By Manuel Raposo
July 25, 2025
Raposo is a Portuguese Marxist analyst, editor of the web magazine jornalmudardevida.net, where this article was published July 17, 2025. Translation: John Catalinotto
The last few weeks have revealed yet another chapter in the subjugation of Europe to U.S. imperialism. The 5% military spending demanded by Trump from NATO members, plus the Europeans’ commitment to sustain the war in Ukraine by buying military equipment from the U.S., plus the customs tariffs imposed on European exports mean the complete submission of Europe to U.S. designs.
Protest of NATO Summit at The Hague, Netherlands, June 2025.
The ruin of the European economy brought about by the Biden administration’s plans (whether by mobilizing Europe for war in Ukraine or by forcing it to cut trade relations with Russia) is being completed by the Trump administration in a more theatrical but no less effective manner.
At its root, this is a dispute between powers struggling with the economic decline of their aging capitalist systems, with the more powerful of them seeking to subjugate the weaker power to its interests. European sub-imperialism, which prospered as long as it could under the wing of dominant imperialism, is now resigning itself to its fate as a subordinate force when the course of the world no longer provides enough spoils for both.
But to say that this is merely a dispute between powers would be an understatement. And it would be politically suicidal not to add the obvious: It will be the working masses in the first instance and the European peoples in general who will pay (are already paying!) the price for this dispute. This dispute affects their material living conditions, determines the political changes underway in each country and takes to extremes the pure and simple threat to survival that the warmongering of European and U.S. leaders is creating.
War as politics and as business
The choice made by the majority of European leaders (mainly in the European Union and Britain) to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely is perhaps the most eloquent sign of their weakness. The EU, like Europe in general, is economically stagnant and politically exhausted. Internal divisions are evident at every level. All the much-vaunted goals of creating a political union, promoting prosperity and building a bastion of democracy and freedoms (whatever that meant in the mouths of European leaders) have now been cast aside.
The decades of “peace” that the EU boasted about until recently (only behind closed doors, forgetting Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, etc.) have resulted in a rabid and blind anti-Russian war policy and multi-million dollar plans to arm themselves to the teeth.
It is because they have no political future and no prospects of prosperity to offer their peoples that the leaders of the EU and most of Europe are embarking on a military adventure, following the U.S. like inseparable conjoined twins.
The last three years have clarified a situation that had been looming for some time.
European capitalism is wedged (in all respects, economic and political) between the still powerful U.S. imperialism, which is losing momentum, and a continuously growing China — or rather, China, plus Russia, plus the BRICS, plus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which constitute the hard political and economic core of the so-called Global South.
With the war in Ukraine, the European economy has faltered, particularly in its industrial stronghold, Germany. Operation Nord Stream, carried out by the Biden administration as an act of pure piracy, was a clear sign that the U.S.-led war against Russia was also, inevitably, a war for the subjugation of Europe.
Since 2022, with the sanctions against Russia, the European economy has stagnated. Germany is now in its third consecutive year of recession. In the last 10-15 years, Europe’s gross domestic product has fallen from 90% of the U.S. GDP to just 65%, revealed Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, at a recent event in Dublin (forgetting to add: ruined in large part by the U.S.).
How could Europe, given the current situation, hope to rise as a competitor on two fronts, against the U.S. and China-plus-partners? With no choice, it has leaned toward where it has always been comfortable — now resigned to the status of vassal. The rearmament of Europe and the warmongering turn of its politics are therefore a leap forward. (for whom? For European imperialism?)
With no possibility of rebuilding an economy based on consumer goods for everyone (in a context of global overproduction and a proportional deficit in purchasing power), irretrievably behind in the race for cutting-edge technologies, Europe is embarking on the creation of an industry of massive, constant and guaranteed waste, with financing guaranteed by the states.
This means that the center of the European economy is shifting, through the planned action of those who run it, from the production of goods and services (particularly social services) to armaments. This is the sure path to a near future of worsening poverty.
