AT THE recent Nato summit most member countries committed themselves to a target of spending 5 per cent of GDP on the military budget. This is more than we were spending during the Gulf war and much more than when this country was waging war on Iraq and Afghanistan. We have not seen such a rapid expansion of military spending in this country since the beginning of the second world war.

The consequences for the safety and security of this country will be very grave and there will be very significant, negative consequences for most other areas of government spending as a result. The government plans to shift us to a wartime economy, with all the serious consequences that implies.

The US president described the outcome of the Nato summit as “a great victory.” For once, he was telling the truth. It was a great personal victory for him and for the US war machine.

Throughout the US presidential campaign Trump repeatedly threatened to force European Nato members to pay more, much more as their contribution to the organisation. Despite a great deal of posturing about resisting Trump, European leaders have done exactly as he demanded. It reached a low-point with the Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte calling Trump “Daddy.”

Trump has obtained from the Europeans, including the British government, a major contribution to the US’s war-fighting capacity. It will be paid for by the populations of Europe, including people in this country.

Trump’s plan, as he said himself, is to ‘“un-unite” Russia and China, so that he can pursue a confrontation with the latter. All of his recent manoeuvrings in imposing tariffs on the world have clearly had that as a central objective, including trying to dictate that other countries are not allowed to trade with China, under threat of even more tariffs.

Europe’s role in all this is to replace the US resources (under the Nato banner) in Europe that are being used to fight Russia. Those US resources can then be freed up and redeployed to south-east Asia and the coming fight with China.

Europe, or nearly all of it, has gone along with this bizarrely reckless policy. For us Europeans, this simply means a forever war with Russia while government spending on areas of useful social spending and welfare are cut much further. More war and more austerity is the consequence of the of the real refusal to stand up to Trump, in fact an almost complete subservience to him, the “Daddy.”

There is of course one exception to this, which is the Socialist government in Spain led by Pedro Sanchez. He is no left-wing firebrand and verbally he makes all the warmongers’ noises about the threats we face and the need for a military upgrade and reform. The essential difference is that he refuses to fund Trump’s war machine and argues that the current level of 2.1 per cent of GDP in the military is quite sufficient. Actions are more important than rhetoric.

For his part, Trump has threatened more tariffs on Spain because it has a government with some sort of spine. As a member of the European Union, he may find that difficult. But it demonstrates what Trump really thinks about US allies. They are only allies if they do exactly what Trump demands.

It was only a decade ago that the informal rule in Nato was that countries spend 2 per cent of GDP on the military budget. The general shift to 5 per cent is a step-change in the preparedness for war.

Many of the warmongers argue that it was the annexation of Crimea in 2014 by Russia and now the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 which changed all the calculations and assumptions.

But that is not really true. The Trump plan (which may still be evolving) has been that the US reduces its commitment to being stationed in Europe and shifts to encircling China. So, the war drive in Europe is not increased forces in response to a threat of being attacked by Russia. It is in response to the prospect of a unilateral departure by the United States. As one commentator, writing about the Nato summit in The Times put it, “The alliance leaders who gathered in the Dutch city [The Hague] showed that they were more frightened of Donald Trump than of Vladimir Putin.”

While that phrase was produced with a certain flourish, there is objectively no reason to accept the warmongers’ attempt to frighten the population into acquiescing to their war drive. In addition to the trillion-dollar US military budget, the 5 per cent of GDP target will take the other member states up to that level between them. A total of $2 trillion or more.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) Russia’s military budget is a tiny fraction of that, $150bn in 2024, with no capacity to significantly increase it. Even China and Russia’s military budgets combined would still be less than a quarter of the Nato total.

Despite casting accusations at others, it is the Nato countries that are engaged in an aggressive military build-up, at Trump’s direction.

Despite widespread claims to the contrary, it is not as if the Nato members have a record of demonstrating peaceful intent. Nato was part of the aggression against Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya. Currently, its members have been helping the Israeli genocide, bombing Yemen, installing terrorists in Syria and fighting a nuclear-armed Russia. The latest illegal act is the bombing of Iran. As much-discussed scenarios for the start of World War III go, that is almost the complete set.

All of this severely undermines the safety and security of the people of this country, and the institutions they rely on, the transport network, the NHS, banking systems, and many more. Strong arguments for a completely different approach to properly defend our security are made in CND’s recent Alternative Defence Review and it should be read widely.

We are already seeing some negative social consequences from the war drive. Austerity is back with a vengeance. It is not accidental that the cuts to welfare and the chokehold applied to departmental spending are occurring at the same time.

From the government’s perspective, very large welfare and other cuts are necessary to deliver on the promises to increase the military budget. The war drive and the austerity drive go hand-in-hand. But the sheer scale of the planned rise in the MoD budget means that austerity, in a number of forms, will go much wider and deeper that it has already. We must be prepared to fight them both.

Diane Abbott is Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.