LABOUR prime minister Keir Starmer addressed Parliament yesterday reporting on the emergency defence summit of European leaders he’d convened in London at the weekend.
This hastily summoned meeting of 18 European leaders, along with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, was called in panic after it became clear in Friday night’s flare-up between Zelensky and US president Donald Trump and his vice-president JD Vance that the US is prepared to dump Ukraine along with its former allies in the UK and EU.
Zelensky was humiliated and ejected from the White House by Trump despite having come to Washington to sign an agreement handing over the mineral wealth of the Ukraine on a plate to the US, along with $500 billion in war reparations.
At this meeting, Starmer warned that ‘Europe is at a crossroads in history’ as he committed the UK to playing a central role in a ‘coalition of the willing’ to defend Ukraine.
The phrase ‘coalition of the willing’ was first used in 2003 to describe the support given by the UK to the invasion of Iraq by US military forces using the lie that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and devastated the country.
The then Labour prime minister Tony Blair sent 45,000 UK troops to fight this illegal war. Starmer is now emulating Blair – only this time, the US is not playing a role in this coalition with Trump making it quite clear the UK and EU states are on their own.
Starmer has pledged an additional £1.6 billion of UK export finance to buy over 5,000 air defence missiles for Ukraine. This is on top of a £2.2 billion loan for more military aid to the collapsing Zelensky regime.
All this is on top of the £12.8 billion already given to Ukraine and Starmer’s cast iron pledge to hand Zelensky £3 billion every year for ‘as long as it takes’ to continue the war provoked by US imperialism designed to weaken Russia and open the country up to capitalist exploitation of its vast resources.
Starmer intends these billions to come from austerity cuts imposed on workers and the welfare state.
In addition, Starmer pledged the UK and other European countries are willing to put ‘boots on the ground and planes in the air’ to defend Ukraine and Europe in the event of a Russian invasion.
The increasingly strident calls to re-arm because the UK and Europe are threatened by Russia has the same basis in truth as the fraudulent claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that it intended to use against the UK.
While Starmer and EU leaders are whipping up a war hysteria, Putin last week proposed to Trump a deal offering the US access to rare minerals including those found in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine and dangling the prospect of allowing America to exploit the huge mineral deposits in Russia itself.
Trump is reported to be ‘considering’ a deal with Russia – a deal that would further signal that US imperialism is dumping its erstwhile allies in the UK and Europe.
Not only is the US dumping them but, as he made clear at the weekend, Trump intends to impose 25% import duties on EU exports to the US ‘very soon’.
World capitalism has indeed reached a crossroads; with the old world order established at the end of World War II in tatters, as the most powerful capitalist country, the US, desperately attempts to reorder the world to rescue itself from diving into slump and recession.
In the midst of this fast developing world crisis, the working class is expected to pay the bill for imperialist wars of domination and trade wars to smash capitalist rivals.
The working class internationally has the power to intervene and resolve this crisis by organising in mass strike action to bring down their capitalist governments and taking power through establishing workers’ governments and socialist planned economies.
This requires the building up of the WRP and Young Socialist in Britain and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership necessary for the victory of the world socialist revolution.