Starmer will visit Donald Trump on Thursday. He intends to renew the British-US "special relationship". But the British PM has already been pipped to the Trumpian post by Emmanuel Macron.

    The French president - in fact in Washington to represent the EU - was seen to stand up to Trump, metaphorically speaking, by correcting some of his exaggerations over which country, the US or the "EU", had spent more on helping to fuel the 3 years of slaughter in Ukraine...

    So shouldn't Trump's peace-brokering - no matter his motivation - be welcome? And yet it isn't! All the European politicians are, literally, up in arms!

    And all the more so, because Trump - in his own garbled way and for his own purposes - dared expose this war for what it really is: a war between the forces of NATO and Russia. In fact NATO broke every agreement it signed with Russia since the end of the Cold War. Even the Minsk Accords, meant to end the war in the Donbas in 2014 were broken, while NATO carried on encircling Russia with missile batteries and offering EU/NATO membership to its neighbours.

    Ukraine was primed as NATO's proxy for war with Russia - a war Ukraine could never win. That's how cynical the imperialist politicians in Europe and the US really are. No matter the Ukrainian losses, they wanted Russia weakened enough so that a deal could be forced on it which would once and for all allow access to Russia's (and Ukraine's) rich natural resources - and working class expertise.

    After all, Silicon Valley does not have its own silicon, nor gallium nor germanium, nor lithium, nor copper... And above all else, today Trump is aiming to rebuild US chip manufacturing to lead the world in the forthcoming AI tech revolution.

Defence-spending diversion

With just 48 hours to spare before facing Trump, Starmer set out his plan to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP as per Trump's demand from every NATO country. For this, Starmer was applauded by all sides of the House. Even by some (formerly pacifist!) Greens. Will this extra £13.4bn a year rebuild Britain's armed forces, put jets on aircraft carriers and update the rusty military to make it "fit" for the future (whatever that may mean)? Of course not. Former top army commanders - who apparently ought to know - say that even 8% of GDP per year wouldn't be enough.

    But that's hardly the point. Turning Trump's "siding" with Russia into an earth-shattering moment ("we are in a new era"; "the tectonic plates of global geopolitics have shifted", they say!) is a godsend for the politicians, here and in Europe. They can talk up war and the threat of war. Even China is coming into the equation.

    Starmer gave a long speech before his defence-spending announcement in which he described "Russia" as an "existential threat". He knows he is telling porkies. If Putin really was a threat it would take a lot more than an 0.2% increase in the defence budget to deter him.

One solution, socialist revolution

The real issue is elsewhere. In fact where it always was. There has been no "shift in the tectonic plates"! All European governments are sitting on economies in decline - the global capitalist recession doesn't leave anyone out. Wars might help, temporarily, as they provide a boost to the weapons' and allied industries... But at the end of the day these governments all know they are in deep trouble.

    This war-talk and defence spending serves a purpose, and not just for Starmer and co., but also the rest of Europe's governments who have to face their electorates while sitting in the same leaky boat. They talk of black holes and offer no solutions to the crisis except more cuts. They have all reduced - or are intending to reduce - public spending, including social welfare budgets for the very poorest, in order to avoid raising "unpopular taxes" and upsetting their respective wealthy classes.

    The gains of parties like the far-right Alternative for Germany (20% in the election) or Reform in Britain (14.3%) are symptomatic of the chronic and worsening crisis. Far-right extremists (but also populist politicians like Trump) gain a voice at times like this and propose to help rotten capitalism survive just a little bit longer. They absurdly blame migrant workers and/or refugees for being responsible for the system's inbuilt faults and its inability to solve society's problems.

    That said, by trying to divide the only force - the working class - which can overthrow the capitalist system and replace it, they at least serve to remind us of the revolutionary task which our class has to undertake. And that there is little time to lose.