The strange new world of European rearmament

One of the most famous anti-militarist books of the 1930s in the US was War Is A Racket by a retired Marine general, Smedley Butler.¹

Gen. Smedley Butler (1929)

It takes some imagination now to recall how strongly an anti-militarist sentiment became dominant in the US during the 1920s and 1930s. That position had both left and right versions. The rightwing version stemmed from the anti-Wilsonian Isolationists who successfully blocked the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles by the United States. The Republican Isolationists tended to be deeply suspicious of the kind of liberal internationalism that Wilson and the Versailles Treaty represented. Their position was essentially nationalist and one that generally held in contempt the notion of the US being bound by international law. The fact that the Versailles Treaty really was disastrous is not any kind of validation of the Isolationists’ blinkered perspective.

When I refer to Trump and the MAGA crowd as rightwing isolationist, it’s because their fundamental outlook – leaving aside the question of whether Trump himself can even formulate a foreign-policy strategic outlook in his own head – is lawless nationalism. The nastiest moment of rightwing isolationism in the US was when famous figures like Charles Lindbergh openly declared their admiration for Hitler Germany. Woody Guthrie wrote a memorable polemical folk song about “Lindy” and the America First movement.²

The ”Wheeler, Clark, and Nye” in the lyrics referred to rightwing isolationist Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri

Former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote a long treatise presenting a post-World War II Old Right Isolationism that was actually first published in 2011: Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. He had begun writing it in 1944 and completed the manuscript in 1963.

Another look of the Old Right isolationism that became an important current of rightwing sentiment after the Second World War is provided by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), one of the five books published on the results of the famous Studies on Prejudice project directed by Max Horkheimer.³

But there was also plenty of criticism of militarism from the left and progressives, too. One of Smedley’s most famous statements was published in 1935 in a socialist magazine, Common Sense:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.⁴ [my emphasis]

The left generally was critical of American militarism in the 1930s but were also aware of the bad acts and strategic dangers coming from Mussolini in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Hitler Germany’s threats to its neighbors, notably during the Spanish Civil War. Longshore workers’ unions and other, for instance, demanded embargoes of scrap metal shipments to Japan, which had militarily attacked the Chinese territory of Mongolia in 1931.

There was a particular twist in the views of some of the left when the Soviet Union entered into the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. For both the Germans and the Russians, it was a cold-bloodedly realist foreign policy move. Hitler got to start his war against Britain and France without having to worry about the Soviets opening a two-front war against them.⁵

The German journal Osteuropa devoted a full issue in 2009 to that agreement⁶, drawing on the documentation available in 2009, which obviously provided much more detail on the negotiations and the motives of the major actors than was publicly available in 1939. Their front cover provided this symbolic framing:

But part of the deal was cooperation on political propaganda and publicity. So publications from Soviet-aligned Communist parties that either directly followed the official Comintern (the Soviet-headed world organization of Communist Parties) positions or took some direction from them reflected tended to represent the British-French war against Hitler Germany as an “imperialist” war for which they and not the Axis powers were primarily to blame.

The leading American author Theodore Dreiser published a book in 1941 called America Is Worth Saving, which took a similarly critical view of the cause of Britain and France, though with considerably more literary flair than other left-leaning writers generally achieved in their pamphlets. For instance, he poked fun at the chronic fascination of Britain for Americans - which of course continues to this day:

We are as a people what Professor Freud calls masochistic. Our greatest thrill is being kicked in the tail - as long as England, the object of our blind adoration, does the kicking. In fact our national motto in so far as our relation to dear old England is concerned is: "Kick me again, daddy!" Kick me and kick me again, please.

A few weeks after Germany invaded Poland, the head of the US Communist Party 1930-1945, Earl Browder, evaluated the situation this way:

Capitalist Germany, imperialist Germany, is at war with capitalist-imperialist Britain and France. Even those who slander the Soviet Union admit by their very slanders that it is unreasonable to expect the imperialist powers to maintain peace, and by inference demand that the socialist Soviet Union should promote peace among them. …

This war is a continuation of the last World War, with no difference in essence or principle. It is brought about by the fundamental contradictions of monopoly capitalism. It is an expression of the general crisis of the capitalist system, and in turn it deepens and intensifies that crisis. …

As a consequence, one of the first developments is the rapid disappearance of the differences between the so-called democratic and fascist capitalist states, which become indistinguishable insofar as their dictatorial character is concerned …⁷

I picked an Earl Browder quote to get the chance to mention one of the more interesting factoids of the current, moment which is that Earl was the grandfather of Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, who is currently one of the West’s most prominent critics of Putin’s regime in Russia.

When the “so-called democratic and fascist capitalist states” of the USA, Britain, and France made an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1944, Earl Browder and his party quickly recognized it as a war between the “democratic” camp of the Allied side and the fascist Axis powers.

