"Europe's militarisation is a jobs programme for the US military-industrial complex. Europe taxes its citizens, guts its public services, and ships the proceeds across the Atlantic to Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing – and Rutte offers this up as his proudest achievement, a gift to be laid at Trump’s feet."
“Daddy” knows best: Mark Rutte and the economics of vassalage
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte makes “the economic case” for Donald Trump to stay committed to NATO. And what is that case? That Europe’s frantic rearmament is now sustaining nearly 200,000 US jobs, through a $300 billion order book of European and Canadian purchases from the US arms industry.
So he is saying the quiet part out loud: European militarisation is a jobs programme for the US military-industrial complex. Europe taxes its citizens, guts its public services, and ships the proceeds across the Atlantic to Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing – and Rutte offers this up as his proudest achievement, a gift to be laid at Trump’s feet.
This is the man who last year called the US President “daddy”, and who now, asked about it, insists “praise is warranted”. He describes Europe, approvingly, as “one big platform of power projection for the United States”. He travelled to the White House to apologise for European countries that hadn’t done enough to help America’s illegal war on Iran – a war most of humanity condemned – reassuring Trump that European bases had still been used to launch some 5,000 US flights.
This is not diplomacy. It is the psychology of the vassal. A sensible European strategy would ask what serves the people of Europe: peace with their largest neighbour, affordable energy, investment in homes and hospitals. Rutte’s NATO asks only what pleases Washington and enriches its arms merchants.
Across Europe, governments are pleading poverty: no money for health services, for pensions, for housing, for the green transition. Yet suddenly there are hundreds of billions for weapons, most of it flowing straight to US corporations, justified by the ever-useful spectre of Russian aggression. The war economy has a purpose, and it isn’t defending Europeans. It’s transferring their wealth upward and westward.
Rutte calls this “a great success”. For the shareholders of the US arms industry, it certainly is. For everyone else, it is the sound of a continent being asked to pay for its own subordination, and to thank “daddy” for the privilege.