Des Derwin (personal view).
The rearmament and defence panic among European rulers can be dated to Trump’s entry to the White House and his pivot of US imperial power away from support for Ukraine, and Europe, and towards alignment with Putin’s Russia. The concern for European defence by a sector of the European left, including a section of the Ukraine solidarity movement (East and West), can be similarly dated.
This assumption of MAGA, Musk and Vance to power has indeed altered the international configuration for Europe, and Ukraine. But to what extent should it essentially alter the outlook of the European working class or, more immediately, the European left, and, in particular, the Ukraine solidarity movement in the European left?
Europe, or the EU (which cannot formally claim to be a military bloc), a capitalist complex with imperialist constituents, has had its powerful ally, guarantor and arms supplier removed at a stroke. Actually the whole of Western imperialism, the EU, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. has had this hole torn in its flank. Simultaneously the biggest trading partner and investor – the same entity as the erstwhile ‘protector’ – becomes the initiator of a trade war!
Suddenly the European imperialist bloc needs acceleration to a military-industrial complex of its own. To justify this as defence a threatening enemy is needed. As always. Up go the speeches, articles, broadcasts, posts and reposts about threats, creating fear and banging the drums of war. The enemy is Russia. A relatively remote threat to ‘Europe’ since 2022 now jumps up to an existential hazard. Russia, which after three years of hammering Ukraine since the full-scale invasion has been held to a front of a fifth of Ukraine at enormous cost to Russia (facts not a categorical error), has JUST NOW become an imminent danger to ‘Europe’. Russian aggression has arrived JUST NOW! The onward march of Russian forces has not been necessarily so, as described by Phillips P OBrien (Phillip’s Newsletter, Weekend Update 129, 20th April 2025), though the loss of US aid might well boost it. What HAS arrived just now is the Trump regime and the Trump withdrawal.
Withdrawal from the EU, from NATO and Ukraine. For Ukraine the gap must be filled. As a matter of life and death. So Ukrainians begin to talk, or talk much louder – as Europe does – about Russia being a threat to EUROPE, the EU, to European infrastructure and cyber communications. Now Europe must build up a collective defence as Europe, as if the EU was a state, a military entity. (Before, arms for Ukraine were from individual states, within and without the EU).
Ukrainian intellectuals, already and understandably sympathetic to the EU as a whole entity, because of Ukraine’s valid and democratic orientation to the EU as an alternative to Putinist tyranny in Ukraine, have taken up the banner of a strong Europe. They have found an echo in a portion of the Western left anxious to show close solidarity with Ukrainians. Notably among social democrats who more easily identify with their own state and its defence, who have, to their great credit, stood with Ukraine (when a large part of the ‘revolutionary’ left did not), and who are especially strong in the Nordic countries near to Russia.
The grass in the EU IS greener than in Putin’s prison of nations. For EU citizens anyway. Ukrainian identification with it is understandable. It is also understandable that arms being cut off or curtailed from the US would lead to an immediate awakening of the idea of arms from ‘Europe’ on a comparable level. And the EU itself is doing the same: convening heads of state to vote €800 billion in rearmament. Russia is cited, all of a sudden, and not that Trump has left Europe, and its economic and global sensitivities, in the cold. A cold WORLD – not just a European one where imaginary tanks from the East cannot be countered by European drones, which apparently Ukraine could field but Germany or France could not. A world in which battleship Europe must now be rearmed to survive alongside ALL the other adversaries, including – now – Trump’s United States.
Trump’s US from which the clear and present danger, the immediate and huge threat, has come. The idea of scaremongering about Russian ships off the Irish coast when Trump is actually moving to devastate the Irish economy is head fixing mixed with blind ideology. Already planned improvements to sick and minimum pay for Irish workers have been postponed as part of crisis supports to businesses. Have we all forgotten the old Cold War lampoon, ‘The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!’
