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Britain is now on a “war footing”, we are told. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, demanded that European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand”.
In this increasingly feverish atmosphere, it becomes ever more difficult to ask for a bit of perspective, but it is necessary. European elites are panic-stricken after Donald Trump hit the accelerator away from US hegemony, a trend already long under way. Meanwhile, Labour figures openly brief that this could be Keir Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, using Ukraine’s agony to transform the government’s calamitous polling, speaking to a grubby political opportunism. Britain’s current trajectory could raise a much graver menace than Russian invasion: domestic social turmoil and an ascendant radical right that threatens democracy itself.
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. At present, Britain wastes a significant amount of its defence budget on Trident nuclear missiles, which are dependent on the US – and going by failed tests, are unreliable anyway.
Billions have been squandered on aircraft carriers described by the former chief of the defence staff David Richards as “unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”; they are plagued by faults, not to mention outmoded in the face of armed drones and anti-ship missiles. Another £5.5bn was thrown at Ajax armoured vehicles, which were delivered eight years late after being beset by multiple problems, such as shaking so violently that soldiers developed nausea, swollen joints and tinnitus.
To avoid such colossal waste, defence spending must be scrutinised, and proportionate to real threats. That the Russian autocracy represents a lasting menace to Ukraine is unquestionable, and arming its war of defence was justified. In the longer term, Moldova – with its breakaway Transnistria republic – and the Baltic states may be at risk, although even that is debatable.
The idea that Russia poses a realistic conventional military threat beyond that – to Britain or otherwise – is delusional. After three years of invasion, and 11 years of conflict, the Russian army has managed to capture a fifth of Ukraine’s land mass, inhabited by a 10th of its prewar population. This, in a country which as recently as 2010 elected a pro-Russian president.
The cost to Russia has been enormous. It has lost hundreds of thousands of young men. It already had a demographic crisis, due to high mortality – which surged thanks to western-backed free market “shock therapy” – low birthrates and young men fleeing conscription. That, combined with mobilising troops and defence industries requiring workers, has led to labour shortages. Although Russia’s economy has so far proved surprisingly robust, chalking up 4.1% growth in 2024 and rising living standards, inflation runs at 9.5%, with interest rates at an unsustainable 21%. Moscow is running out of tanks and armoured vehicles, and has been forced to dig into increasingly depleted Soviet-era stocks. And as the Russian revolutions of 1917 showed, the patience of a war-weary population can snap quite suddenly.
The Soviet Union was a far more formidable military foe, and it attempted just one invasion outside its postwar bloc: Afghanistan in 1979, which proved so calamitous it helped bring the whole edifice down. After the bloody Ukrainian debacle, the idea that Moscow’s rulers are going to march across Europe in an attempt to subsume entirely hostile populations is fantastical. Even the Baltic states – despite their small size and population – seem a stretch. Investing in the defences of these specific nations makes sense; but asking western European nations to throw vast sums at their own defence budgets does not.
That’s not to say Russia or indeed other countries and non-state actors couldn’t pose other threats, such as cyberwarfare. In that case, governments should direct spending there specifically. As Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at Sussex University, tells me, the “defence establishment is so unfit” for judging what is needed; instead, we need “a root-and-branch” examination of defence spending, to assess where savings can be made, to pay for actual priorities.
Here is the real threat. So far, Labour has butchered spending on international aid to pay for defence. That will cost lives, but it is superficially highly popular: although when voters are asked about spending on specific humanitarian commitments, such as aid to Ukrainian civilians, the results are rather different. Nonetheless, given Labour’s refusal to increase taxes on the well-off, future defence spending hikes are likely to come at the expense of public services and social security. Research also suggests that increased military spending is bad for economic growth, particularly in richer countries. The Soviet Union itself crumbled in part because of its excessive defence budget.
Starmer suggests defence spending will benefit Britain’s crisis-ridden living standards. That is disputed by the Common Wealth thinktank, which notes that, in the past financial year, of the £37.6bn spent by the Ministry of Defence, nearly 40% went to just 10 companies. Despite vast public subsidies, the arms industry employs a tiny sliver of the British workforce, declining from more than 400,000 in the early 1980s to about 134,000 people now.
We are already in a position where radical rightwing parties are surging across Europe thanks to austerity and stagnating living standards. The far-right demagogue in the White House owes his victory, in part, to squeezed US workers’ wages. In Germany’s recent election, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) doubled its vote in part because the economic consequences of Russia’s invasion hurt voters. Support for hardcore rightwing parties has risen steadily since the financial crash: they are now the most voted-for political grouping in Europe. Hiking military spending at the cost of social expenditure will undoubtedly fuel them even more. Europe’s pursuit of a phantom menace may prove its actual ruin.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
