Lindsey German on another Suez moment for Europe and growing global instability

Donald Trump’s decision to phone Vladimir Putin, agree to peace talks over Ukraine between the US and Russia, as well as closer ties between the two countries, and ignore the European powers or indeed the Ukrainian government, has totally blindsided the European governments who have been sending more and more arms to Ukraine in the past three years.

By insisting that European countries must spend much more on ‘defence’, Trump has also torn up pretty much the whole of the post Second World War settlement in Europe.  Then it was recognised that the US – organised militarily in Nato – would provide troops and military hardware in Europe as part of its conduct of the decades-long Cold War with the then Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

In 1956 the US made clear it would not back the British and French war against Egypt over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. That marked a turning point in foreign policy when the old imperial powers recognised that they could not move independently without the approval of the giant superpower. This is another Suez moment for Europe.

Hence the hastily arranged emergency summit in Paris on Monday and the pledge from Keir Starmer to send ‘peacekeeping troops’ from Britain to Ukraine in the event of a settlement.

The European governments are furious at being insulted and ignored in turn by Trump’s vice president JD Vance and his defence secretary Pete Hegseth. But they are also desperate to appease Trump because they need his military backing and hardware for any serious military operations, and they also fear his threats of tariffs and trade wars.

Starmer has been particularly terrible on all this, with his pathetic attempts to claim to be a ‘bridge’ between the EU and US. His vainglorious behaviour over Ukraine – promising a 100-year alliance with the country and repeatedly claiming that Britain will support fighting to the end and total victory – has been little short of delusional. He didn’t see this coming yet it has been obvious for months that the war was decisively lost, that Ukraine’s citizens increasingly recognised this, that increased conscription was deeply resented and opposed and that the country’s president Zelensky was becoming more unpopular.

Trump made it clear from his election campaign that he would end the war, but even if Harris had been elected there would still have been some sort of settlement because the war could not be won without full-scale Nato involvement rather than simply conducting a proxy war. That in turn would have led to a much greater war between nuclear powers, something which the western powers could not contemplate.

After the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Britain’s support for genocidal war in Gaza what credibility has British foreign policy left? Starmer’s posturing about sending British peacekeeping troops only adds to that. This war needs to end, as does the addiction to war and intervention that has been the hallmark of successive British governments for over a quarter century.

Now the cry from governments everywhere is for more money to be spent on arms and the military. On Monday share prices of Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and other arms companies shot up. This is to pay for Europe’s supposed defence against Russia, a country whose economy is the same size as Spain’s and which has only managed to advance across a relatively small part of Ukraine despite three years of war. The idea that Putin could be in Dunkirk in a matter of weeks or that he is about to attack across Europe is fantasy perpetrated by those who want to increase arms spending at our expense.

Starmer is of course one of those people and he wants to increase our spending on arms as a proportion of national wealth, despite it already being one of the highest in Europe. Big increases in arms spending will come from our pockets and our public services. Preparing for real security in Britain and elsewhere means providing security of work, health, housing, not more weaponry and militarism at our expense which will only create greater insecurity and feed far-right forces, as we’re already seeing in Germany.

The world is entering a new phase of politics. Trump is turning away from Europe and prepared to do business with Putin because he wants to pivot more strongly to confrontation with China, which he sees (correctly) as his main rival. It is a classic great power carve up where he wants to get the weaker power, Russia, offside to make it easier to confront China. But Europe is not turning away from war – far from it. Demands for more arms spending also align with Trump’s goals, which is for Europe to carry more of its own ‘defence’.

Threats to China, through deals like the Aukus Pact, alignment with Netanyahu over ethnic cleansing of Gaza and continuing threats to Iran, are all high on Trump’s agenda. His sidelining of the European powers creates greater instability. More wars and arms spending means more attacks on the working class here and abroad. The anti-war movement has never been more vital.

This week: I will be in Newcastle on Saturday and Tower Hamlets on Wednesday speaking about the need to defend the right to protest. Also discussing how we respond to the very rapidly changing situation internationally, and keeping an eye on the German election where the far-right AfD are expected to do well – aided no doubt by Trump and Vance. I’m reading Pankaj Mishra’s new book The World After Gaza which is (so far) quite a lot about the world before Gaza as well!