Spodnji komentar Wolfganga Münchaua je edini članek, ki ga je treba prebrati glede evropske norosti, ko je EU kot kura počepnila pred Trumpom in se podredila njegovemu diktatu, da letne izdatke za obrambo dvigne na 5 % BDP. To je absolutna norost, v katero so evropski politiki spravili EU, brez da bi za to imeli demokratični mandat. Vse države EU so lani skupaj namenile za obrambo 326 milijard evrov (1.9 % BDP EU). Dvig izdatkov za obrambo na 5 % pomeni, da bi glede na BDP iz leta 2024 morali izdatke za obrambo dvigniti na 895 milijard evrov oziroma za dodatnih 569 milijard evrov letno! To v 10 letih pomeni 5,700 milijard evrov (po cenah iz 2024).

Kaj to pomeni? To pomeni, da bo bodisi treba zmanjšati izdatke za socialo in družbeno infrastrukturo (vrtci, šole, zdravstvo) ter prometno infrastrukturo (ki trenutno znesejo okrog 3 % BDP), ali pa se dodatno zadolžiti vsako leto za skoraj 570 milijard evrov. No, in tukaj nas čakajo finančni špekulanti. Evropski BDP stagnira že 3 leta, že pred tem pa je bila rast mizerna in nobene možnosti ni, da bi EU odplačala ta dodatni dolg z višjo rastjo BDP. Sploh pa, ker bo večina dodatnih izdatkov šla za nakup ameriške in izraelske vojaške opreme in tehnologij in ker so multipliaktorji izdatkov za obrambo že itak manjši od 1. Torej se bodo povečali deficiti držav in finančni špekulanti bodo napadli države EU zaradi ocene, da so ti deficiti in dodatni dolh nevzdržni. Grška kriza se je začela, ker Grčija ni bila sposobna refinancirati 20 milijard evrov dolga, zdaj pa govorimo o 570 milijardah evrov dodatnega evropskega dolga letno! Predstavljajte si veselico finančnih špekulantov, ko bodo lahko začeli navijati donose na obveznice EU držav.

Najhuje pa je, kot pravilno ugotavlja tudi Münchau, da ta številka – 5 % BDP – ni prišla na osnovi kalkulacij evropskih potreb po dodatni oborožitvi, vlaganjih v vojaške tehnologije in dodatno vojsko (kot sem to naredil lani jaz, ko sem ocenil, da bi se kumulativni skupni izdatek za obrambo evropskih držav v 10 letih moral povečati za 900 milijard evrov, pač pa jo je Trump izcuzal iz prsta. Lahko bi rekel 4 %, lahko bi rekel 7 % BDP. In države EU bi pristale na katerokoli številko, samo da zadovoljijo Trumpa.

In še več, ta dodatna vlaganja v opremo ne bodo bistveno povečale obrambne sposobnosti držav EU, saj tukaj ni nobenega načrta za skupne vojaške programe ali skupne vojaške nabave na podlagi identificiranih potreb. Pač pa gre zgolj za številke v excelu. Teh številk pa se Putinu. ni treba bati. Sploh pa, ker bodo finančni špekulanti uničili Evropo, brez da bi njemu bilo potrebno migniti s prstom.

Ali kdo med evropskimi politiki sploh še uporablja možgane? Vsaj kakšno možgansko vijugo? Ali pa gre zgolj za kasto ameriško-izraelskih podrepnikov, ki bi naredili vse, da zadovoljijo njune interese?

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I am going to put my head on the block to predict that this crisis could come back sooner than we think. Last time, it was the southern Europeans who triggered it. This time, it is the northern Europeans with their relentless push for an increase in defence spending to 5% of GDP.

In 2010, a Greek deficit, overshot by some $20 billion, triggered the worst financial crisis in Europe since the Great Depression. But this is a tiny amount compared to the extra defence spending European countries are about to commit: $500 billion, by my calculations, every year. The Greek deficit was a finance minister taking his eye off the ball, but our increase in military spending is a life sentence. After 10 years, we will have spent a cool $5 trillion. This is on top of what we are spending already.

People get easily fazed by large numbers. Let’s put this into perspective. When the Labour government in the UK cut off the winter fuel payments to pensioners, that saved them less than $1.8 billion. We all remember the furious political reactions and the botched U-turn. If the UK was really serious about meeting the Nato 5%-of-GDP target, the UK government would have to spend a cool $100 billion each year. That’s 55 times as much as the savings on the fuel subsidies. In fact, it is more than half of the UK’s entire welfare budget, excluding pensions.

