By IWU-FI sections in Europe
24 November 2025. Using the Russian threat as an excuse, the European Union is rearming. In March 2025, the European Union approved the ReArm Plan, under which the 27 member states agreed to an €800 billion increase in defence spending. The EU common fund provided €150 billion in low-interest loans, but the member states must repay them. The plan requires all EU countries to buy at least half of their weaponry within the bloc by 2030 (currently they purchase 80% on the external market and 64% directly from the US). To carry out at least 40% of their purchases jointly (currently barely 18%) and increase the weight of the domestic market to at least 35% of the entire European arms trade.
These expenditures will increase public debt, although no one will count them for deficit accounting purposes, revealing the cynicism of the supposed economic orthodoxy that served as an unquestionable mantra for imposing memoranda on Greece, or austerity measures on the Spanish State that devastated the living conditions of the working class.
On 24 June 2025, NATO met in The Hague, chaired by Trump. NATO was “brain dead,” as Macron described it just three years ago. Putin brandished the threat of NATO to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Today, NATO has expanded to include Sweden and Finland, and its military budget is growing. From the objective set at the 2022 Madrid summit, which was to reach 2% of GDP in military spending by 2029, to the target set in The Hague at 5% of GDP for the 32 member countries by 2035, as demanded by Trump. 3.5% allocated to military defence and 1.5% to military security. Putin’s threats to NATO, and vice versa, grease the wheels of war for both sides while imposing cuts in the welfare of their people.
However, the increases in military spending are unrelated to Ukraine’s support because the EU’s aid to Ukraine doesn’t reach half of the defence budget increase over the last three years, which was 30%. European and American imperialism has regulated the flow of weapons to Ukraine to enable negotiations with a weakened, but not defeated, Putin. We stand with the Ukrainian people’s resistance against the invasion of Russian imperialism and defend their right to arm themselves to confront it. We do so from a position opposed to NATO and imperialism, and independent of Zelensky’s neoliberal government.
A massive injection of public funds into the arms industry. Domestic production is not significant in the EU supply scheme. This does not mean that the European arms industry is unimportant. Nearly a third of the world’s arms exports come from European countries, which account for five of the top ten arms exporters. The European Union has 27 arms companies among the world’s 100 largest. 41 in the US. The leading European companies are the Franco-German Airbus, the Italian Leonardo, the French Thales, and the German Rheinmetall. Outside the EU, the UK has BAE Systems, and there is the Swedish Saab. The stock prices of arms companies are soaring, fuelled by the winds of war and astronomical rearmament plans. Governments justify these increases in armament by arguing the need not only for security but also to boost the economy and maintain jobs. But the arms economy is parasitic and inflationary.
If in 2009 the EU and governments bailed out the banks with billions, now they are doing the same for the metallurgy and arms-related industries, while the bill falls on the working class and the poor. Militarisation is a response to the profound crisis of capitalism. Facilities intended for automobile manufacturing are being prepared—as they were not during the Great Depression of the 1930s—for conversion to the war industry. With Germany in recession, dragged down by an industrial sector that is struggling to recover, and France facing serious budget problems, the European powers are seeing their positions in the global imperialist order slip. And against that backdrop, the political instability in France, with the fall of several governments in a matter of months, and in Germany are a consequence of the deep bourgeois division within the two pillars of the EU. Given the situation, with a growing sector of the bourgeoisie promoting the extreme right to intensify repression and impose harsh policies on the masses.
The European Union, a giant with feet of clay. Trump demanded a piece of that enormous pie, and he threatened 30% tariffs on EU products. The European Commission quickly yielded. On 21 August, Trump and Von der Leyen signed an agreement that enshrines the energy, military, and commercial dependence of the US: $750 billion in US fossil fuels until 2028 (liquefied natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy). With $600 billion in investments from European companies in strategic industries in the US, Trump merely reduced tariffs to 15%, but the tariff on American companies in Europe will be zero. He also forced a revision of the initial rearmament plan, which aimed to reduce dependence on the US, as there is a military purchase commitment estimated at around $500 billion.
The agreement imposed by Trump on the EU shows the subordination of European imperialism to the US and how European imperialism has lost relative influence in the global imperialist arena. The market share of European imperialism is falling. While the EU grew by 5.5% in the last five years, the US grew by 14.8% and China by 33.1%.
France is the leading European country in defence spending, ranking 7th overall, followed by Italy in 10th, Germany in 15th, and Spain in 17th. Adding up the 27 member states, the EU would be the world’s second-largest military power. According to the Institute for Strategic Studies, the EU, with 1.97 million soldiers, is the second-largest military power on the planet in terms of troop numbers, after China. It is first in the professionalisation of its forces, has the largest force in tanks and armoured vehicles, submarines, and frigates, and is the second-largest air power in the world. There is no shortage of weapons; on the contrary, there is a surplus. But the total is not accurate, because there is no single European imperialism (nor a single European bourgeoisie) capable of imposing a centralised plan on the whole, but several imperialisms, many of which developed in conflict with one another. European companies compete, creating many redundancies and preventing their products from being compatible. The interests of each bourgeoisie within its own state take precedence over supposed common interests in competing economically or in the military industry with the major imperialisms like the US or China.
