All Guns and No Butter on a Burning Planet
The insatiable demands of the military industrial complex are a barrier to human flourishing on a livable planet.
Increasing military budgets as part of rising great-power competition is a disaster across multiple fronts: for the victims of wars, for an already burning planet, and for workers who don’t see real benefits from military conflict. (Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)
In the wake of World War II, the United States crowned itself leader of the Western world through persuasion and coercion. Massive transfers of US aid helped stave off the prospect of Communist governments in Western Europe, while the deployment of American troops and materiel ensured European participation in a US-led military order. Today, Washington seeks to redraw the terms of imperial governance. As F-18 fighter jets bombarded Yemen in March, White House official Stephen Miller argued that European allies should pay for the strikes: “If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation. . . there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” Not only had the United States attacked another country in a brutal display of military might, a habit over decades of imperial leadership, but it had decided that its allies should bear the costs.
To maintain its geopolitical dominance, the United States increasingly relies on the use of economic and military force. Allies are presented with various options to pay for their participation in empire, whether buying American energy, importing its weapons, or contributing to a Rust Belt reindustrialization fund. In the White House, the maintenance of empire, and even the position of the United States as the global dollar reserve, is presented as a burden.
This is a moment of several spiraling transitions. The era of unipolar US dominance is over. In response to China’s economic development, Washington has ushered in a new Cold War, defined by bellicose rhetoric and an attempt to cohere competing economic blocs. The world is offered access to US consumer markets on one hand and punitive tariffs on the other. The economic norms of the last five decades of US leadership — the exploitative imposition of neoliberal governance — have been cast aside, and state intervention is no longer anathema.
Our planetary future has been made a site of great-power rivalry. US allies are cajoled by Joe Biden into joining a Cold War competition with China over clean energy or by Donald Trump to choose between green and fossil-based energy systems. Each of these scenarios spells planetary disaster. In the first pathway, states fight over resources and technologies, prioritizing relationships with their allies over decarbonization, for instance by restricting green imports from China. In the second, a US-led fossil fuel bloc disrupts planetary safety while participants miss out on the benefits of decarbonization.
Even more concerning than this competition over the climate are Washington’s chosen tools for the fight. Facing up to its economic limitations, the United States has thrown money at its military-industrial complex while doubling down on data centers as industrial policy. This is a recipe for chaos, threatening working-class security on a warming planet. Articulating this class interest will be essential to building a politics that can bring us a safe, sustainable future.
Militarizing the Interregnum
Given China’s emerging industrial dominance and superior trading relationships with most of the world, the United States has decided to lean on its gargantuan war machine as a lever of strategic advantage. By expanding its global military force, unleashing genocidal violence in the Middle East and pressuring allies to match its military spending, US strategy threatens to throw the world into a new era of conflict.
In July, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashed funding for health care and food stamps while greenlighting the world’s first trillion-dollar military budget. As well as juicing the balance sheets of private contractors, this spending supports a worldwide network of eight hundred US military bases. In this new era, military resources committed to the dominance of the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia Pacific have been joined with a renewed willingness to use hard power in the Western Hemisphere, whether by launching Hellfire missiles in the Caribbean or sending the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles.
The expansion of Pentagon spending and intervention has unfurled in parallel to the most brutal deployment of US and allied forces in generations. In Gaza, the United States has overseen a genocidal Israeli assault and upended prior norms surrounding the use of force. Whereas air strikes against civilians and civilian infrastructure were once cloaked in the language of collateral damage, the United States and its leading proxy no longer hide their targeting of health workers, educators, journalists, water and energy infrastructure, or people lining up for food amid a starvation blockade.
Washington has demanded loyalty from its allies to support this brutal rampage across the Middle East. Despite symbolic moves and strongly worded statements, Keir Starmer has not paused daily surveillance flights operated by the British military over Gaza. During Trump’s recent state visit, Starmer’s recent rhetoric on the genocide was exactly what the US president wanted to hear and was met with an approving pat on the shoulder from his imperial patron.
Washington has also insisted that allies join its expansion of military power amid rivalry with China, taking the form of a new NATO spending target modeled precisely on the share of US gross domestic product devoted to the Pentagon. As part of this deal, European allies are commanded to pay their dues to the American military-industrial complex: aid to Ukraine, for instance, is now purchased from the United States with European money.
Commitment to this iron umbrella is also commitment to the fossil bloc; the new target is forecast to add 12 percent to the emissions of the European continent, and fiscal resources previously allocated for the green transition are being poured into war machines. Day to day, military emissions come on top of the staggering environmental costs of war — including those of Israel’s US- and UK-facilitated genocide in Gaza that has a carbon footprint on par with entire countries and uses environmental destruction as a tool of ethnic cleansing.
These overlapping processes of militarization, trade bloc re-formation, and genocide beckon the potential of greater and even more brutal conflict. This will bring even greater insecurity and instability to the world’s working class.
Working-Class Security
Across the North Atlantic world, the US-led expansion of military spending and fossil fuel consumption presents material risks to working-class communities with little to show for it. In return for the chaos of a new Cold War, communities in the United States and Europe are promised austerity and environmental breakdown as their needs are abandoned in favor of great-power competition.
For the working class, military-led industrial strategy is a bad return on investment. Recent research shows that for every million dollars, public spending on the military-industrial complex buys five jobs, while education spending creates thirteen and health care investment creates nine. State spending on the war economy consumes public resources that could otherwise provide greater benefits to the working class while rewarding executives and big investors.
At the five prime defense contractors in the United States (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman), CEO pay is at least 164 times greater than the median salary. Investors in these companies enjoy rich returns, too: a 2023 Pentagon study found that defense contractors disgorge cash to shareholders at a higher rate than the rest of the stock index.
Meanwhile, the contribution made by military spending and the Trump administration’s Energy Dominance agenda to environmental breakdown will bring greater instability. With the White House expanding fossil fuel production at home and increasing exports abroad, particularly to NATO allies, European energy security (and energy bills) will continue to rely on fragile geopolitical relationships instead of a domestic green supply.
New emissions from military spending will destabilize working-class life across the world as the Pentagon, already the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, is joined by a similarly sized European military-industrial complex. These emissions are just one part of the unknowable climate footprint of a voluntary Cold War, chosen instead of collaboration with the world’s green industrial superpower.
Recognizing the Pentagon as a source of instability and insecurity in working-class life is essential to building human security across the world. Alternatives to the new Cold War must be a priority for the Left on both sides of the Atlantic. This means highlighting the perversity of expanding military spending and its basis in geopolitical competition rather than genuine security. While campaigns for investment in life’s essentials — health, housing, green energy — are imperative regardless, the interests of working-class communities lie in demonstrating that the insatiable demands of the military-industrial complex are a barrier to collective flourishing.
A political program based on multilateral climate collaboration, rather than destructive competition, would also create the space for new industrial priorities. This would free research and production capacities from the war machine and direct them toward meeting human needs. As shown in the cycles of military spending over the last century, industrial production can be converted by the state when it sees fit, whether to escalate toward war or to take advantage of peace. In this context, politicians seeking to represent the working class must recognize that military expansion and escalation is being driven by great power interests. In a moment of spiraling and escalating transitions, human safety can only be safeguarded by setting aside rivalry and the elite desire to accumulate amid the chaos.