It is not just the UK. You are looking at numbers that are off the charts for every Western European country. This week, Nato leaders are about to descend on the Hague to agree the fiscally most impactful decision that politicians have ever committed to in modern history. They do so without an electoral mandate. None of them campaigned for this, including those who came to power in recent elections, like Keir Starmer or Friedrich Merz. None of them received a formal mandate from the parliaments, which are ultimately responsible for fiscal expenditures in Western democracies. They are doing this because Donald Trump just pulled this number out of a hat. It was just a number. He could have said four, or six. Nobody did a study beforehand on what Nato actually needs, and how the needed capabilities are best acquired. We are talking about the biggest fiscal programme in human history — because Europeans are dead scared that Trump will feed us to the Russian bear.

This is now how military investments are normally done. The right way to do this is to start identifying the threat, and the options available to counter it. Europe will undoubtedly have to purchase capabilities it does not currently have — especially in areas such as electronic warfare, cybersecurity, satellite-based systems, and drone technology. What stands out about European defence spending is not how little we spend compared to the US, but how inefficiently we spend it. Europe has six times as many weapons systems as the US. Our drones, tanks, missiles and warships are incompatible with each other. Nato-Europe has 178 weapon systems, compared to 30 in the US. European countries have a dozen different types of howitzers, a type of artillery gun designed to fire projectiles on a high-arching trajectory. According to Reuters, the Europeans spend some €6-11 million on each one of them, while the US spends €2 million.

Would a rational security planner not start with that kind of consideration? If you were really serious about raising Europe’s defensive capabilities, you would pool this. Europe does not need a single army, but it does need a single defence procurement agency. It cannot be the EU, if only because the UK and Norway are not members.

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I doubt that our new Nato target will help us do this. Given the lack of any political willingness to pool our defence purchases, what will Putin make of our newly announced 5% spending target? He is already spending 6-8% of Russia economic output on defence, but the impact is much higher than those numbers suggest. He does not have a dozen different howitzer systems. Through presidential diktat, he redirects private-sector industrial production to defence. He pays a fraction of the cost of defence equipment that we do. His technology may not be as advanced as ours. But unlike Western countries, Russia is capable of scaling up production quickly. Putin also gets supplies of weapons and soldiers from North Korea, drones from Iran, and dual-use advanced technology from China. The West, and especially the so-called Russia experts that keep popping up in the media, persistently underestimated the resilience of Russian military supply chains. Putin has been a much more formidable warrior than Western experts believed he would be.

So how would a leader, who has been in power for a quarter of a century and who has fought several wars, react to the Nato announcements of an increase in defence spending that avoids any painful decisions? Worse still, many Nato countries like France or Germany will have to fund this through debt because they do not have the political majorities to raise taxes or cut spending. Germany would have to spend $130 billion per year extra on defence. That’s about the size of the federal government’s social budget. They are not going to replace their welfare systems with food stamps, are they? That is the kind of thing Putin might do.

If Nato goes down the road of debt-funded defence spending, chances are that the bond markets will attack us before Putin does. The infamous bond market vigilantes will fight on the side of the Russians. They were the ones that brought the sovereign debt crisis to the eurozone. Their job is to attack countries that aren’t financially sustainable. Low-growth Western European economies are not going to grow out of this debt as they did after the Second World War. A debt-funded increase in defence spending of that magnitude could push some Western countries over the brink. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, is the only Western leader to come out openly against the Nato defence spending programme for exactly this reason. It would destabilise his country, he said. But Spain is not the only country in trouble, or even the main one. Sánchez is the only guy who admits this.

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Perhaps the best thing that can happen to the West is that they will cheat themselves out of the new defence spending target — so that the 5% will end up like just another Western phantom spending programme. Keir Starmer wants to reclassify £5 billion of investments in rural broadband rollout as a key military priority. I am hearing that the Germans are thinking of counting an electricity-price subsidy as a military investment. The truth is that we do not want to give up our creature comforts, let alone our national sovereignty, for defence procurement.

We are spreadsheet warriors. Putin knows it.

Vir:  Wolfgang Münchau, UnHerd