CONFUSION is the order of the day among Europe’s core capitalist powers. We should not let it run rampant in the working-class movement.
It has been an epoch-shifting fortnight, with the US blindsiding the rest of Nato with an about-turn on Ukraine.
Not only has it started peace talks with Russia. It has humiliated European governments — making clear their views are irrelevant.
It has humiliated Ukraine, demanding it hand over half of its resource wealth to Washington and blaming it for the start of the conflict.
Donald Trump is, of course, unfair: to imply Ukraine tricked the United States into this war is to reverse manipulator and manipulated. US and EU policy pushed Ukraine into a position which many US experts, from former CIA director William Burns to former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, had said for decades would lead to war. It did so including through regime change (backing the Maidan uprising in 2014) and derailing peace initiatives like the Minsk agreements.
After Russia invaded, Britain’s Boris Johnson was despatched to block a peace deal in April 2022. When Trump says Ukraine could have done a deal earlier, we should remember who stopped it.
That said, peace talks are overdue and welcome. The Ukraine meat-grinder has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Majority Ukrainian opinion supports talks, and rampant draft evasion shows how little appetite there is for continued war with no plausible endgame. Nobody on the left should seek to prolong the fighting.
Nor should a reorientation of US strategy be mistaken for a pro-peace policy. The Trump regime talks openly of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and encourages it in the West Bank, where tens of thousands have been driven from their homes in the last month.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US is prioritising threats to its own borders. Washington’s new designation of Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist” organisations has sparked concern in Mexico that this is to provide an excuse for military intervention. Trump refuses to rule out an annexation of Greenland, which risks turning the Arctic into a zone of military rivalry. A seemingly minor update to the State Department website, removing a longstanding statement opposing Taiwanese independence, may point to planned confrontation with Beijing.
Trump makes clear what he wants from Europe if it is to retain its place in the US-led bloc: huge rises in military spending. Ironically, those opposing a Ukraine peace as a way of “standing up to Trump” are promoting exactly that.
The consequences for essential services, development or a green new deal in Britain would be catastrophic. Already government departments are being told to draw up plans for 11 per cent cuts ahead of a spending review in June — when after 14 years of Tory cuts, services from local government to courts and prisons are already in deep crisis.
The working class cannot afford a new age of militarism and unions will not be able to mobilise against these cuts unless we resist projected rises in “defence” spending.
If the US wants to retreat from Europe, we should demand more. Tell Trump to pull the nuclear bombers from Lakenheath in Suffolk and kick the US National Security Agency out of Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.
Withdraw from a Nato alliance that was never defensive and is now humiliating. Press for an independent foreign policy.
Britain, like other spurned European countries, can play its role in building a multipolar world based on peace and respectful relations between states, not war and plunder, working together with China and a rising global South to address global issues like climate change.
Or it can launch another crippling assault on the public sector to fund a war drive that puts the entire planet at risk, clinging to the delusion that we are valued partners of the imperialist top dog across the pond.
