

It is now up to all of us in the labour and peace movements in every country to be that orchestra, and drown out the mad drummers that are trying to lead us to catastrophe.

Please note that Facebook does not allow my blogs to be posted. They claim that some people have complained that they are “abusive”. I find that accusation pretty abusive myself and reject it completely. I suggest that anyone reading this have a look through any of my blogs at random and make your own mind up about whether they are absive or not and, if you like them and really want to annoy Mark Zuckerburg, please post them around on other platforms.