Pay the Devil: How the US will force Europe to pay for its military industrial complex

By Andrey Sushentsov, program director at the Valdai Club.

The American presidential campaign of 2024 has been marked by a series of unprecedented events. These include lawsuits against one candidate and relatives of the sitting president, assassination attempts against Donald Trump and, finally, the unprecedented situation of Joe Biden being forced out of the race by his own party. All of this has made the election marathon an extraordinary event.

Meanwhile, domestic politics in the US is spilling over into the rest of the world, and it’s helping fuel the growing dissatisfaction of the countries representing the world’s majority with the intense attempts by Washington to maintain its leadership. But we should not read too much into the vote, because the policy of seeking to preserve American dominance remains the main strategy of both candidates.

The neoconservative group remains quite prominent in the ruling Democratic Party, whose members’ worldview is built around the idea of power as the only tool for maintaining US leadership. This position doesn’t depend on personal attitudes and beliefs, but is derived from the status they occupy in the political mechanism. The then Senator Biden, for example, once proposed a large number of constructive initiatives in Congress. Among other things, he opposed NATO membership for the Baltic states, to the point where his party colleagues accused him of being too peace-loving in his foreign policy.

Once in the White House, however, Biden strictly followed the usual American logic of global leadership. The defense budget under his administration broke all records of recent decades. The consistency of US foreign policy practice in terms of deterrence strategy towards geopolitical rivals allows us to assert that the structural confrontation with Russia and China will continue regardless of the outcome of the election. The dynamics of this confrontation – in Ukraine and around Taiwan – will be determined by the military budget, a draft of which has already been developed and will be approved before the inauguration of his successor.

Against the backdrop of the election campaign, it is particularly interesting to see how much sharper the rhetoric has become and how it has been filled with catchy, ‘workable’ initiatives. Former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s plan for a “forced peace” in Ukraine, which proposes, among other things, that Kiev be brought into NATO on an accelerated basis “so that European allies will bear the burden of its defense,” has been well received. The result of such a scenario would be a direct military conflict between NATO and Russia, so it is unlikely. Such statements, which do not demonstrate a systemic understanding of the situation, need not in principle be long-term in nature. Their function is to mobilize hawks in the establishment, and among the electorate, to show that a forced escalation of the conflict is one possible scenario. It should be noted that as secretary of state, Pompeo established himself as a man prone to making high-profile statements that didn’t culminate in large-scale actions. Nevertheless, his quote is worth considering in the context of the fact that there is no political force in the US that would see the outcome of the Ukraine crisis as an opportunity for reconciliation with Russia.

On the one hand, a continuation will allow Washington to mobilize European NATO members to increase defense spending to a new target of 3% of GDP. In essence, this means more purchases of American weapons by Western Europeans and thus support for the US military-industrial complex. On the other hand, active support for Ukraine allows Russia to be drawn deeper and deeper into an expensive military campaign, thus solving the problem of deterrence without direct confrontation.

The collision of interests between Washington and Kiev is noteworthy here. The Ukrainian government, well aware that its own resources have been exhausted, is feverishly trying to cling to any chance of remaining at the top of the Western coalition’s priorities, and often – as in Kursk – acts rather opportunistically. By offering the West a visible military success, Kiev hoped to force it to become directly involved in the conflict. The Americans see this impulse from Ukraine, but are not interested in such a scenario.

Washington needs Ukraine as a proxy that it can use for as long as possible. The country’s usefulness as an instrument of US foreign policy suggests that the US-Russian crisis will be protracted. At the same time, the upward trajectory of the American defense budget will not change, regardless of the outcome of the election. Thus, Russian foreign policy and military planning is based on maintaining the present military conditions and continuing the strategic rivalry with the US, regardless of who the next American president is.

This article was first published by Valdai Discussion Club, translated and edited by the RT team.

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