A price that the European working class will pay and oppressed peoples.
People also promoted a narrative of fear to help the rearmament discourse be accepted within the EU and its member states. Warnings about Russian attacks and even a third world war, or the need to keep cash on hand because of alleged cyberattacks and a survival kit for at least three days, have been used. This policy of fear allows them to militarise, justify curtailing freedoms, and increase internal repression, as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have shown, where they have criminalised solidarity with the Palestinian people.
These enormous expenditures on armaments drive up public debt and its interest payments. In the first quarter of 2025, the debt of the 27 EU member states reached €14.82 trillion, 4.5% higher than the previous year, while GDP grew by 1.5%. Interest payments grew even faster, reaching almost €177 billion in the first half of 2025, an 11.5% increase. Debt repayment was sacrosanct and had forced the establishment of its priority through constitutional reforms, as with the Spanish State.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that increased defence spending would require sacrifices. The United Kingdom was the first to implement this approach, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer proposing cuts in the 2025 budget of £5.7 billion in disability assistance, healthcare, and aid to dependent families, and reducing 10,000 public sector jobs. In France, several governments have already presented plans for social spending cuts while increasing defence expenditures, only to fall in the face of public rejection. In Germany, the Minister of Economy proposed raising the retirement age to 70. The Spanish state is trying to change the rhetoric to disguise rearmament as a progressive policy, but it is abundantly clear that the money allocated to armaments is being taken from public services.
According to the Eurostat report, 21% of the population, or 93.3 million people in the EU, were at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2024. Every cent spent on defence is a cent less available for public education, healthcare, decent housing, pensions, the fight against poverty, and the creation of stable public sector jobs.
Imperialist rearmament is a threat to the peoples of the world
Germany sells 30% of its arms imports to Israel, weapons used to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. Following the European powers, some also do so, albeit to a lesser extent. EU countries also use the pretext of European security to deepen their relations with Erdoğan’s authoritarian government in Turkey. The debate arises regarding the possibility of employing the Turkish army, a NATO member, to guarantee European security. The Turkish government signs new arms contracts worth billions of dollars. Arms sales are also a way of supporting dictatorships that allow the plundering of their resources through European multinationals. The Spanish state sold weapons to Saudi Arabia during its criminal military offensive in Yemen. Weapons that serve the impoverishment and oppression of peoples. We defend the resistance of peoples against imperialism and oppressive governments.
These rearmament policies also increase the militarisation of the EU’s borders. Dictatorships are supported, and they allow multinational corporations to exploit nations, while dramatic plans are imposed on the population through debt.
The recent Migration and Asylum Pact of a year ago tightens entry conditions, facilitates deportations, and externalises borders with bilateral agreements financed with billions by oppressive regimes such as Turkey, Libya, Morocco, Egypt, and Mauritania. The construction of Fortress Europe has resulted in more than 30,000 migrants dying or disappearing in the Mediterranean in the last 10 years. The EU’s 2024 budget for Frontex, the border militarisation operations, reached €922 million, a 22% increase over the previous two years. Migration control and detention programs are in place in more than 22 countries. Turkey alone received almost €10 billion from the EU in recent years to repress and curb immigration. The European Commission has announced that it will triple funding for migration, border management, and internal security to €81 billion for the 2028-2034 period. This racist and xenophobic policy fuels far-right rhetoric.
Mobilise to defeat the imperialist rearmament plan
The fight against imperialist rearmament must mobilise the working class, with its political and trade union organisations, the youth, and the popular sectors. We must denounce the rearmament policy and its implementation in every state budget, contrasting it with social needs. The broadest mobilisation for:
Not a single euro for imperialist rearmament. Public money for salaries, pensions, jobs, and public services.
Down with Fortress Europe: no to the Migration and Asylum Pact and immigration laws
Stop the complicity of the EU and European governments with the Zionist genocide in Palestine. Immediate arms embargo and a complete break with Israel.
Down with the EU and European imperialism. Solidarity with the peoples fighting against imperialist oppression: with the Palestinian and Ukrainian resistance.
No to the imperialist European Union in the service of big capital, for a united Europe of workers and peoples, for a Socialist United States of Europe.
19 November 2025
IWU-FI activists in Germany,
Movement for the Revolutionary Marxist League MLMR (Italy),
Workers’ Democratic Party IDP (Turkey),
United Workers TU (Portugal),
Internationalist Fight LI (Spanish State)
