Why Western Governments Are Beating the Drums for Wars

7 May 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The only parts of American, German, British, French, and Italian industry that are booming right now, are their armaments manufacturers — the companies that sell far more to governments than to consumers, and that therefore boom while the economy busts. These are the companies that need to control the Government in order to control their biggest market (which IS the Government), and so their controlling owners, the billionaires who control their boards, need to control the influencers of the public, in order to get their candidates elected into Government so as to increase Government spending on their products and services, and to either increase the national debt or else cut the Government’s expenditures for the health, education, and welfare, of the voters. Those “influencers of the public” are news-media, and are also the prestigious universities, and think tanks, whose professors and experts they hire as opinion-writers etc. to validate what these billionaires want to be validated so that the public will then vote for the politicians who support this idea of increasing the public debt and decreasing public spending for the benefit of the public, in order to increase military spending. And the way to do this is the type of scare-mongering that European Governments are doing right now to the effect that Russia is planning to conquer their countries, and that America’s Government is doing right now in order to scare-monger Americans to the effect that China is planning to conquer America — and that the U.S. Government had used also in 2002 and 2003 in order to scare-monger Americans into thinking that Iraq was preparing to attack America. This is the basic marketing plan for those billionaires, and it has always been extremely profitable for them.

For example, on May 2nd the U.S. White House — which has made clear that it’s beating the drums for war against China — headlined “Office of Management and Budget Releases the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Skinny Budget” and reported that “The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. … Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission.” All of those increases would go towards the suppliers to the enormously militarized police-state at the same time that health, education, and welfare, of the voters, will be reduced by $165 billion or 23% from the current level. And notice that Trump’s propaganda-operation is alleging that they are “gutting a weaponized deep state” by cutting Governmental services to the poor. If that sounds stupid, it is no stupider than the electorate is, but the electorate were given a choice between the nominees of two Parties, each of which is controlled by its billionaires; and in an election such at that, it is like having a choice between different ways to commit suicide; and, so, it is the billionaires who are to be blamed, not the voters (in both Parties) who have been deceived by them into voting for their candidates. But anyway: Trump revealed there his contempt for his voters, because even he knows that the Deep State does NOT consist of the poor, but instead it consists of the billionaires.

The White House’s May 2nd “Major Discretionary Funding Changes” says that:

For Defense spending [ONLY the Defense Department, NOT including the approximately $700 billion yearly of annual U.S. military spending that is being paid out from OTHER federal Departments], the President proposes an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion for FY 2026; for Homeland Security, the Budget commits a historic $175 billion investment to, at long last, fully secure our border. Under the proposal, a portion of these increases — at least $325 billion assumed in the budget resolution recently agreed to by the Congress — would be provided through reconciliation, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources needed to complete the mission. This mandatory supplement to discretionary spending would enable the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, among others, to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration and harden the border and other defenses to protect America from foreign invasion.

Therefore, approximately $1.7T of total military spending is being sought by Trump, while he is proposing to cut all other discretionary spending (which had previously constituted the other 47% of all U.S. Government annually appropriated federal spending (and was previously around $800B per year) down by $165B to around $635B total, or about 37% of all annually appropriated federal spending.

Looking further at WHAT is being cut the most, the document shows that the only part of the Department of Education that will be increased — by $60 million — is “Charter Schools,” the part that privatizes public-school education, which is the part that billionaires want to increase. Meanwhile, Title 1 and K-12 federal spending will be reduced by $4.535 billion; the program to incentivize colleges to “to engage with low-income students and increase access” will be cut by $1.579 B.

The Department of Health and Human Services will cut $4.035 from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), $1.970B from the Refugee and Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, $1.732B from AIDS and financial-assistance health programs, $3.588B from CDC and Prevention programs, $17.965B from NIH, $1.065B from programs working with addicts to help them reduce their addictions.

The Environmental Protection Agency will be cut $2.460B for Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Funds, and under a billion dollars each for such programs as the Hazardos Substance Superfund.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will be cut by $26.718B for programs for the poor.

The Treasury Department will be cut by $2.488B for the IRS.

The National Science Foundation will be cut by $3.479B and by an additional $1.130B for “Broadening Participation.”

Most of the other cuts will be below a billion dollars.

On February 26th, I reported that:

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies).

But Western Governments call this a “democracy.”

In Europe, the war they’re beating the drums for is instead against Russia. On April 30th, the Carnegie endowment for international war, which goes by the name Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and which was founded by Andrew Carnegie, who like Cecil Rhodes in the later part of the 1800s, co-invented neoconservatism (the plan for the UK to take over the U.S. again and use it to spread universally the British Empire but which achieved that goal much later, on 25 July 1945, when Truman was suckered into it by the Rhodesist Winston Churchill and by General Eisenhower, to start the Cold War to ultimately conquer Russia), headlined “Europe Tried to Trump-Proof Itself. Now It’s Crafting a Plan B: The continent’s response to security and economic challenges could be transformative both at home and for post-American international relations.”, and argued that

The building blocks of a response strategy are coming into focus in three key areas. First, Ukraine is Europe’s first line of defense. London and Paris have been convening a “coalition of the willing” to plot the next stages of European military and diplomatic support, with the goal of making Ukraine a “steel porcupine.” … Second, the need for European states to increase their defense spending was long overdue, and the open discussion about assuming responsibility for territorial defense and deterrence is unprecedented. Governments are taking drastic measures to increase defense spending, with Germany’s U-turn on public debt as the most remarkable evidence that taboos can be broken. …

Politically, to ensure public support for rearming Europe and to offset the inevitable costs, defense efforts ought to be part of a broader strategy of economic and technological innovation. … The economic and social costs of the security and economic transition at home will lead to political challenges in a volatile context in which few governments enjoy wide popular support, though the EU is enjoying positive public opinion polling at the moment — likely a silver lining of the Trump effect. The EU’s security turn will come at the expense of its soft power, with reputational costs at home and abroad. Making its economy fit for geopolitical disruption entails daunting obstacles and difficult choices.

The “Naked Capitalism” blog recently published some terrific articles documenting that European Governments are just as much oligarchies (or “aristocracies”) as is America’s Government:

“Coffee Break – Across the Pond: Lights Out Edition”

“Coffee Break: Across the Pond, Tyrants Edition”

“The EU Zombie Uses Trump as Cover to Further Feed on Citizens”

Despite the cutesy, pretentious, vague, pompous, headlines at that site, some of the articles there (such as those three) are superb. Because of the lousy headlines there, it’s tedious to find which ones, if any, there might be worth reading.

While America’s billionaires are intent upon increasing their armaments-profits from a war-buildup against China, Europe’s billionaires are intent upon increasing their armaments-profits from a war-buildup against China. And on both sides of the Atlantic, the poor will suffer the most, and only the billionaires will profit the most, from the neoliberal-neoconservative (or libertarian and imperialistic) policies of these ‘democracies’ that actually aren’t. They are so corrupt, they are aristocracies. All electoral democracies ultimately degenerate into such dictatorships. And now it is accelerating.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.