Rearmament: time for the left to take a stand...

The whole British labour movement faces a question: which side are you on?

Nuclear-armed Royal Navy Submarine on the Clyde. Image: POPhot Barry Wheeler © MOD

We will look back on the first quarter of 2025 as a period of suspended disbelief. European heads of government know the USA is set on walking away from conventional military deterrence, and has pulled the plug on all kinds of military and even commercial aid to Ukraine, in the hope of bouncing Kyiv into an unjust deal with Russia.

What they don’t know, yet, is whether the USA is fully committed to NATO’s Article V collective defence; or whether Trump actually wants a comprehensive alliance with Russia, leaving Europe to pick up the pieces of a shattered global order. Nor do they know whether, having pulled aid to Ukraine, Trump is prepared to start coercing European states themselves, as they try to keep Ukraine in the fight.

Politicians in almost every European capital, then, are having to follow Antonio Gramsci’s advice: optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. For those closest to the problem – the professional military leadership of European states – pessimism of the intellect is being reinforced by sudden operational frictions: the sudden inability of US counterparts to take part in routine conferences; the disruption of Starlink services to Ukraine, the freezing of military supplies to Kyiv at the border.

Politicians, especially those tasked with diplomacy, seem determined to do optimism of the will a l’outrance – and I can see their point. There is nothing to be gained by shutting options down, or by premature conclusions – particularly if the Trump administration is operating a mixture of bluff and “flooding the zone”.

Ultimately we will know from America’s actions – over a period of weeks not days – what its actual strategy is. If Putin remains intransigent – and why shouldn’t he, if Trump has handed him all the negotiating cards – and the Saudi-hosted talks get nowhere, while Europeans beging to take the strain of supplying and supporting Ukraine, does Trump double down on his bullying of the Ukrainian side, or does he back off?

But it makes sense, now, for every country in Europe to prepare for an existential US detachment from collective security. What that means is barely understood by European populations: if you were born after December 1941 you have never lived in a world where America is not fully engaged with the defence of Europe.

As the EU pledges to raise €500m for the ReArm programme, and Poland mulls compulsory military training for all adult males, there are natural and legitimate worries among voters across a wide range of liberal and centre-left parties, that they are being bounced into a militarist project whose rationale has not been explained.

Alongside that, as we saw in the German election, there is a significant portion of far right and right-wing populist voters who are more sympathetic to Putin and to MAGA than they are to Ukraine.

As a social democrat, I want to convince as many voters as possible that we need to rearm – fast and decisively, both at the conventional and the nuclear level.

Decades of failed expeditionary warfare by Western countries has made voters justifiably sceptical of military action, while in those countries where the professional armed forces revel in a “warrior caste” culture, there often enjoy a kind of respectful, alienated tolerance among the mass of people, rather than active support.

The weakest arguments against rearmament are those deployed by the outright tankies – the neo-Leninists who have been dissembling their way through this crisis, claiming to be outraged at Russia’s behaviour buy heaping all the blame for the conflict on “NATO expansion”.

Some of the stronger arguments were listed by the Guardian writer Owen Jones, in a column last week. They are: that the Russian threat is being overblown; that military spending is wasteful and the defence giants will swallow it in the form of windfall profits; and that if rearmament is paid for through austerity, that could hand power to the radical right.

Let’s take these one by one. Owen writes:

“That Britain and its European neighbours are hiking military budgets to arbitrary percentages of gross domestic product should raise questions. Announcements of defence splurges rarely involve detailed explanations of what that money will actually be spent on. A better approach, surely, would be to make a case for what is actually needed, and in relation to which concrete threats.”

First off, we just had a direct request from our major ally the USA, to spend 5% of GDP on defence. Arbitrary or not, that is a real demand from a vociferously transactional partner. Answering it with “we’ve hit 2.5%” is at least language they can understand.

Second, the reason we talk about percentages of GDP is that (a) this is the international benchmark used, for example, by monitors like SIPRI and (b) it is a crude measure of intent. Vladimir Putin has hiked Russian defence spending to 6% of GDP, and 40% of the state budget. Because Russia’s GDP is about the size of Italy’s that means we can deter him by reallocating GDP from non-military sectors to military.

But fair enough, hiking Defence to 2.5% and then 3% of GDP after 2030 doesn’t say anything about what it’s spent on – and risks focusing on inputs rather than outputs.

That is why, on coming to power, Labour commissioned the independent Strategic Defence Review, whose remit was to do exactly what Owen asks: analyse the threat and design the capabilities to meet it. Its deliberations have happened at the expert level, behind closed doors, with only the most senior military involved, and were drawing to a conclusion when Pete Hegseth dropped his bombshell in Brussels, demanding a rapid rethink.