One after another, European factories shut down, and politicians and policymakers are suggesting replacing them with weapon factories. Worse yet, European Union bureaucrats endorse such populist absurdities. They believe new arms manufacturing will provide a solution to the increasing unemployment problem, as well as Trump’s pressure to spend more militaristically.
They should! The Kikimora, Vodnik and Vova monsters are lurking behind the Ukrainian valleys! The first two are only demons if you believe in them, but the third one is in flesh and blood, and Trump says he will allow Vova to eat up Europeans if they do not increase their military spending. As a result, Europeans (except the Spaniards) agreed to save themselves from Trump’s fickle ire if not the Russian menace.
Increasing military spending as a cure to economic distress has been an age-old solution since the Romans; the French Revolutionists had taken the pavements apart and reinstalled them so the monetary turnover would calm the jobless masses! Americans also know! Their GNP grew 75% from 1939 to 1944 thanks to the skyrocketed military production! British economist John Maynard Keynes had also recommended increases in total spending to boost aggregate demand, with one proviso: the nation should have productive capacity!
The Economist warns that increasing only the military production in the EU would work backward; individual countries do not have enough raw materials for such production, and they do not have enough savings to pay for the imports, i.e., not the required productive capacity. European governments cannot get the necessary funds to increase military production from their social programs, which have already been experiencing bottlenecks. Just look at the discontent all over Europe. In short, neither Keynesian nor Trumpian theories are going to save the EU car industry from the clutches of the Chinese car companies.
If the EU bureaucrats venture out of their lavish Brussels chateaus and manors, they would see the economic difficulties ordinary people suffer in Europe; they don’t need more armies or more modern weapons. They don’t feel threatened by Russia or China. Ordinary citizens of any European country can understand the aches and pains of Ukrainians; but it must be difficult to fathom why on earth their governments are exasperating their suffering by providing arms to the fascists acting as the running dogs of American Zionists, neocons and the interventionists-globalists in their quest to open the “Road to Peking through Moscow.”
Instead, the EU could perfectly mediate the conflict that Russia started by occupying Crimea in 2014. Actually, they were doing it when they started the Minsk Talks, but U.S. President George Bush sabotaged it. The Europeans had a second chance in 2022 when the representatives of both sides wrote up a draft agreement to be signed by their perspective leaders. But the leading European powers were trying to prevent the successful conclusion of the Istanbul talks; then-Prime Minister of Great Britain Boris Johnson, rushing back from conferring with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington to Kyiv, asked Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to sign the Istanbul Agreement and promised to continue providing arms to Ukraine. Despite the joint efforts of Davit Arakhamia, the chair of the parliamentary faction of the ruling party of Ukraine and the British government, Zelenskyy, himself, confessed he was ready to sign the Istanbul agreement before talking to Johnson.
Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, and the Europeans have not been compensated by the U.S. for the arms they gave to Ukraine. Quite the contrary, Trump chastized them for prolonging yet another “unending war of Biden.”
Europeans proved that they couldn’t cooperate among themselves to deliver alms-like help to Ukrainians with bombs and hand grenades. When they looked at their capabilities to defend against Russia, they turned their heads toward Türkiye, and they saw a probable member of the prospective European Armed Forces that they kept denying membership in the EU. Türkiye was not interested in their stinking European Army. Now they are pushing their Eurofighter warplanes to grease Türkiye’s palms. But the Türkiye-EU relationship is quite a different matter! Let’s continue to go through European needs for military power or lack thereof!
So, when you don’t have the initial money to convert your closed-down car factories into tank and rocket plants, what do you do? You go around and look for prospective partners. Lo and behold! You have your American friends ready to invest in your projects. Only with one caveat: You have to show your American friends that those tanks, armored personnel carriers and rockets will have guaranteed buyers.
“No problem!” you think; the U.S. government has been pushing your government to increase your military budget: “Now our joint defense mechanism, NATO, should buy them from us.” But nooo! That was the previous U.S. government! The present one asks you to increase your military investments but also to increase your share in the joint defense mechanism. Well, what could the poor European pariahs do? They compel their old Dutch prime minister, in his new outfit of NATO chief, to butter Trump up by calling him “Daddy!”
We’ll see if it works. Trump gladly accepted the appellation, but in return, he did not promise anything. If I know my Europeans, they will never ever go back to the 1930s-40s militarization levels. Young Europeans prefer to go to dance halls rather than military barracks! Gilbert Doctorow, a professional Russia watcher and graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975), calls the last NATO Summit a disaster and Europe a “dead man walking.”
Walter Aubrig and Olivier Eichenlaub, in their article titled “De-Westernizing Europe” on the website of the Iliade Institute for Long European Memory, claim the “Western” Europe is facing a profound identity crisis; and they argue “the idea of a unified Western world” is being challenged more than it has been since the Cold War. Aubrig and Eichenlaub, both political scientists, say that with the increased American cultural and ideological dominance, “a political and spiritual decoupling – a de-Westernization” is going to happen necessarily if Europeans want to keep their own civilizational legacy.
It is hard to say whether the American impact on Europe will go that deep in military matters and whether NATO will turn into a specter if Europeans do not come up with 3% of their GDP in their defense budget. However, we can see that not only Europe, but Pink Floyd said half a century ago, “All in all, you're just another brick in the wall,” and we don’t need Trump’s “thought control” and “no dark sarcasm in the classroom.” Daddy Donald “should leave them kids alone.”
