“The future battlefield” said Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonsson in an interview in Svenska Dagbladet on 2 August last year – as if it were already on the calendar. The Government-sponsored People and Defence meeting in January was full of even more alarmist statements. Of course, Russia was in the firing line.
But no-one can believe that Russia, which has such problems with Ukraine – a quarter of its size – would voluntarily go to war with the whole of Western Europe plus the US, together eight times its size? There must be something else behind all the war mongering.
Six suggestions:
– The rulers have noticed that the inhabitants are getting angrier and angrier about the mismanagement of the economy and society since at least 1990. An external enemy to blame can then be a good thing to have, to make opposition illegitimate and possible to lock up as anti-national if it continues to make trouble. Statewatch, which monitors states’ authoritarian tendencies, has warned that the EU is beginning to equate environmental movements with terrorism, and more of that is sure to come if they are allowed to continue.
– They also realise that they are increasingly losing ground economically to East Asia because of all the outsourcing Western oligarchs have engaged in since the 1980s. At the same time, they realise that under the pretext of a national emergency, Russia has managed to push its oligarchs aside and actually increase its production capacity. Maybe they want to follow suit? But that would require a national emergency first, real or fake. Already Keynes complained that the bourgeoisie cannot imagine any other reason for public investment than military*), and there are many indications that they still cannot. Otherwise, the climate issue would be a sufficient pretext for investment, but there is less enthusiasm there.
– Another effect of the backlog may be that they have been gripped by fear of possible disruptions in raw material supplies from around the world. Perhaps China is offering better terms to commodity countries? And NATO does indeed consider interruptions in the supply of raw materials to be a cause of war (see p 24). But in order to get the foot soldiers to accept an attack on a peaceful country in the periphery, a threat must be painted in good time, preferably spiced with a colonial contempt for natives of the kind that has been brought up in connection with the Gaza war.
– The war industry is often portrayed as a player with a strong interest in new wars, and Eisenhower already in the 50s warned of what it can do. The increase in the military budget to 2% of GDP that is being considered in Western Europe corresponds, according to the British ex-diplomat Ian Proud, to an increase in the sales of the US war industry of about USD 20 billion. In fact, it would be possible to put resources into any industry – but as Keynes pointed out, only weapons are acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Not for economic but for political reasons – it believes that everything else should be controlled by individual companies, the ‘market’, not the state. But to gain political acceptance for favouring the war industry in particular, threats are needed.
– Maybe it’s just about the jobs in the NATO bureaucracy? In any case, fear of closure was what Cold War expert George Kennan saw as the reason for NATO’s increased alarmism after 2000. But why would NATO governments go along with it?
– And that brings us to what George Orwell saw as the reason for incompetent British policy in the 1930s: institutional idiocy. They have such a thick stuffing of money between themselves and reality that they don’t need to know what anything is like, Orwell said of the rentier politicians of the time. They obviously believe, for example, that the numbers on the screens at the stock exchange are the real economy, so why shouldn’t they believe that the world situation is whatever a NATO bureaucrat says it is to get more money for his institution?
Maybe there is some other possible reason? Or maybe everyone is true?
Of course it is not a real, hot war they want. Such a war risks wiping out even themselves – or at least their power base. They want a cold war, like in the 1950s. From their point of view, it was an excellent decade, completely complacent and economically very successful. There is just one small problem.
Cold war means brinkmanship, i.e. you always have to dare to go to the edge of the cliff without falling off. And the risk of falling into a hot nuclear war is high. The only reason we’re not all dead is that Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was on duty on 26 September 1983, mistrusted the Soviet missile warning system and checked it again. He had time to do so: it would take half an hour for the missiles to reach Soviet territory. With today’s shorter times, nobody has that time.
There is another problem – that a cold war is at the expense of other more necessary investments. So it’s a problem for us to solve, the political establishment doesn’t care.
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* Footnote: According to Mark Blyth: Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea, Oxford University Press 2013. Blyth quotes an interview in New Republic 29 juli 1940, which isn’t available at the internet.
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