Both the increase in defense spending demanded by Washington and the rearmament plans drawn up in Brussels are forcing states to act as financiers of the war industry and, consequently, as agents of the extortion of additional value that such a policy entails. In other words, it will be inevitable to impose greater cuts on wages and pensions and in general on direct and indirect income from work, with inevitable damage to public health, education, housing, infrastructure, etc.
With this rearmament, under the guise of “reindustrialization” presented as an economic renaissance, what is really underway is the assembly of a machine of programmed waste and ruthless extortion to finance waste.
Now, military waste requires either a permanent state of war or the permanent threat of a future war. Europe is betting on both: prolonging the war in Ukraine as long as possible and creating the specter of a coming war with Russia as a pretext.
The weapon of fear
To justify this maneuver, it is necessary to invent a danger that will convince workers and peoples to accept the plundering of their living conditions and to accept as inevitable a policy that runs counter to their basic interests of survival.
The “danger” exploited over the last three years has to do with a supposed threat from ‘autocracies’ against “democracies” — when it is capitalist democracies themselves that are collapsing from within under the onslaught of neo-fascism, worn down by permanent and unsolvable economic degradation.
The new “danger” is the threat of an imminent Russian attack on Europe (“within a few years”), an idea forged from start to finish behind the scenes at NATO and among the EU rulers. It is so crudely forged that even Trump does not believe it — but if it convinces Europeans to pay the 5%, then great, the White House will say, you can justify it any way you like.
The same procedure was put in place with the staging of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain. With the end of the Second World War, the gigantic U.S. military industry needed to continue operating or face ruin. Later, with the Soviet threat eliminated by the end of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and the war on “international terrorism” took its place.
Europe, lacking imagination, has dug up the rusty slogan “The Russians are coming!” The ignoble [Dutch politician and NATO Secretary General] Mark Rutte — the NATO leader who makes little secret of his servility to his U.S. boss — shamelessly says that we need to create a “war mentality” and pay accordingly. And, to cut a long story short, he points the governments to where the money can be found: pensions and public services, putting an end to the “luxury” that is the welfare state.
The political consequences of this drift are easy to imagine. For reasons of [what the rulers will claim is] “national security,” the regime will protect at least a large part of the arms industry from strikes, trade unions, demands and other labor rights. The same will apply, if necessary, to ports, airports, logistics centers and means of transport if these are defined as “strategic.” Add to this the control of the media or the prohibition of public demonstrations whenever the regime can invoke the higher interests of the state.
They will use the “war mentality” to justify handing over political power to a small caste charged with ensuring our “security” and distributing economic resources according to the supreme need to “defend the free world.”
How it plays out in Portugal
In this environment of submission to war plans, the Portuguese state fits in perfectly as an obedient subject.
Last month, the heads of state and government both showed complete subordination to the U.S. when dozens of military aircraft used Portugal’s Lajes Base in the Azores in the North Atlantic in support of the attack on Iran, in violation of all international law.
The justification, given by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Prime Minister Luís Filipe Montenegro in unison, was simply that they were complying with the agreement signed with the U.S. for the use of the base. “End of story,” Marcelo emphasized to end the conversation, completely dismissing the nature of the military action carried out.
Both even went so far as to offer ridiculous excuses, such as that the planes “were not attack planes” but only supply planes. Twenty-two years ago, the then Portuguese leaders Durão Barroso and Paulo Portas — with the complete passivity of the then President of the Republic, Jorge Sampaio — also received U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Lajes and swore at the time that they had seen evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that served as a pretext, three days later, for the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq.
The current head of government is even trying, in the face of the 5% ultimatum, to show himself as the best student in the class. Already this year, Montenegro has promised to increase the contribution to “defense” spending by more than 1 billion euros, followed by a schedule of annual increases until the target demanded by the U.S. is reached.
He guarantees that there will be no cuts in social support, but these are just words of convenience to calm people’s spirits, given the colossal sums involved and the obvious scandal of such spending when confronted with the country’s glaring needs. With a virtually stagnant economy, with capital tax cuts reducing state revenues and knowing that money is not elastic, it will surely be from the workers’ share of wealth that the government will seek what it needs to pay for the military adventures planned in Washington and Brussels.
