NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and US President Donald Trump at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague. Photo Martijn Beekman / NATO / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
The risk of an all-out conflict between NATO and Russia is higher now than at any point in the cold war period. The Ukraine war has increasingly become NATO’s proxy war with Russia.
Britain’s working class needs to take stock of where the EU/NATO war machine is taking us. The talk about an EU reset is about military spending. We are told that we are already at war. Britain is a member of NATO so there is a truth there.
Has there ever been a period where the population has been so pressured into the inevitability of war without even a question of why are we to join this war?
It is ten years since the vote to leave the EU, but just one year since the summit where Starmer entered into “a new strategic partnership” with the EU. This was mostly about “defence” – by which capitalists mean war; we should not be fooled.
This is embedded in the EU-UK joint statement, for instance paragraph 11 which says, “In line with our shared security interests, we attach particular importance to collaboration on defence. For the UK and those EU Member States who are NATO Allies, NATO remains the cornerstone of their collective defence.”
This set in train activity aiming to enmesh Britain into the EU again and especially the European Defence Mechanism, much of it out of sight.
The European Parliament is not coy, saying in May that it welcomed closer engagement, and framing the UK as a key strategic partner. It went on to argue for the “pragmatic inclusion, regulatory alignment and strengthened industrial integration” of Britain “into the European defence architecture”.
That European defence architecture is taking a number of forms. In April, the German government entered into a strategic defence partnership with Ukraine, the first time it has done so with a country at war.
That agreement paved the way for co-production of weapons systems, including long-range drones and missiles. And the first drone was produced less than two months later.
The defence architecture is taking a different form in France, with a change to their nuclear doctrine to “forward deterrence”. According to a UK parliamentary research paper, this envisages the temporary deployment of French nuclear aircraft to allied countries in times of crisis.
The EU economic model is now focused on propping up capitalism with defence spending. Starmer has embraced this model from the outset. But as we saw with ministerial resignations, the only official debate is with those in his party who want to spend more.
The working class challenge is this: How do we extract ourselves from this EU/NATO war machine? That must begin with a debate about the big questions: who wants this war and why?