Ordinary people will pay the price of war, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

Days after a new report found that global arms spending had reached record highs, at £1970bn, rising in all five continents, Rishi Sunak announced he was putting UK defence spending ‘on a war footing’. 

Meanwhile, Grant Shapps, the UK’s defence secretary, argued that all Nato states should match the UK’s promised 2.5% spending of GDP on the military by 2030. 

His statement comes amid increased belligerent rhetoric that saw him make a speech in January describing a global shift ‘from a post-war to a pre-war world’. Other European leaders have echoed his words. The new Polish PM Donald Tusk said in March that Europe was in a pre-war era.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba joined the cacophony on 24 April, saying that ‘the era of peace in Europe is over’, after US politicians approved a $95 billion package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. 

Increasingly jingoistic rhetoric and spiralling spending on war appear to unite forces across the political spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic. Two weeks prior to Sunak’s promise of the boost to the arms budget, Labour leader Keir Starmer had promised to raise spending to 2.5% of GDP ‘as soon as resources allow’. 

A warfare state  

The announced move towards a pre-war situation requires the transformation of the welfare state into a warfare state. Pressed on where the money for the military spending would come from, Shapps struggled, but he noted that part of the funding could come from sacking 72,000 civil servants, and he refused to rule out cuts to the NHS and schools. 

And that’s it. There is, after all, a magic money tree. Its workings are not overly mysterious, though. To fund war abroad, establishments across the world are prepared to wage war on their populations at home. As we can see from the Russia-Ukraine war to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, too, the victims of the fighting will be ordinary men, women and children. 

None of this has to do with self-defence. The West still dwarfs its military competitors, with the US alone contributing to 37% of all spending, compared with nearest rival China at 12%. Meanwhile, Nato, excluding the US, outspends Russia by a factor greater than 3:1.

It should be obvious that Western arming of Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is centrally about shoring up Western interests and hemming in its competitors behind a military iron curtain in a renewed Cold War. 

But arms races can be hard to contain. The biggest rise in military spending in 2022 to 2023 in the world by region was in the Middle East, which stood at 9%. The logic is reminiscent of something the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once said, that ‘one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’

This is why socialists and the anti-war movement have been right to argue against the push for rearmament including within the trade union movement in recent years. This is why we have been right to caution against funding the West’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. This is why we are right to oppose the West’s support for Israel’s aggression in Gaza and across the Middle East. We have to redouble our efforts before wider war breaks out.