“THE US is now the enemy of the West.” Thus the arresting headline on a column by Financial Times sage Martin Wolf this week.
Since the US has not relocated, the headline once again underlines that “the West” is an ideological construct.
Moreover, the things Wolf complains of regarding the Trump administration’s conduct — indifference to democracy, cutting great power deals without regard to others, cynically plundering Ukraine’s resources — correspond exactly to how the rest of the world has experienced “the West” over the last 200 years.
That does not diminish the drama of the moment, which has so distressed the Financial Times. Donald Trump ordered US representatives to vote with Russia and China on a resolution concerning the Ukraine war at the UN which neglected to dub Vladimir Putin as aggressor.
He thus split from Britain and other Nato powers on a central issue of European geopolitics, a historic first for the US at the UN.
Whatever view one takes of the Ukraine war, it scarcely makes sense to fling labels around if the aim is to get peace negotiations started as swiftly as possible.
It is now Britain and France that are leading the war party over Ukraine, thus behaving as Wolf believes “the West” should always act.
Keir Starmer is insisting that British troops be deployed in force to Ukraine to police any ceasefire.
His aim is to wreck peace negotiations by inserting demands that he knows will be unacceptable to Russia. If third-party forces are required to keep the peace, they should be from states acceptable to both sides and under UN authority.
The fly in Starmer’s ointment is the fact that British troops are unable to mount such an operation without US support.
So far has Britain’s functional military independence been compromised by decades of subordination to Washington’s plans that they cannot function without access to the Pentagon’s logistics and communications resources, any more than Trident constitutes an “independent deterrent.”
That is why Starmer demands a US “backstop” for his planned deployment — it is not a pledge to ride to the rescue if hostilities recommence, it is a basic requirement for British troops being in Ukraine to begin with.
His talks with Trump in Washington are directed to that end, even though the US’s agreement would seriously compromise Trump’s stated ambition to secure a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, along with much of the former’s wealth.
So now Britain reverts to the role which it played for so long, from the earliest days of “the West” until the second world war, of the bulwark of imperialism in Europe, even if it still yields place to the US on the world scale.
The British people are already footing this bill for the vainglorious aspirations of its belligerent bourgeoisie. Three billion pounds a year in military assistance is being sent to Ukraine even before British boots are on the ground.
And the increase in military spending projected by Starmer over the next decade cannot possibly be funded without massive cuts to public services and other state investments. That is the least the bond market would demand for continuing to purchase government debt.
So, yes, Trump is indeed a plutocratic pirate, intent on extorting every advantage possible for the oligarchy he serves.
But Starmer offers no alternative. He combines the worst of the old centrist imperialism with the worst of the new populist variant in terms of increased militarism, pandering to authoritarian and nationalist demagogy and clinging to failed capitalist economic orthodoxies.
He may not be an “enemy of the West,” but he is surely an enemy of peace and progress.
