After six months of diplomatic overtures to Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has signalled he is ready to escalate the West’s proxy war with Russia after meeting NATO allies on 14 July.
Expressing his disappointment with Putin, Trump announced the US will, after all, continue new weapons shipments to Ukraine. He also gave the Russian leader fifty days to end the war or face secondary tariffs on countries continuing to purchase Russian exports, principally oil.
While few are taking the threat of secondary tariffs seriously, proponents of the West’s proxy war with Russia are reacting with jubilation to Trump’s U-turn on sending new weapons shipments to Ukraine. The Economist called the move ‘cynical’ but ‘welcome’ on 16 July.
Trump’s war
In a major provocation, furthermore, Trump signalled that he supported Ukrainian strikes on Moscow and St Petersburg using long-range US weapons. Although he backtracked the next day, his outburst will undoubtedly help to normalise the idea that Ukraine, supported by the West, can respond to the Russian invasion by mounting attacks on Russian soil.
We need only look back just over six weeks to see the risks. Ukraine’s surprise drone strike on Russia’s nuclear bombers in early June could have caused significant, nuclear escalation, had any of the aircraft been armed with atomic weapons. Unsurprisingly, Moscow has since intensified its air attacks on Ukraine, leading to increased numbers of civilian casualties.
Yet the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians is hardly at the forefront for Trump and his NATO allies. After all, the West practically sabotaged a deal being done in spring 2022 for the carnage to end. Joe Biden’s primary goal was to exploit Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to bleed the Russian army and weaken Moscow’s ability to intervene abroad. It was hardly to maintain international law, as was evident from his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
But the conundrum for the Western alliance was how and where to stop. While Russia’s initial goals of seizing Kyiv and placing a more pliant government in control, in effect to reverse years of NATO westward expansion, its performance on the battlefield improved. Ever since the failure of Ukraine summer offensive in 2023, it is the Russian army that has had the upper hand. It is now closing in on key towns like Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka and Kupiansk on the eastern front.
Biden’s legacy
Trump’s initial hope on becoming president was to woo Putin away from China, which he rightly views as the US’s main global challenger. It is clear however that his various peace proposals over the last six months were never enough for Moscow, which now has the upper hand in Ukraine, and too much for Ukraine’s beleaguered nationalist elites and their Western backers. In fact, after all the money spent to maintain the war effort against Russia, pulling out of Ukraine is now perceived as much of a defeat for the Western powers as it would be for Moscow.
Terrified of having to make more concessions to Moscow to get a peace done than had been on offer in spring 2022, Trump and the Western powers have again doubled down. But the problem for them remains that they have no clear exit strategy. New weapons supplies may help Ukraine slow Russian advances. But the fundamental problem remains that Ukraine is facing mounting challenges mobilising the manpower and maintaining the morale to keep the war going. As its smaller army gets stretched by Russia’s summer offensive, Ukraine is finding it ever harder to hold its defensive lines.
Unsurprisingly, many ordinary Ukrainians are increasingly war weary, due not just to the threat of Russian advances, but also to the bleak future on the horizon. Countries resisting imperialist attack have often rallied when they believe in a better tomorrow. For many Ukrainians, watching their corrupt elites in wartime evade the draft, make vast amounts of war profits, and wager the future of their country on ever greater dependence on the West cannot be a galvanising prospect.
Nothing symbolises the reasons for the widespread pessimism more than the recent governmental reshuffle by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He has just promoted Yuliia Svyrydenko to the position of PM. Svyrydenko was a key player in Ukraine’s recent mineral deal with Trump, which is symbolic for how Ukraine’s embattled political leadership continues to sell the country’s future bit by bit to the US in order to maintain the war with Russia. That can hardly be a motivation for ordinary people to keep fighting.
Europe’s burden
Meanwhile, Trump appears to have made his decision to continue arming Ukraine contingent on Europe writing the cheque. This re-affirms the trans-Atlantic relationship as one where Europe is subordinate to the US, visible already in, say, Germany’s meek acceptance of the blowing up of Nord Stream 2, which we now know is unlikely to have been a Russian operation.
The US under Trump is demanding the Europeans spend more on defence, partly in order to subsidise US arms spending. Germany for instance has promised to buy US-made air defence systems to then donate to Ukraine. The expenditure will be part of the agreed 3.5 percent hike in defence spending across NATO. But the underlying question is who will pay?
Growing arms expenditure in Europe will not come from taxing the rich, but as a cost for working people across the continent. Recent studies by the likes of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Fit for war by 2030? European rearmament efforts vis-à-vis Russia) suggest Europe lags far behind Russia in terms of military production and remains technologically dependent on the US. Attempts to reverse this will need to overcome the limited scale and the fragmentation in the European military sphere.
But this is unlikely in the short term, as coordinating the military capacity of 27 member states requires a level of political cohesion that is simply missing in Europe. Witness how France and Italy have not followed Germany in buying US materiel to send on to Ukraine. So, all the talk of the return of military Keynesianism as a quick fix to pull Europe’s sinking economy back up is just pie in the sky. What increased military spending will do, however, is lead to more cuts to welfare.
This is particularly evident in Britain, where Keir Starmer’s government has made deeply unpopular cuts to international aid, Winter Fuel Allowance and disability benefits, while sticking to the two-child benefit cap, explicitly linking some of these austerity measures to the need to spend more on the military. Starmer has even been at the forefront of attempts at orchestrating a future European military presence in Ukraine in the hypothetical eventuality of that being agreed to as part of a peace agreement.
It cannot be surprising that Starmer’s government is also at the forefront of suppressing antiwar activism and opposition to austerity. War abroad can only be financed by war at home: on welfare and democracy. The clampdown on protest rights, symbolised by the harsh policing of pro-Palestine demonstrations, taking to court of figures like Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition and Ben Jamal of the PSC, and the banning of Palestine Action, to name a few, has been accompanied by ritual removal of the whip to Labour MPs who reject the logic of replacing the welfare state with the warfare state.
Rather than a PM who fawns over Donald Trump, we need a clean break with the traditional policy of toeing the line and bowing to the United States. What we need is a new approach that will prioritise peace and justice abroad and at home. In Ukraine, that means that there needs to be a serious push for genuine and serious negotiations involving all sides, aiming for a deal akin to the one in spring 2022. That is in the best interests of ordinary Ukrainians, but also Russians and Europeans. Such a policy shift, though, will not come from the establishment, but from the pressure of millions of ordinary people mobilised on the streets for an alternative foreign policy.