Recently, the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said we were living in dangerous times. This was echoed by the new American Secretary of State for Defence, Pete Hegseth. I would have said this was the usual exaggeration which the Donald Trump crowd is known for. But coming from the British prime minister, one cannot simply dismiss it because this was a preambular statement to the launching of a new British defence and strategic review document which is going to increase Britain’s defence spending to 3% of the country’s GDP.
This will be well above the current 2% and moving on to 2.5%, still way below the 5% president Donald Trump is demanding from all NATO member countries, even though the current amount the USA is spending is $895 billion, just about 3.4%of its GDP, which is way above the current expenditure on defence by the next three countries of China, $266.85 billion, Russia $126 billion, and India, which comes fourth with an expenditure of $75 billion.
From these figures it can be seen that the USA alone spends more than the next three countries combined. The British prime minister’s statement was further explained by the Secretary of State for Defence , Right Honourable John Healey, who claimed that his country aims to build about eleven attack submarines, expand the carrying capacity of the British navy and reinvigorate the airforce by buying additional American-built F35, and increase the number of British-built typhoon aircrafts, and start recruiting people into the fighting force of the army, while keeping the current men and women happy by improving their accommodation and stipends. All these coming from a socialist government, which traditionally preferred to spend money on social services, indicate that its analysis on threat to the realm is serious.
This, of course, should be taken in the context of the NATO members’ feeling about the unreliability of the USA as a partner because of the statements of President Donald Trump who has, perhaps rightly, been saying that American defence partners must share the burden of defence, and not expect America to carry their burden as it used to do hitherto.
This sharing of burden on defence extends not only to NATO members alone, but to Japan and South Korea, and to the rich Arab oil kingdoms, but not to Israel where the Israeli tail wags the American dog! As at the moment, Trump is prepared to fight the Israeli war against Iran and to possibly level the Persian theocracy down unless it kowtows to Israeli diktat and abandons its nuclear programme.
The current doctrine of expanding defence spending has also been embraced by the new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who has publicly committed his country to go beyond 3% of GDP from its current low of below 2%. Chancellor Merz has signed agreements with Ukraine to help it defend itself by building its own defence industry. The German posture on defence is influenced by President Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. For reasons of the big powers guarantee of Germany’s permanent disarmament, the Germans would probably have built their own nuclear arsenal, which they are capable of doing and have the know-how.
The current aggression of Russia in Ukraine has led to President Macron’s signing defence agreements with Poland in addition to the European Union’s opposition to the Russian threat. All these coming after Donald Trump’s bluff has not impressed President Putin, and it seems the Europeans are determined to defend themselves, with or without American support. Coordination of British, French and German preparedness to defend their interests on the continent of Europe, and their threat to seize accumulated Russian assets and investments in Europe, may eventually force President Putin to count the cost of his policy of rebuilding the lost Russian empire and the reconstruction of the collapsed USSR.
Recently, the security conference in Singapore, which the Chinese virtually ignored by sending a low-ranking delegation to, witnessed the campaign of rearmament carried to their door step, with President Macron delivering the keynote address and offering France’s support in the defence of democracy, defence and development for countries in South East Asia, and warning those countries of the need to be prepared to defend their country’s autonomy. He also called on China to prevail on North Korea’s continued intervention on the Russian side in the current war between Russia and Ukraine on the European continent.
The American Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth, was less diplomatic as characteristic of American “open diplomacy, “established since the time of President Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War, by openly accusing China of threatening Taiwan and the Philippines, and calling on countries in Asia to be ready to resist Chinese communist threats by increasing their arms spending. He gave the impression that America is prepared to defend Taiwan, which is against President Trump’s campaign statement that he would not commit American troops to the defence of Taiwan. The Japanese and the South Koreans were not openly attacking China. Japan, in recent times, seems to have abandoned its pacific policy to a policy of armed neutrality in Asia, but ready to protect the Japanese homeland.
In the first Trump administration, the Japanese were publicly goaded to develop their own nuclear umbrella. The Japanese did not publicly state their position, apart from saying the American – Japanese treaty of defence was sufficient. My guess is that the Chinese do not have expansionist ambitions on the Philippines except to contest fishing rights on disputed islands in the South China Sea, and Vietnam is capable of resisting Chinese ambitions. As for Taiwan, the eventual unification with the mainland is a foregone conclusion, with or without America acquiescence.
To make the new arms race palatable to the suffering electorate in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, politicians are now talking of a new concept of “DEFENCE DIVIDENDS,” meaning with expansion of defence industries in their neighbourhood, jobs will be created for working-class people who can either enlist in the armed forces or work in arms industries. The idea of defence dividends is not strange because when a country’s economy is put on war footing, there seems to be the appearance of full employment, which is a false prosperity against which the post Second World war American president and previous Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, David Dwight Eisenhower, warned against when he advised his country against being taken over by the “military industrial complex. “
There is, however, no doubt, that there is a growing hysteria about the possibility of an outbreak of war in Europe, and the rest of us cannot just ignore it because of our distance from the current theatre of the conflict in Eastern Europe. However, we can hope that, like all other regional wars of the past, since 1945, the Russian war in Ukraine will be contained because its spread and development into a nuclear confrontation is just too ghastly to be imagined.