Because pragmatic calculations of national interests, based on inherently limited knowledge of the full intentions of other countries, is such a prominent reality in world politics, it would be hard to say that Earl Browder’s either before or after Germany’s invasion of Poland was entirely wrong. Britain and France in 1939 were playing hard-nosed pragmatic politics, too, although it’s easy to make the argument in retrospect that they were playing it badly. Britain and France really were looking at the advantages they might derive from Germany and the Soviet Union pulverizing each other in a war. It’s also true that if they had rejected the Munich deal with Hitler in 1938, they would have had to go to war with Germany in 1938 – but they would also have been able to make a common practical cause with the USSR immediately, therefore going to war with Germany over the Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland with a far better position than that in which they did go to war just a year later over Germany’s invasion of Poland.

The shadows of the past today

All of this provides some important historical context for understanding the current debate over European rearmament and the various ways of viewing it politically. All we can say with very large confidence at the moment is that the European countries – most of them, anyway – see Russia as a new kind of threat, one at least more urgent than they did in 2021 or even 2024. The second Trump Presidency has increased that urgency by the Orange Anomaly openly declaring that he will not publicly state his commitment to previous NATO defense arrangements, and by his military threats against NATO members Denmark and Canada.

A great deal of routine diplomacy involves blowing smoke at other countries.

But the current European concerns, however much hot air they may generate, are real and substantial. And so we are already in the beginning of what promises to be years of debate in Europe about military buildups and their costs as well. And the “guns and butter” debate is made much harder by the notorious conservative European position of making a fetish out of deficit-reduction and treating taxing billionaires as a sacred neoliberal taboo.

Ben Wray in the social-democratic Jacobin takes on the current guns-and-butter debate in Europe.⁸ And he raises important points that need to be addressed. One is that part of what is happening is a reliance on “military Keynesianism” by Germany and other European countries, which is a way that Germany in particular can have the manufacturing of military equipment replace the decline of car production.

And he makes three important points about military Keynesianism: one, it has a lower “multiplier effect” on the economy than most other types of public spending. Two, the need for (or addiction to) high military spending will tempt political and economic elites to try to sustain “a constant state of war.” Three, “Europe and Germany simply do not have the technological prowess to compete with the United States as a producer of cutting-edge military hardware and software.”

But those are all matters on which European policymakers have choices. The reason economists give for the lower “multiplier effect” of military spending compared to civilian outlays is that military production is capital-intensive. But a big part of what makes it so is that private military producers are allowed obscene profits and the kinds of cost overruns governments don’t allow with, say, companies renovating highway bridges. The risk is there, but Europeans governments can reduce that risk if they set that as a serious goal.

Yes, governments will be tempted to look more favorably on military interventions if they have larger militaries. But this is not inevitable, governments have a choice. If they copy the US and drastically underfund diplomatic infrastructure while letting the Pentagon gouge itself and its private contractors, they will face the same problem that has become chronic in the US: if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But Europe is not going to be the chief actor in a new “unipolar” moment like the US had for decades after 1989. Unlike the US where Trump can seriously threaten to seize Greenland from Denmark by military force in a 19^th-century style imperial land-grab, the EU will not be in a position to threaten to seize Florida, even if the EU countries are acting in close coordination with Britain and Türkiye.

Still, France has been tempted way to often to muck around with military interventions in some of its former African colonies. So Germany’s much-discussed “pacifism” will need to put brakes on such blundering moves.

And when it comes to Europe and Germany not having “the technological prowess to compete with the United States as a producer of cutting-edge military hardware and software.” So what? They don’t have to export advanced military technology to big swaths of the world. The immediate need is to establish a European ability to provide such supplies to Europe itself to remove their current dependence of American military equipment. And if they can kick the austerity habit – by no means a given – they can hire a lot of the scientific and technological talent that won’t be going to the US in the same numbers as before. They can even attract American scientific and technical talent among people who would rather live in a place where masked goons with no identifying clothing carrying combat weapons can snatch people off the street at the discretion of freaks like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.

Wray rightly criticizes European leaders who refuse to make a clean break with Israel over the genocide in Gaza. It would be a disastrous mistake for European countries to tie themselves to the whims of whatever religious fanatic and/or warmonger is running the Israeli government at any give time. Given the long and complicated history involved there, Germany in particular will find it a challenge to say “no” to Israel. Failing to do so could lead them to the same kind of disasters that the US has encountered with the Iraq War and maybe again now with Netanyahu’s jihad against Iran.

Here Wray refers to “Israel’s value to Western imperialism.” Israel is definitely a settler-colonial state, currently engaged in a vicious ethnic cleansing. But it’s “value” as an instrument of Western foreign policy. It has all too often been a complication and impediment to Western nations pursuing even legitimate national interests. A rerun of the Iraq War in Iran would be incredibly damaging to the US or other Western nations foolish and irresponsible enough to go along with it. It might benefit Israel’s settler-colonial interests as conceived by Netanyahu.

The Russian threat?

