It was probably inevitable that the refusal of Spain to bend to Donald Trump and NATO’s demand that it, along with the other Nato allies, increase military spending to 5% of GDP would spark the US president’s ire. He was quick to threaten Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez with a tougher trade deal, including making them pay “twice as much” in tariffs than the countries that willingly did his bidding.
The new 5% commitment on national security agreed at the NATO summit in The Hague can be broken down, the UK government press release stated, into a projected split of 3.5% on ‘core defence’ and 1.5% on ‘resilience and security’, with a target date of 2035. Trump of course heralded it as a “great victory” and, most tellingly, said he hoped the money would be spent on buying US military hardware.
That’s something the British government couldn’t do quickly enough, swiftly putting in an order for 12 nuclear-capable F-35A fighter jets from US manufacturer Lockheed Martin, at a cost of $80-100 million each – the total cost around the same amount as the chancellor Rachel Reeves is fighting to cut from PIP and Universal Credit payments. These jets will be stationed at RAF Marham near Peterborough, and armed with US B61-12 nuclear bombs, which will be stored either at RAF/USAF Lakenheath or RAF Marham; they will be allocated to NATO’s airborne division.
Unlike the nuclear-capable jets stationed at US airforce-controlled Lakenheath airbase, which are US military assets, these new jets coming to Marham, and the weapons on them, are a new addition to Britain’s nuclear weapons forces. Currently Britain’s nuclear weapons are located on submarines, hence sea-launched by the Navy. This new step will add air-borne nuclear weapons to the UK arsenal for the first time since. Britain last had air-borne nuclear weapons in 1998, when they were dismantled by Blair’s government.
Also agreed at The Hague was a commitment by NATO members to maintaining the commitment to collective defence under Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty, despite Trump causing some anxiety by apparently suggesting his definition of collective defence might differ from that of the other countries.
There are massive global impacts of the outcome of the summit, not least in terms of climate, military emissions and social decay. The big question for Britain is where the money will come from. The chancellor’s spending review published earlier this month set a target of 2.6% by 2027 for defence, but now, with the new 5% target, it will be 4.1% by 2027. This government will presumably take it from social spending. The cost will be enormous.
The announcement of all this came alongside the publication of the National Security Strategy, with an emphasis on a ‘whole society’ approach which aligns security and defence objectives to jobs, economic opportunities and growth. It also includes a wider definition of security such as energy security and cracking down on people smuggling gangs. The big stress is on sovereign capability – making and controlling things ‘in house’ such as steel production and securing supply chains – and on science, education, trade and frontier technology, alongside ‘soft power’ such as the MI5 and MI6 spy operations.
All this ties in with the government’s new industrial strategy, which includes £86 billion for research and development to drive growth in technologies for economic and military competitiveness, while defending public services and businesses, transport and energy sectors against cyber attacks and sabotage.
So how should the anti-war and peace movement respond to this increased militarism and British nuclear proliferation in a new arms race?
Clearly ‘military Keynesianism’, promoting military spending as an economic benefit, does not add up. We must use the work done for the Alternative Defence Review in the trade unions and wider society, to demonstrate the harms of the ‘defence dividend’ approach and specifically how military spending is a much lower economic and employment multiplier than other public investments, meaning it generates less overall economic activity and jobs and fewer secondary benefits than spending on essential services or infrastructure and on job rich technology, particularly renewables.
We must also focus on opposing militarisation in education, in particular the army recruitment propaganda being targeted at young people in schools through a tie up between the Ministry of Defence and Department for Education.
Yes we need a whole society approach, but one that says no to nuclear weapons escalation, one that recognises resilience and security come from investment in communities, in welfare, in good jobs and decent housing and education, not on weapons of war.
Join CND and StW this Saturday, 28 June, at the RAF Marham emergency protest