Today, on May 3, the World Socialist Web Site Organize sound International online gathering May 1 at 3 p.m. (East time). A central theme of this rally is the need to build an international socialist movement of the working class against the imperialist war.
The urgency of this prospect was highlighted this week by the publication of a report by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute – SIPRI), documenting an amazing figure of $ 2,700 billion in world military spending in 2024.
More than a third of world military spending is attributable to American imperialism, Washington having devoted $ 997 billion to war in 2024, the last year of the Biden administration. The figures also reveal spectacular increases in military budgets in Germany (88.5 billion dollars) and Japan ($ 55.3 billion), an increase of 28 percent and 21 percent in one year respectively. Germany has thus gone from the seventh to fourth row of the greatest military expenditure.
The NATO alliance, led by the United States, spent more than $ 1,500 billion, or 55 percent of the world total. It is ten times more than the 149 billion dollars allocated by Russia, which is the target of imperialists in the current war in Ukraine.
The increase in military spending has been incessant in the last decade, with an increase of more than $ 1,000 billion, going from $ 1,670 billion in 2015. But this is only the start. The imperialist powers have announced new massive increases in their military budgets in order to guarantee their share of loot in the new redistribution of the world between the great powers.
The Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026, published on Friday, provides for a 13 % increase in the pentagon budget, bringing it to $ 1,010 billion. To finance this colossal sum, Trump plans to reduce the education budget by 12 percent and impose drastic cuts on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as other essential social programs.
In Europe, Germany is committed to devoting 1,000 billion euros ($ 1,130 billion) to war preparation: a “special fund” of 500 billion euros to adapt civil infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals) to military use, and 500 billion euros for the purchase of military equipment. The 500 billion euros intended for military equipment represent 11 percent of German GDP, more than the 8.6 percent of the GDP constituted by Germany’s war credits during the first year of the First World War. Hitler only reached a level of comparable military spending until 1938, after five years of intensive reset of the Nazi regime, just a year before the start of the Second World War.
The meteoric growth of military budgets promises enormous profits to weapons manufacturers – modern death merchants – as well as financial oligarchy. The 100 largest weapons manufacturers in the world recorded a turnover of $ 632 billion in 2023, including 317 billion for American producers.
The German company Rheinmetall, which already provided weapons to the Nazi regime during the Second World War, recorded spectacular growth of 36 percent of its sales in 2024 and provides for a new increase of 25 to 30 percent this year. Rheinmetall estimates that an increase in military spending in NATO countries to 3.5 percent of GDP – a goal supported by German, French and British governments – could lead to orders reaching “up to 400 billion euros” by 2030.
All the imperialist powers claim that their military expenses are purely defensive, by calling them “defense spending”. It is a grotesque lie. Whether Washington, Berlin, London, Paris or Tokyo, the ruling elites are moving to the teeth to advance their predatory economic and geostrategic interests by military means, both against their rivals and against their “allies” of the facade, around the world.
As for Russia and China, whose regimes are desperately seeking to find a compromise with the imperialist powers, they brandish the military threat and reactionary nationalism in order to negotiate an agreement with imperialism and to defend their “right” to exploit the working class in their own country.
The dazzling increase in military spending over the past decade is accompanied by the breakup of imperialist wars for control of raw materials, markets, labor and areas of influence around the world. In 2014, the United States and Germany orchestrated a fascist coup in kyiv to overthrow the pro-Russian president and place Ukraine under imperialist domination, a process which led to the invasion of Moscow in 2022 and to the war waged by the United States and NATO against Russia.
Ten years later, Washington, under the leadership of the president with fascist ideology Donald Trump, intensifies conflicts on several fronts, in a context evolving quickly to a third world war. In addition to the current war aimed at submitting Ukraine, Russia and the entire Eurasian continent to the interests of American capital, Washington openly prepares for a confrontation against China in the Asia-Pacific region in order to slow down its economic ascent.
-The latest Sipri report explicitly stresses that the 2022 US national defense strategy is an engine of the sharp increase in military spending in recent years. This document qualified China as “the most global and most serious challenge for the national security of the United States” and was published barely two weeks after the national security strategy of the Biden administration, which undertook to defeat Russia and China during the “decisive decade” to come.
In the Middle East, Washington’s desire to guarantee its undisputed hegemony on this region rich in energy resources led him to support the genocide perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza. Washington and Berlin provided tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the Zionist regime, allowing it to intensify its bloody attacks in Lebanon, where tens of thousands of people have been killed or mutilated, and to launch strikes against Iran, the main regional target of American imperialism.
During the first month of the wild bombing campaign against the Houthis, allied with Iran alone, launched by Trump in March, the United States would have spent $ 1 billion in ammunition and military resources.
European imperialists are increasingly perceiving their former American ally as an opponent and have no intention of being marginalized by Washington in the fight for world domination. Aware that Trump’s “America First” foreign policy marks the end of the transatlantic relationship that prevailed after the Second World War, the European powers are all engaged in a arms race in order to be able to lead war independently of the United States.
This process will accentuate class conflicts. In the European Union, which recently undertook that its 27 member states devote an additional € 800 billion to military spending, around 93 million people, or 21 percent of the population, lived in poverty in 2024.
The financial oligarchies, which dominate the official political life of each imperialist country, intend to weigh the burden of militarism and the war on the working class.
To this end, governments dismantle public spending as well as all social services, while establishing forms of dictatorial regime aimed at repressing popular opposition to imperialist war. The unions fuel Chauvin nationalism exploited by the ruling class to mobilize workers in favor of war and actively encourage the reconversion of civil production to military production.
Trump’s announcement of new increases in military spending is accompanied by an incessant thrust to establish a presidential dictatorship in the United States, dismiss hundreds of thousands of federal officials and close entire ministries.
In Germany, the meteoric increase in military spending of more than 80 percent in the last decade was accompanied by an aggravation of poverty and inequalities. The ruling elite systematically rehabilitated fascism in the form of the extreme right alternative to Germany (AFD), while health budgets have been reduced to the congruent portion.
To ensure their predatory ambitions on a global scale, the imperialists want to reverse and restore the brutal and dictatorial social order which prevailed during the two world wars of the 20th century.
During his famous speech on May 1, 1916 in Berlin, where he called to put an end to the bloody massacre of the First World War, the German socialist Karl Liebknecht denounced with bitter irony the “three major Prussian state privileges” which the German citizens enjoyed: “We can be soldiers, we can pay taxes, and we can be silent.”
The international working class is the social force capable of stopping the resurgence of the imperialist world war and the dictatorship of the ruling elites. It is already engaged in major class battles, as shown by the emerging opposition to Trump and the resurgence of strikes across Europe and North America. The world’s mass demonstrations against the Gaza genocide express the bitter hostility of millions of people to the barbarism of the Zionist regime and its imperialist sponsors.
The decisive task is to arm workers struggling with the socialist and internationalist program necessary to oppose militarism and war, as well as the capitalist profit system which is the primary cause. The international online gathering of May 1, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International on May 3, will make a significant contribution to this struggle. We invite all our readers to y participate.
