NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte is on the warpath, much to the delight of Ukraine’s state-controlled mass media and politicians.

Europe’s biggest-selling daily paper, Bild, reports his comments in the light of the Ukraine war: “I’ll tell you very clearly: we have to prepare for war.”

Knowing that many of his German readers remain nervous about their country engaging directly in military conflict, he adds: “That is the best way to avoid war,” as though reciting an iron law of history.

Not only Russia is in Rutte’s cross-hairs. He also identifies China as a growing security concern, deploring the recent expansion of its military capacity.

What to do? 

Rutte’s message is aimed specifically at Germany. As Europe’s biggest economic power, he insists, it is not pulling its weight in Nato. The Berlin government has a special duty to increase its “defence investments” and armaments production.

(Note to Morning Star readers: military spending by Britain and its allies is invariably referred to by our pro-Nato mass media as “defence” expenditure). 

Germany’s military budget has finally reached the Nato target of 2 per cent of national GDP, helped by plans to station a permanent brigade in Lithuania, pump yet more arms into Ukraine and boost the technological quality of Germany’s military-industrial complex.

Britain’s Labour government is spending £57 billion this financial year on the military, around 2.3 per cent of GDP, with a commitment to hit 2.5 per cent by an as yet unspecified date. 

But Rutte wants Nato to raise the bar to 3 or 3.5 per cent of GDP at its summit in The Hague this June. 

Leading Tories and leaked papers from the Ministry of Defence — that euphemism again — call for a similar increase. Given the Labour government’s refusal to raise top tax rates on income, wealth and corporate profits, or introduce wealth and financial transaction taxes, that would create a new “black hole” — up to £28bn annually — to be filled mostly by cuts in social spending.

Reform UK Ltd controlling director Nigel Farage proposes a five-year transition to 3 per cent. Donald Trump prefers a Nato target of 5 per cent. Either way, Farage would love to see Labour tightening the austerity screw following this year’s UK Strategic (ahem!) “Defence” Review. 

CND is working on its own non-nuclear SDR, which will doubtless strike a note of sanity. But when will Britain’s labour movement call for an end to the war-mongering madness?

Russia has neither the will nor the capacity to invade and occupy territories that not even President Vladimir Putin in his wildest anti-Leninist imagination can claim to be Russian.

China wants peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with Britain and Europe, preferably without British and other Western military forces squatting on its borders and patrolling the nearby seas.

The European Union has significant political, economic and social challenges to face, none of which will be overcome by its ongoing militarisation.

Like Nato, the EU has been an anti-socialist cold war project from the start, rooted in the failed attempts to construct a European “Defence” Community and a European Political Community before the “free market” pro-capitalist European Economic Community emerged from the wreckage. 

With luck, Trump’s bellicose xenophobia will fracture Nato, perhaps fatally. Britain could then pursue a truly independent foreign and defence policy, free from Washington diktat and Brussels delusion; a policy promoting international peace and solidarity.