Should Europe Rearm?

Note: Below is the first of two posts criticising Britain’s recent Strategic Defence Reviews’ call for British and European rearmament. This post critiques the justifications; next week’s post will discuss the economic consequences.

Europe is committed to rearmament. Commission President van der Leyden unveiled her ‘ReArm Europe Plan’ which aims to boost EU defence spending by euros 800bn over four years. On 5 June NATO defence ministers agreed to double their members’ annual defence spending from an average of roughly 2.5% of GDP to 5% by 2032. The note which follows concentrates on the British Strategic Defence Review, published on 5 June, which calls for British rearmament as part of a ‘Nato First’ policy. My first post below discusses the justifications for the rearmament program. The second part, to be posted next week, will consider its economic implications.

There are two, main justifications for European rearmament. The first, and arguably the most important, is that President Trump has demanded it. Historically the USA has contributed about 70% of NAT0’s budget. Europe’s rearmament is in part a response to his demand that it pay its ‘fair share’. This goes in hand with the feeling that the USA is poised to disengage from Europe - - partly because of Trump’s desire to do business with Putin, partly because of the American pivot on the challenge of China, the two, of course, linked in the current American geostrategy. But doubts about the American commitment to NATO cannot be openly admitted, so emphasis is placed on the second justification - the Russian bogey. Britain’s Strategic Review mentions the possibility of American disengagement only in passing; it is the Russian threat which looms largest.

’Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a strategic inflection point’, the SDR states, ‘irrefutably’ demonstrating the threat of a ‘state-on-state war’ returning to Europe. The UK and its allies are under ‘daily attack, from [Russia], with aggressive acts of espionage, cyber-attacks, and information manipulation causing harm to society and the economy. Russia has demonstrated its ‘willingness’ to use military force, inflict harm on civilians and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to achieve its goals’. So, Britain must rearm to deter and if necessary ‘fight and win’ a war against Russia. As Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General, put it the British have better rearm or learn to speak Russian.

This involves increased investment not just in conventional armed forces, but in the new technologies of warfare: ‘dynamic networks of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous assets and data flows’. The aim would be to achieve a tenfold increase in ‘lethality’ (ie killing power). Since Russia has intentionally blurred the line between nuclear, conventional, and ‘sub- state’ threats an integrated British response should combine both conventional and hybrid forms of war preparation. Great stress is placed on the need for a resilient ‘home defence’ ’ to guard against espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination and poisoning, electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, and intellectual property theft.

The Review is a superb example of how, starting from a false premise, remorseless logic can lead to madness. The premise is that if Russia is not confronted by a rearmed Europe, it will seek to impose its will on the Continent. Deny the premise and the argument for mobilising society and economy against Russia collapses. What it reveals is the strength of the warmongering mood of official Britain.

The attribution to Russia of aggressive intent harks back to the Cold War, with the old tropes shamelessly repurposed for current use. NATO was set up to keep the Russians from conquering Europe. Today Russia must be prevented from becoming the ‘dominant military power in all of Europe’’ (Fiona Hill, quoted Guardian 7 June 2025). Yet the Cold War itself was partly based on misconception. Few now believe that Stalin’s Russia, still less its post-Stalin successor, set out to dominate the whole of Europe: its purpose was to create a buffer against invasion from the West. However, the Cold War era saw a genuine ideological conflict between capitalism and communism. So was not altogether fanciful to believe that we were engaged in a battle for the soul of the world.

Today’s repacking of the Cold War lacks any such ideological dimension. It is replaced by the threadbare idea that autocracies are naturally expansionary, so our rearmament is a defence of western values against otherwise rampant dictatorships. But there is no firm evidence that dictatorships are naturally more expansionist than democracies: Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States invaded Iraq, both alleging threats to their security.

More plausible is the view that in the international anarchy, none are safe, so that each ‘peer’ nation has to be ready to repel aggressors. This is the basis of the balance of power theory. The argument is that we in the West have allowed our defences to slip, thus tilting the balance in Russia’s favour. Unless this is remedied Russia will take advantage of our slippage to pursue its own security goals at our expense.

Western analysts forget that Russian rearmament has been shaped by exactly the same logic: Russia was stripped of its security shield by the West in its moment of weakness in the 1990s; under Putin it has set out to restore as much of it as possible. The solution to the disorder inherent in a world of sovereign nations is not that they should all arm themselves to the teeth, but that they should develop rules of coexistence, and practice the arts of diplomacy and conflict resolution. Few of these were on display from either side in the runup to the Ukraine war.

However, the defects of the SDR go beyond the false premise of a mortal Russian threat. The first lies in its failure properly to distinguish between deterrence and war. The classic doctrine of deterrence asserted that being prepared to ‘fight and win’ a war was the best deterrence against having to fight one, because of its threat to inflict unacceptable costs on any aggressor: In the Cold War nuclear war was deterred by promising MAD‘ - mutually assured destruction’

Following the general abolition of conscription (in Britain in 1960) deterrence in the Cold War era, being based on nuclear weapons and volunteer conventional forces was largely separated from the peaceful pursuits of society. Military needs did not determine the shape of the economy or constrain public discourse. At the height of the Cold War western societies allowed sizeable peace movements to challenge a defence strategy based on nuclear weapons, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) being the obvious British example.

According to the SDR, such dissent today would weaken the credibility of our deterrent. Our war-making (and hence deterrence) capacity must now permeate every aspect of society. For Britain to deter Russia it must develop a ’whole society’ war readiness. As the SDR puts it ‘UK must be better prepared for high intensity, protracted war ‘.

There are two things wrong with this. First the kind of armed peace advocated by the SDR obliterates the distinction between war and peace. We must realise that we are already at war with Russia and mobilise the nation to fight it. But how or when is such a war to end? As stated, it is never-ending as long as dictatorships exist in any part of the world.

Even worse, to keep the nation in a state of constant alert requires, as Prime Minister Starmer frankly admitted, a ‘radical shift in mindset’, a ‘transformation of culture’, the ‘eradication’ of ‘unacceptable’. behaviour.one that accepts defence and security as’ the organising principle of government’. Th government should increase cadet enrollment in schools, spread understanding of the armed forces among young people, start ‘public outreach events across the UK, explaining the role the wider society must play in the UK’s security and resilience,…’ -seemingly modest objectives until one realises that they are part of the project for readying the ‘whole nation’ for war.

Do the authors of this Review have any grasp of the implication of the words they use? The language of ‘readying’ the nation for war is the language of war itself, not of deterrence, appropriate, say, for the second world with its mass civilian bombing but not for a society which rightly regards itself at peace. Have they stopped to consider the Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for perpetual war?

The SDR rightly draw attention to the increased and often subterranean threats of harm opened up by rapid accelerating technological innovation. But I draw an opposite conclusion. The multiplication of technological threats provides a compelling argument for global cooperation, not for a new Cold War continually teetering over into a hot war. It is the joint responsibility of leaders of all the great powers to act as adults and not as children playing around with their lethal toys. Russia should not have invaded Ukraine: The West should not have provoked Russia to so by promising Ukraine membership of Nato. The doctrine that international law guarantees all countries sovereignty wilts before the global responsibility of those with the greatest power for good or ill to behave in such a way as to maximise the chance of a peaceful future for all.