Uncharted territory

There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. These last few weeks have very much felt very much like the latter. By an unhappy coincidence, I started my new role as general secretary at the Fabian Society on 20 January, the same day Donald Trump started his new job. In the few weeks since then, we have seen the post-war geopolitical order fragment before our very eyes. America is not only disengaging from European defence; it appears to be switching sides in the war on our continent. With collective security undermined, governments across Europe are rapidly rethinking alliances, and rushing to rebuild their armed forces. While the Trump White House appears to be seeking to end the war on Putin’s terms, it is provoking a trade war which will hurt both their closest allies and their own population alike.

These transformative changes – the so-called ‘Trump Shock’ – pose big questions and even bigger challenges, strategic, political and economic.

Keir Starmer has been very effective at charming the new president, and he has rejected the need to choose between our alliances to the US and to Europe. However, Trump has shown himself to be an utterly unreliable ally. While he was constrained in his first term, Trump is now unleashed. The Maga takeover of the Republican party is largely complete, his ‘veep’ is looking likely to succeed him, and the Democrats are in disarray. There is little chance of a quick return to a president committed to European security. In this context, we must look at deepening our relationship with our European neighbours, both for our collective defence and for our future prosperity.

There is no doubt that Trump’s capriciousness and Putin’s aggression necessitate a major reinvestment in defence and security across Europe. This might be uncomfortable for many on the left. It should not be. Attlee and Bevin helped create NATO to guarantee European peace, democracy and self-determination after the war. Starmer is acting as the heir to this tradition by playing a leading role in securing Ukraine’s future, and in coordinating collective defence of Europe. As Paul Mason and Margaret Pinder write in this edition, we should make a virtue of this strategic necessity. If we must spend more on defence, we should ensure this creates good quality jobs in every region, as a key part of our industrial strategy.

For two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, western European nations enjoyed both robust growth and a ‘peace dividend’, whereby a stable international order meant we were able to shift government spending from defence to public services. With growth having stagnated over the last 15 years, and with Europe facing the necessity of increasing defence spending, Labour now faces much more difficult choices.

Many of us will have found the recent decisions on international development and welfare very difficult. Somehave argued that there is a need to trim our welfare state in order to build a warfare state. While we must increase investment in our security, we should seek to avoid such narrow trade-offs. It was Labour, after all, which built the welfare state out of the rubble of the second world war, at a time when defence spending represented a significantly higher share of national income. In the context of unprecedented and unforeseen changes, a growing threat to our security, and severe pressure on our public services, there is a case for looking again at either taxation or at flexibility in our fiscal rules. This would ensure that we do not have to provide the security that we need at the expense of good society that we want to build

Image credit: Number 10 via Flickr