If the solidarity left gets behind general European rearmament we will play right into the hands of the campist and surrender left. They mobilise with the slogan ‘welfare not warfare’, a slogan naturally supportable from an anti-austerity and progressive point of view. In Ireland the anti-solidarity left mobilises around the defence of neutrality from any military bloc. These correct slogans will be used against the arming of Ukraine, as ‘peace’ and ‘anti-war’ has been used all along. They will be doubly used if the solidarity left identifies with battleship EUROPE. But this time ‘Europe’ is to arm up exponentially AND AT A TIME – in Britain – of cruel cuts in social spending.
Europe’s rulers want to increase general arms spending by €800 billion. “Europe is ready to assume its responsibilities. ReArm Europe could mobilise close to EUR 800 billion for a safe and resilient Europe. We will continue working closely with our partners in NATO. This is a moment for Europe. And we are ready to step up. (cf. EU Commission website, ‘Press statement by President Von der Leyen on the defence package’, 4th March 2025). “At an emergency summit on defence policy, national leaders agreed to back a plan to free up potentially hundreds of billions of euros, for states to spend on their militaries and defence” (‘Irish Times’, 21st March 2025).
The cover for general rearmament with a veil of assistance to Ukraine, and the actual difference between the two, can be measured in euro and cents. “Europe’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, had high hopes of being able to mobilize as much as €40 billion of military aid [that is one-twentieth of the general rearming budget -DD] to shore up Ukraine’s position on the battlefield and strengthen its hand in upcoming talks with Russia” (Politico, 20th March 2025). Even one-twentieth was too much for Ukraine. “But as EU leaders wound up their gathering in Brussels on Thursday, the plan lay in tatters — not quite dead, but dramatically downgraded from its original ambition”.
By no means can ‘Europe’ or the EU or ‘the West’ be cast as a paragon of justice, even though liberal parliamentary democracy must be defended from authoritarianism. Internally, especially, with the AfD more likely to threaten German democracy than Russian tanks. Where exactly are Hungary and Italy situated? And externally, with US authoritarianism, associating with the European far right, looming as big as Russian authoritarianism. Allusions to the Baltic states never seem to be accompanied with any allusions to, or awareness of, Palestine. Yet some EU counties are arming a genocide that has, I’m sorry to compare, passed in horror and intensity even what Putin is inflicting on Ukraine. Parallel to this is the development of the repression of Palestine solidarity in the heart of liberal Europe, Germany, Austria and Britain. In some cases Trumpist methods have already visited this continent. There is already a ‘Fortress Europe’, to keep out and scapegoat asylum seekers and immigrants. There is now in some places a turn against the rights and benefits of Ukrainian refugees.
Is the Greek experience at the hands of the EU metropolis to be forgotten? In the constitutional heart of Europe, in France (where incidentally a far right President was until recently a very real prospect), there is rule by decree. “In April 2023, President Macron enacted his government’s contentious pension reforms, raising the state pension age from sixty-two to sixty-four — a deeply unpopular move that was pushed through by bypassing any vote in Parliament. All of this was followed by relentless police violence and crackdowns against protests” (Jacobin 8th March 2024).
If the arming and defence of Ukraine, and Ukraine’s right to get military assistance how they choose, is a matter for Ukrainians, please allow all Europeans to have an opinion on the arming and militarization of Europe, and of their own European countries.
While Ukraine’s urgent defence needs are understandable, the abandonment by Trump’s US of Ukraine cannot be the trigger for a sudden new interest in a strong rearming Europe that can substitute for US aid. The necessary defence of Ukraine (assisted for its own selfish reasons by ‘Europe’) and the build up of the military might of European imperialism – an imperialist actor like the others – are two different things which must not be entangled. The distinction between the two is clear to European rulers even in the different budgets they have agreed for Ukraine and for Europe.
After opposing the characterisation of the war as a ‘proxy inter-imperialist war’ and supporting Ukraine’s struggle of national defence, the solidarity left cannot be drawn into war-readiness for a real inter-imperialist conflict.
23rd April 2025
Irish Left With Ukraine - Neither Moscow nor Washington 
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