Back in 2010, author and Guardian columnist Sir Simon Jenkins wrote an article arguing for the defence budget to be completely scrapped: “I don’t mean nibble at it or slice it” he wrote, “I mean cut it, all £45bn of it.”
It was in response to the then Chancellor, George Osborne, asking the public for a “once in a generation” radical suggestion as to what superfluous government spending could be reasonably eliminated that would represent a significant saving, given the straightened position of the Treasury following the 2008/9 financial crisis.
Jenkins reminded us that at the end of the cold war, in the 1990s, there was much talk of a peace dividend, but that this sent the defence industry into a frenzied search for new hobgoblins with which to create “a fantasy proposition that some unspecified but potent ‘enemy’ lurked in the seas and skies around Britain.” The industry conjured up a new “war” jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide: “The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf”, he wrote.
Jenkins continued: “No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham and Leeds in their sights.”
Yet for the previous 20 years, he said, Britain’s armed forces had encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation’s security. And when UK PM Gordon Brown was asked earlier in 2010 why he was standing in an Afghan desert, he had to claim absurdly that he was “making London’s streets safer”. The ludicrous propaganda phrases never vary. On the lips of every current politician robotically promoting increased “defence” spending are the words: “To meet growing security threats”.
From the end of the cold war, NATO became an alliance in search of a purpose, as many advocated for it to be dismantled, in the same way the Soviet Union had dismantled the Warsaw Pact, as there was no more need for it.
The U.K. defence budget this year is expected to reach between £62bn and £70bn, prioritising capital investment over day-to-day spending, and MPs never tire of clamouring for more taxpayers’ money to be diverted to arms manufacturers. NATO does not wage any war for a defined end, but to maintain a permanent state of war footing, without any official declaration of war. It has become the economic model of leading NATO countries, which keeps its populaces submissive, and is one of the most effective ways of transferring money from the taxpaying public to the pockets of the plutocracy, or what author Paul Cudenec calls the criminocracy.
Greek economist and author Yanis Varoufakis told Owen Jones in an interview that when Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran “it was lamentable that Trump had no Plan B, but it was even worse because he had no Plan A.”
Varoufakis also stated that the U.S. was dragged into attacking Iran by Netanyahu, whose reasons were the same as those for which he pursued the war in South Lebanon, the bombing of Yemen and the repeated invasions of Syria: because he needs to distract all of us from the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza.
He went on to say that the Knesset – the Israeli Parliament – recently passed a law which effectively cements Israel’s transition from an apartheid state to a genocide state because it makes it “legal” to hang Palestinians accused of killing Israelis in the Occupied Territories.
Varoufakis credits his friend Julian Assange with having made the point in 2004 that none of the wars that the U.S. was waging — Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and so on — had any aim of victory. Their purpose was simply permanent war. Varoufakis said: “It’s a form of ‘military’ Keynesianism, the economic model by which the American economy grows, and the military-industrial complex is the industry policy of the U.S.” Keynesian economics is named after the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and is based on deficit spending to generate employment in a weak economy. But Keynes advocated it “in the interests of peace and prosperity” not “war and destruction”. In other words, the American economy is sustained by killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of civilians in foreign lands, and a percentage of U.S. and allied military personnel. And we call it “defence” spending, because military-aligned politicians claim it is justified under far-fetched and easily disprovable invented threats.
But the grand halls and corridors of authority built on foundations of arrogance and self-interest are trembling and their weaknesses being exposed. We are in the age of reckoning.