Wray brings up the entirely legitimate concern:

[For EU Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen, military Keynesianism and the centralization of power in Brussels - so-called “ Commission-ization ” — is predicated on there being an existential threat to Europe. Despite the lack of evidence that Vladimir Putin plans to attack NATO members, continually hyping up this threat is politically indispensable to the militarization agenda in Europe.

Fear of Russia has been useful for the purposes of Western governments and others as well. Including China. There was a relatively short but real war between the Soviet Union and China in August-December 1929, chronicled by Michael Walker in The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew (2017). The long rivalry of the Sino-Soviet split that began in the 1950s occasionally resulted in border skirmishes but fortunately never became a full-blown war. But the Soviets certainly served as a bogeyman for China during that period.

In the 19^th century, from Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia on, Tsarist Russia was seen - rightly – as a bulwark of reaction willing to support imperial and royal government in Europe against democratic movements. That image persisted well into the 20^th century. The fear was a key factor, probably the decisive factor, in Kaiser Bill’s Imperial German government persuading a majority of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to support his war against Russia. Which of course came to be known as the “ur-disaster” of the 20^th century.

And the Soviet Union was always a bogeyman image for Western powers right up until 1989, except during the period of the World War II alliance and its immediate aftermath.

So the ability of Western warmongers to use Russia as the threatening image of The Enemy is not new. And concern about it being used and misused in the immediate future is entirely realistic. But the ironic saying also applies: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”

Russia is currently in an adversary situation with Russia. Russia did illegally invade Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, however much foolish American actions and diplomacy – most notably the 2008 NATO declaration that Ukraine would join NATO in the future even though no immediate plans for that were in process - may have made that event more likely than more sober approaches would have.

But it will take some serious diplomacy on the part of European countries to mitigate the conflict without simply abandoning Ukraine to subjugation and partial annexation by Russia. And it will also take serious diplomacy from the United States on the issue, which we have no evidence at the moment that we can expect from the Trump 2.0 regime. Anne Applebaum recently wrote, “But thanks to quieter decisions by members of [Trump’s] own administration, people whom he has appointed, the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace—not merely in rhetoric but in reality.”

There’s nothing in the abstract wrong with good relations between the US and Russia. On the contrary. On the contrary, a stable condition of “peaceful coexistence” would be highly desirable. But it takes complicated diplomacy to get from here to there. And Trump is no Mikhail Gorbachev. Trump is not working on creating a “Common European Home.” There’s little evidence that he is capable of thinking in terms of such a strategic concept. And as John Mearsheimer has been emphasizing, Trump’s diplomacy over the Russia-Ukraine War has been abjectly incompetent. As Applebaum puts it:

Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer who became Trump’s main negotiator with Russia despite having no knowledge of Russi0an history or politics, regularly echoes false Russian talking points and propaganda. He has repeated Putin ’s view, which he may have heard from the Russian president himself, that “Ukraine is just a false country, that they just patched together in this sort of mosaic, these regions.” Witkoff has also seemed to agree with Putin that Ukrainian territories that voted for independence from Moscow in 1991 are somehow “Russian.”

This is not a serious way to conduct diplomacy. If we look back to ground-breaking moments in the US relationship with the USSR during the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift to the SALT nuclear-arms-control treaties to the reunification of Germany, it took real diplomacy to achieve those things. Reality-TV posturing will never be good enough.

The text is available at the American Jewish Committee Archives. <https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/387> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

Smedley Butler. Wikipedia 07/04/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Smedley_Butler&oldid=1298746983> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

Osteuropa 59:7-8 (Juli-August 2009).

1. The text is available at the Internet Archive. <https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

2. Woody Guthrie - Lindbergh. rutaloot YouTube channel 07/07/2025.

3. The text is available at the American Jewish Committee Archives. <https://ajcarchives.org/Portal/Default/en-US/RecordView/Index/387> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

4. Smedley Butler. Wikipedia 07/04/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Smedley_Butler&oldid=1298746983> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

5. Osteuropa 59:7-8 (Juli-August 2009).

6. On the Twenty-Second Anniversary of the Socialist Revolution. The Communist Nov. 1939, 1016. <https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v18n11-nov-1939-The-Communist-OCR.pdf> One benefit of the digital age is that people can locate digital versions of obscure publications that even 25 years ago you would have to search libraries and obscure used book stores to find.

7. Wray, Ben (2025): Europe’s Race to Remilitarize Isn’t Just About Trump. Jacobin 07/02/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/07/europe-trump-germany-military-spending> (Accessed: 2025-05-07).

8. Applebaum, Anne (2025): The U.S. Is Switching Sides. The Atlantic 04/07/2025. <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/putin-trump-russia-ukraine/683414/> (Accessed: 2025-05-07). Applebaum makes it clear that she is speaking for herself in her articles, books, and speeches. But she has also been married for decades to Radosław Sikorski, currently the Foreign Minister of Poland.