When guns get the budget and bread gets crumbs

Geopolitics has taken an anti-people turn, and defence spending goes up while welfare is slashed

Guns edge out butter

The world is being forced to choose guns over butter with ever greater vehemence. Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s strategic capacity, crippling about a third of its planes capable of carrying and delivering nuclear bombs, is fraught. Even if it does not provoke a nuclear response, Russia would escalate the war qualitatively in response. Ukraine’s European allies would supply it with ever more weapons.

These weapons do not suddenly pop into the donors’ hands the way they do in computer games. The weapons have to be built, and paid for. Resources have to be directed towards making guns, rather than butter.

In Ghaza, Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war, to force Palestinians to leave the territory. A trickle of food aid has resumed. But food distribution is a different matter. The traditional UN agencies that have been distributing food in Gaza have been chased out by Israel. It wants those who want food to come to food distribution points and pick up the food. The Israeli Defence Forces have staged attacks on people milling around to collect food, as well, claiming they were targeting Hamas fighters. The death toll has been climbing steadily, and could be well in excess of the 55,000 or so figure put out by the Gaza health ministry.

Israel wants to occupy Gaza to prevent the regrouping of Hamas or the emergence of another force like Hamas. Israel want to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank, as well. Some of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition partners, whose support is essential for his survival in office, consider the West Bank to be the Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria, where Jews had traditionally lived. They want to take back these regions and annex them to modern-day Israel.

Jewish settlers attack Palestinians on their farms on the West Bank, and when the Palestinians try to resist, Israeli armed forces intervene, on the side of the settlers. Many Palestinians are driven off their lands. Hunger stalks Gaza, it has a toehold in West Bank, as well. As Israel proceeds with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank is drawn into the conflict. Guns score, butter retreats.

Sudan is home to a manmade famine of acute proportions. Egypt supports the Sudanese Armed Forces, while the United Arab Emirates and a Libyan warlord support the Rapid Support Force. They have been fighting each other since 2023, rampaging through the land, killing, looting and raping on the way. More than half a million children have died of malnutrition. Civilian casualties reportedly exceed 150,000. The commanders have guns, bread and butter. People fleeing the violence merely die.

Rwanda is the darling in Africa of western aid donors. Paul Kagame rules with an iron fist, but runs a relatively efficient government capable of meeting the assorted targets set by donor agencies. The country gets about $1 billion in aid every year, even as the economy shows robust growth. Money is fungible, of course. When foreign funds go to meet development expenditure, domestic funds are released for aiding rebel groups in neighbouring countries. Rwanda professes outrage at the notion that it has been supporting the M23 rebel group in Congo. The M23 have taken over the town of Goma and the wider province in which it is located. The death toll this year so far is around 7,000.

We have the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. It has killed some 50,000 people, millions have been displaced, and are in need of humanitarian assistance.

President Donal Trump’s move to focus American resources on America, and leave the rest of the world to fend for itself is forcing country after country to increase their defence spending. America’s allies in Europe have been told in no uncertain terms that they have to raise their defence spending, not just to meet the NATO target of 2% of GDP but to make up for past slippage in meeting the target. Trump’s message had been amplified by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference.

Germany has already decided to abandon its debt brake and create a corpus to finance arms spending. Germany is willing to abandon both fiscal prudence and pacifist policies, to build European defence capability that does not depend on the US. France has been urging such a course since 2019.

Poland wants fellow NATO members to spend 5% of GDP on defence. Britain is making a beginning by increasing the arms budget to 2.5% of GDP by 2027. The money would be found by cutting back on external aid.

Speaking at the Shangrila Dialogue in Singapore, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth warned his audience of Kungfu Panda going rogue. He said China’s forcible takeover of Taiwan is imminent. He urged all Asian nations to strengthen their own defence capability by raising their arms outlay.

Even as countries are under pressure, thanks to shifts in geopolitics, to raise defence spending, technology is changing rapidly, to make old ways of fighting obsolete and make new capabilities vital.

Drones capable of taking guidance from satellites in low earth orbit, as well as from conventional cell phone towers, are the new kids on the block. In the hands of Ukrainians, these have made Russian tanks unusable.

The latest coordinated attacks by swarms of drones opens yet another front in tech-enabled warfare. Russia could be tempted, in response, to use weapons that it has so far refrained from using on any large scale, thermobaric weapons and cluster munitions, for example.

Thermobaric bombs act like a flamethrower in the sky. These create a massive fire in the sky, burning up oxygen in the air, and people choke to death if they have not been roiled already.

Even as peace talks continue, the war escalates.

Guns roar, butter just melts away.

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