Global military spending at
record $1.7 trillion
4
May 2018
Global military spending hit a record of more than $1.7 trillion
in 2017, the highest level since the Cold War, according to figures published
Thursday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
The report gives some idea of the scale of the squandering of
resources for destructive ends. According to SIPRI, just 13 percent of annual
world military spending would be enough to end world poverty and hunger; four
percent would guarantee food security for the world’s population; five percent
would meet health needs; 12 percent would provide everyone with an education;
three percent would provide clean water and proper sanitation.
Feeding its vast military machine with more than $610 billion in
2017, the United States remains by far the world’s biggest military spender,
dedicating a greater amount to military spending than the next seven countries
combined. The 2018 defense budget recently signed by President Donald Trump
will push this figure to $700 billion.
The US has been at war continuously for the past quarter-century,
beginning with the 1991 invasion of Iraq, followed in the course of that decade
by military interventions and strikes in Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq and
the air war against Yugoslavia. The 2000s saw the launching of the global “war
on terror,” beginning with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001.
That was followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the extension of the
Afghanistan war into Pakistan with the launching of drone attacks in 2004, the
war for regime-change in Libya in 2011 and the beginning that same year of the
continuing CIA-fomented civil war in Syria, followed by a third war in Iraq.
The war in Syria, which began as a regime-change operation by
US-armed and funded Islamist proxy forces fighting to overthrow the pro-Russian
and pro-Iranian government of Bashar al-Assad, has evolved into a confrontation
between US forces and those of Russia and Iran, with Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo boasting that the US has killed scores of Russians, the Israelis
carrying out missile attacks on Iranian targets in Syria, and the US, Britain
and France launching a joint missile strike against Syrian government
facilities.
After the dissolution of the USSR by the Stalinist bureaucracy in
1991, the apologists for capitalism proclaimed the “end of history”—the final
triumph of capitalism and defeat of socialism. They hailed the dawn of a new
era of liberal democracy, peace and prosperity.
But more than a quarter-century later, capitalism has produced a
nightmare world of feverish rearmament and war, millions of refugees
confronting militarized borders and racist witch hunts, soaring inequality
combined with brutal austerity, the growth of far-right and fascistic parties
and a universal turn by governments to authoritarian rule.
Now the regional wars are metastasizing into a third world war to
redivide the globe. Every major power is rearming, pushing international
military spending up by nearly 10 percent since the global economic crisis of
2008.
The particularly sharp rise in military spending over the last
decade in Central Europe (20 percent) and Eastern Europe (33 percent) reflects
the preparations by the US and the NATO alliance for war with Russia. The 29
members of NATO now account for more than half of the world’s military
spending.
Under Obama and now Trump, Washington has pressured its European
allies to push their military spending even higher. Germany’s new grand
coalition government has pledged to nearly double military spending to two
percent of gross domestic product by 2024, while French President Emmanuel
Macron plans to increase military spending by 35 percent and has called for a
revival of the military draft. In all of these countries, rearmament has been
accompanied by an onslaught on social programs and workers’ living standards.
Despite incessant US propaganda proclaiming Russia to be a
military juggernaut menacing its neighbors, the country had one of the largest
annual declines in military spending, falling 20 percent from 2016. The Kremlin
spent $66.3 billion on its military in 2017, little more than one tenth what
the US spends.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, a key ally of the US in the Middle East,
took the number three position from Russia, spending $69.4 billion in 2017. The
oil-rich kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula expends 10 percent of its annual
economic output on its military, the second highest percentage in the world.
Much of Saudi Arabia’s military equipment, purchased from the US, has been
dedicated to its slaughter in neighboring Yemen, but that is only a prelude to
war against its main target, Iran.
Asia and Oceania have seen military spending increase for an
unparalleled 29 successive years. The region witnessed a major military buildup
under Obama’s so-called “pivot to Asia,” which is being continued under Trump.
The arms race in the region is guaranteed to accelerate with India, under the
government of Narendra Modi, initiating plans to expand and modernize the
country’s military forces to prepare for war with China and Pakistan.
The US sees its war preparations against Russia as the prelude to
a military confrontation with China, deemed to be Washington’s most dangerous
rival. The US is rapidly building up its naval forces in the region and setting
up missile defense systems and other military installations in the region to
encircle China, which is responding with its own military buildup.
Japan is well on the way to casting aside all post-World War II
pretensions to pacifism and remilitarizing.
As US military spending has grown to historic heights, the
Pentagon has established ever closer ties with the technology giants, creating
a special unit, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, based in Silicon
Valley. Amazon has contracts with both the CIA and the Pentagon and Google has
partnered with the Pentagon to expand the drone murder program.
Record levels of military spending have been accompanied by ever
greater concentrations of wealth in the hands of billionaires, the integration
of the corporations they control with the state apparatus, an assault on the
living standards of the working class, and the erosion of democratic rights,
including censorship of socialist and anti-war voices on the Internet.
The root cause of war, austerity and attacks on democratic rights
is the decrepit and obsolete capitalist system, which subordinates every social
need to the enrichment of the financial oligarchy that dominates society.
In 2016, the International Committee of the Fourth International
spelled out the following principles for building an international movement of
the working class and youth against imperialist war:
* The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the
great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive
elements in the population.
* The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist,
since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end
the dictatorship of finance capital and the economic system that is the
fundamental cause of militarism and war.
* The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be
completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political
parties and organizations of the capitalist class.
* The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international,
mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle
against imperialism. The permanent war of the bourgeoisie must be answered with
the perspective of permanent revolution by the working class, the strategic
goal of which is the abolition of the nation-state system and the establishment
of a world socialist federation. This will make possible the rational, planned
development of global resources and, on this basis, the eradication of poverty
and the raising of human culture to new heights.
This Saturday, May 5, at 5:30 pm EDT, on the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, the ICFI is holding its annual International May Day
Online Rally, which will be broadcast live throughout the world atwsws.org/mayday. We urge all our readers and all workers throughout the world to register and attend May Day 2018.
Niles Niemuth
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