Very interesting read, although very pessimistic in my view. Rearming europe is a concern. What happens afyer 5 - 10 years when you have a global market saturated with arms?

As the article points out, there's little prospect of any serious rearmament happening in Europe because the continent's energy costs and capitalist dynamics have already made the model unviable.

Military Keynesianism assumes a manufacturing powerhouse that can rebuild its economy around a fossil fuel war economy, as the US did during the second world war. Europe today is a deindustrializing net importer of expensive US LNG. Germany in particular, which is the intended engine of rearming Europe, has suffered back to back recessions since 2023, lost 245,000 manufacturing jobs since 2019 watching steel and car output collapse while its industry flees to China for cheaper energy.

Arms production is unproductive of future value because weapons do not re-enter the next production process, so diverting scarce surplus into military spending weakens the accumulation process that's meant to fund it in the first place. Military Keynesianism did not even lift the US out of the Great Depression incidentally. Rearmament also deepens dependency since over half of European arms imports come from the US. So, purchases like the F-35 and Tomahawk lock European supply chains into American ones. The 800bln euro Rearm Europe plan and the additional 544bln euro annual NATO bill actually serve to subsidize US weapons manufacturers and bond investors rather than build sovereign European capacity.

The whole thing is a farce given structurally high energy costs along with a shrinking industrial base, and an aging population that's becoming increasingly angry about the austerity. Europe cannot generate the surplus needed to sustain any sort of a war economy. It can only mortgage its remaining productive capacity to US LNG exporters and US arms cartels which turns the whole rearmament into a further instrument of vassalization.

Ok, so is this poor europe screwed then? Clearly, there are things that we are doing wrong: aging population gets fixed with immigration policies and young family policies. Spain may be doing the right thing, despite being accused of the contrary by right wing governments in the rest of europe; the green deal could have been the answer to a big chunck of the energy debacle but the bastards in Brussels watered it down; eu is lacking a common industrial a energy strategy. Some countries lime Italy have lost the compass are industrialy collapsing. How is it that we can't get ourselves oyt of this mess? Eu politicians seem pretty ineffective at the moment and are just trying to please the next right wing government that reaches power in country X. This is disheartening. We are screwing up my kids generation and their kids generation. I think europe has focused for too long on external markets and has forgotten about internal markets. Increase internal purchase power and get europeans to spend on european goods rather than cinese or american goods.

It's not so much that these problems can't be solved, they're just largely intractable under liberalism. Like sure, Spain is doing fine with immigration, but that doesn't solve the rest of the problems. The reality is that most of Europe is tilting towards the right and nationalism. The green deal could've been an answer, but it's not profitable for the ruling class, and so it didn't happen. And this is an excellent explanation of why the industry is being eroded systematically under financial capitalism. It's just not a good investment for private capital compared to stuff like software or the service industry. I'd also argue that EU politicians are extremely effective at serving the interests of the ruling class. They managed to keep a proxy war nobody wanted going for full four years now.

You keep talking Europe as being some homogeneous body where everybody has a common interest. But that's not the case because Europe is a class society, and the interests of the capital owning class do not align with those of the working majority. On top of that, regional capital has divergent interests as well, and hence why the whole thing is a mess. Rich people are gutting Europe to make a buck.