The Billionaire Plan to Cut Social Services and Start a War with Russia

By Stephen Gowans

12 June 2026

The United States and NATO are urging Europe to significantly increase its military spending to defend the continent from what we’re led to believe is an inevitable Russian invasion that will take place sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, has told Europeans that “we must be ready for the scale of war our parents and great-grandparents endured.” [1]

To prepare, he is urging Europeans to accept cuts in spending on health care, education, and other social services, in order to free up revenue for military expenditures (much of which will benefit wealthy people with investments in weapons makers.)

Rutte told Britons that if they didn’t agree to significant increases in military spending, they would be able to keep their National Health Service, but they had better start learning to speak Russian. [2]

Rutte is a shameless lickspittle (he called the megalomaniacal chairman of the billionaire-backed US imperialist state “daddy,” much to Trump’s delight) as well as a shameless fear-monger who is peddling a lie. The idea that Russia has any intention of invading a NATO state is implausible.

• Moscow is four and half years into a war with a much smaller Ukraine that it just can’t seem to defeat.
• NATO countries in Europe already outspend Russia militarily by more than a factor of three—and the gap is on track to grow larger.  Europe plans to significantly increase its military spending by 2035.

The Wall Street Journal [3] notes that:

• “European countries’ spending on the military collectively dwarfs Russia’s and has overtaken China’s.”
• “Military spending by European Union member states, the U.K. and Norway could reach up to about $890 billion to $1 trillion in 2030.” (Russia is currently spending $173 billion on its military.)

Military spending, 2025
	$ billions	% of GDP
NATO states in Europe	559	2.3
Germany	114	2.3
Russia	173	6.3
Sources: Max Colchester and Alistair MacDonald, “U.K. Defense Secretary Quits Over Lack of Military Spending,” The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2026 Ivan Nechepurenko and Constant Méheut, “Why Russia Is Gaining Ground in Ukraine,” The New York Times, July 19, 2025.

What’s more, consider the following:

• Europe enjoys “a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure,” according to the 2025 US National Security Strategy.
• “A senior NATO official said Russia doesn’t have the troop numbers or military capability to defeat the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe,” according to The Wall Street Journal [4].

Based on the above, it’s clear that the campaign to increase NATO military spending has less to do with deterring a Russian invasion (which appears to be a fear-monger’s fantasy) and more to do with building a NATO capability to overwhelm Russia while wrecking Europe’s social safety net.

To this end, the German government is making Kriegstüchtig, meaning “ready for war,” its rallying cry. It is trying to galvanize support for building Europe’s largest conventional army—one ready to lead Europe into a land war against Russia. [5]

The price Europeans will pay for Kriegstüchtig include:

• The dangers and destruction of a major war;
• Austerity to pay for the new militarism.

The campaign to boost NATO spending has “no basis in reality,” says former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. Confirming the figures in the table above, he notes that European NATO members already spend three times as much on their militaries as Russia does on its armed forces. The campaign to boost NATO spending is aimed, he says, at outspending Russia 10 times. [6] 

Does NATO need to outspend Russia 10 times? Is this a goal that warrants further reductions to already strained and starved public services?

I said the plan to cut social services and start a war with Russia is a billionaires’ plan. Why?

Because the plan comes from the Trump administration, which issued an edict commanding NATO states to hike military spending to five percent of GDP. Virtually all NATO states say they will comply. Trump’s administration teems with billionaires and centi-millionaires. The plan was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank funded by billionaire families and major corporations. It’s impossible to say the plan isn’t billionaire-backed.

The rich have long been hostile to social services, both because they don’t want to pay taxes to fund them and because social services make people less vulnerable and therefore less desperate to submit to exploitation by wealthy business owners.

Billionaire investors and major corporations are also keen on military spending (especially if it’s paid for by others), because it involves investments in weapons-makers they have an interest in, and because a strong military can be used to defend and expand trade and investment abroad. A military able to dominate Eastern Europe, and therefore to secure the region’s profit-making opportunities for North American and European investors at the expense of Russian ones, is attractive to the NATO-area business community.

For these reasons, the plan to wreck social services and go to war with Russia deserves the title “made by billionaires for billionaire interests.”

For these reasons, it also deserves to be rejected.

1. Laurence Norman and Daniel Michaels, “For Ukraine’s Allies in Europe, a Bad Deal With Russia Is Worse Than No Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2025.

2.  Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, Jun. 9, 2025.

3.  Alistair MacDonald, Cristina Gallardo, and Robbie Gramer, “The Phantom Stealth Fighter That Exposes Europe’s Deep Divisions Over Defense,” The Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2026.

4.  Matthew Luxmoore and Robbie Gramer, “Marathon Russia-U.S. Meeting Yields No Ukraine Peace Deal,” The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2025.

5. Christopher F. Schuetze, “Lithuania, Once Occupied by Germany, Is Glad German Troops Are Back,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.

6. Mark Landler, “NATO Chief Urges Members to Spend Far More on Military,” The New York Times, June 9, 2025.