Starmer’s proposal to send troops to Ukraine is a typical piece of empty patriotic posturing.
He will be hoping it makes him appear tough, but it conveniently skates over the fact that he has gone from being a champion of continuing the carnage in Ukraine to accepting that a peace process is inevitable.
At last July’s NATO summit, he was pushing for Ukraine’s outright victory. Suddenly after Trump’s reset, he is a supporter of a negotiated settlement.
The fact that Trump’s interventions this week have changed the calculus over Ukraine proves what the anti-war movement has said from the start. The US was always in the driving seat in Ukraine’s war with Russia. Officials and commentators are now regularly referring to it as a proxy war, something they long denied.
In fact, it was NATO’s rapid eastward drive that created the conditions for the war in the first place. A series of US foreign policy insiders repeatedly warned over the last two decades that this push to the east would be deeply provocative to Russia.
Senior figures from Henry Kissinger to Madeline Albright argued that any discussion of Ukraine joining NATO in particular would be a red line for all sections of the Russian establishment. Undeterred, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice pushed ahead with discussion of just that at the Bucharest Summit in 2008.
Between the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, thirteen states in Eastern Europe and the Baltics joined NATO, despite promises in the early 1990s that NATO would not move one inch east.
After Russia’s invasion in February 2022, which the Stop the War Coalition opposed from the outset, the Western powers responded almost overnight with the biggest mobilisation in the region since the Cold War and the biggest transfer of weapons to a foreign country since World War Two.
Britain led the European war drive, sending drones, depleted uranium shells, cruise missiles, and tanks; promising a training scheme for Ukrainian fighter pilots and putting special service troops into Ukrainian territory.
Britain has up to now sent nearly £13 billion pounds with of aid to Ukraine, of which nearly £8 billion is military. All this at a time when successive governments have been telling people that drastic cuts in public services are essential.
In the first few months of the war the Conservative government became alarmed that Ukraine’s President Zelensky was pursuing peace negotiations.
Within 48 hours Boris Johnson turned up in Kyiv to tell Zelensky that ‘no negotiations are possible’. According to sources close to Zelensky quoted in the Ukrainian media:
‘Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. Putin is a war criminal. Pressure must be put on him. No negotiations are possible. And secondly, if you are ready to sign any agreement with him, then we will not be part of it. We can have agreements with you, but not with him. He will let everyone down in any case,’
These moves have served to prolong a war which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and which most military experts predicted from the start was unwinnable.
Now Starmer says he is ready and willing to take responsibility for putting British soldiers ‘in harm’s way’ in Ukraine. Such a move, already condemned in several European capitals, would only inflame the situation as well as throwing away more much-needed resources
Donald Trump’s withdrawal of support for Ukraine and his plans to pull financial support for NATO have blown up the Western security architecture in place since World War Two. They are cynical moves based on the calculation that the US should try and draw Russia towards the US as it faces up to its main competitor on the world stage, a rapidly arming China.
Accompanying them is the demand that other Western allies need to take on more of the military burden of defending what is laughingly called the free world. All this is a response to growing challenges to US power in a more and more multipolar world.
Even though Trump has been flagging these moves for months they have caused consternation in Europe.
With tin soldier Starmer leading the charge, the Europeans are responding by calling for rearmament across the continent, just as Trump demands.
Such plans will increase the risk of wider war and exacerbate an already brutal austerity. Treasury leaks are suggesting that plans for 11% cuts to council funding, once regarded as being worst case scenarios, are now being seriously game planned because of the ‘need to increase defence spending’.
This underlines the necessity for the whole movement to oppose what is a bogus security panic. Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s and not much bigger than Spain’s, is simply not a serious military threat to wider Europe. Its army failed to reach Kyiv in the first days of the war and the effort in Ukraine has come at a massive economic cost.
For the political deadheads running Europe Donald Trump’s epochal shift away from the continent is just one more reason for ramping up arms spending and militarism.
Anyone with any imagination or concern for the future would see it as an opportunity to move away from failed military solutions towards a foreign policy based on peace and co-operation.