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ALL GUNS AND NO BUTTER ON A BURNING PLANET  
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Khem Rogaly, Patrick Bigger
October 12, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The insatiable demands of the military industrial complex are a
barrier to human flourishing on a livable planet. _

Increasing military budgets as part of rising great-power competition
is a disaster across multiple fronts: for the victims of wars, for an
already burning planet, and for workers who don’t see real benefits
from military conflict., Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images

 

In the wake of World War II, the United States crowned itself leader
of the Western world through persuasion and coercion. Massive
transfers of US aid helped stave off
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the prospect of Communist governments in Western Europe, while the
deployment of American troops and materiel ensured European
participation in a US-led military order. Today, Washington seeks to
redraw the terms of imperial governance. As F-18 fighter jets
bombarded Yemen in March, White House official Stephen Miller argued
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allies should pay for the strikes: “If the US successfully restores
freedom of navigation. . . there needs to be some further economic
gain extracted in return.” Not only had the United States attacked
another country in a brutal display of military might, a habit over
decades of imperial leadership, but it had decided that its allies
should bear the costs.

 

To maintain its geopolitical dominance, the United States increasingly
relies on the use of economic and military force. Allies are presented
with various options to pay for their participation in empire, whether
buying American energy, importing its weapons, or contributing to a
Rust Belt reindustrialization fund
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the maintenance of empire, and even the position of the United States
as the global dollar reserve, is presented as a burden
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This is a moment of several spiraling transitions. The era of unipolar
US dominance is over. In response to China’s economic development,
Washington has ushered in a new Cold War
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defined by bellicose
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rhetoric and an attempt to cohere competing economic blocs. The world
is offered access to US consumer markets on one hand and punitive
tariffs on the other. The economic norms of the last five decades of
US leadership — the exploitative imposition of neoliberal governance
— have been cast aside, and state intervention is no longer
anathema.

Our planetary future has been made a site of great-power rivalry. US
allies are cajoled by Joe Biden into joining a Cold War competition
with China over clean energy or by Donald Trump to choose between
green and fossil-based energy systems. Each of these scenarios spells
planetary disaster. In the first pathway, states fight over resources
and technologies, prioritizing relationships with their allies over
decarbonization, for instance by restricting green imports from China.
In the second, a US-led fossil fuel bloc disrupts planetary safety
while participants miss out on the benefits of decarbonization.

Even more concerning than this competition over the climate are
Washington’s chosen tools for the fight. Facing up to its economic
limitations, the United States has thrown money at its
military-industrial complex while doubling down on data centers as
industrial policy. This is a recipe for chaos, threatening
working-class security on a warming planet. Articulating this class
interest will be essential to building a politics that can bring us a
safe, sustainable future.

Militarizing the Interregnum

Given China’s emerging industrial dominance and superior trading
relationships with most of the world, the United States has decided to
lean on its gargantuan war machine as a lever of strategic advantage.
By expanding its global military force, unleashing genocidal violence
in the Middle East and pressuring allies to match its military
spending, US strategy threatens to throw the world into a new era of
conflict.

In July, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashed funding for health care
and food stamps while greenlighting the world’s first
trillion-dollar military budget. As well as juicing the balance sheets
of private contractors, this spending supports a worldwide network of
eight hundred US military bases. In this new era, military resources
committed to the dominance of the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia
Pacific have been joined with a renewed willingness to use hard power
in the Western Hemisphere, whether by launching Hellfire missiles in
the Caribbean or sending the National Guard to the streets of Los
Angeles.

 

The expansion of Pentagon spending and intervention has unfurled in
parallel to the most brutal deployment of US and allied forces in
generations. In Gaza, the United States has overseen a genocidal
Israeli assault and upended prior norms surrounding the use of force.
Whereas air strikes against civilians and civilian infrastructure were
once cloaked in the language of collateral damage, the United States
and its leading proxy no longer hide their targeting of health
workers, educators, journalists, water and energy infrastructure, or
people lining up for food amid a starvation blockade.
Washington has demanded loyalty from its allies to support this brutal
rampage across the Middle East. Despite symbolic moves and strongly
worded statements, Keir Starmer has not paused daily surveillance
flights operated by the British military over Gaza. During Trump’s
recent state visit, Starmer’s recent rhetoric on the genocide was
exactly what the US president wanted to hear and was met with an
approving pat [[link removed]] on the
shoulder from his imperial patron.

Washington has also insisted that allies join its expansion of
military power amid rivalry with China, taking the form of a new NATO
spending target modeled precisely on the share of US gross domestic
product devoted to the Pentagon. As part of this deal, European allies
are commanded to pay their dues to the American military-industrial
complex: aid to Ukraine, for instance, is now purchased from the
United States with European money.

Commitment to this iron umbrella is also commitment to the fossil
bloc; the new target is forecast to add 12 percent
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to the emissions of the European continent, and fiscal resources
previously allocated for the green transition are being poured
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into war machines. Day to day, military emissions come on top of the
staggering environmental costs of war — including those of
Israel’s US- and UK-facilitated genocide in Gaza that has a carbon
footprint on par with entire countries
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and uses environmental destruction as a tool of ethnic cleansing.

These overlapping processes of militarization, trade bloc
re-formation, and genocide beckon the potential of greater and even
more brutal conflict. This will bring even greater insecurity and
instability to the world’s working class.

Working-Class Security

Across the North Atlantic world, the US-led expansion of military
spending and fossil fuel consumption presents material risks to
working-class communities with little to show for it. In return for
the chaos of a new Cold War, communities in the United States and
Europe are promised austerity and environmental breakdown as their
needs are abandoned in favor of great-power competition.

For the working class, military-led industrial strategy is a bad
return on investment. Recent research
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shows that for every million dollars, public spending on the
military-industrial complex buys five jobs, while education spending
creates thirteen and health care investment creates nine. State
spending on the war economy consumes public resources that could
otherwise provide greater benefits to the working class while
rewarding executives and big investors.

 

At the five prime defense contractors in the United States (Lockheed
Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman), CEO
pay
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is at least 164 times greater than the median salary. Investors in
these companies enjoy rich returns, too: a 2023 Pentagon study
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found that defense contractors disgorge cash to shareholders at a
higher rate than the rest of the stock index.

Meanwhile, the contribution made by military spending and the Trump
administration’s Energy Dominance
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agenda to environmental breakdown will bring greater instability. With
the White House expanding fossil fuel production at home and
increasing exports abroad, particularly to NATO allies
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European energy security (and energy bills) will continue to rely on
fragile geopolitical relationships instead of a domestic green supply.

New emissions from military spending will destabilize working-class
life across the world as the Pentagon, already the world’s largest
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institutional consumer of fossil fuels, is joined by a similarly sized
European military-industrial complex. These emissions are just one
part of the unknowable climate footprint of a voluntary Cold War,
chosen instead of collaboration with the world’s green industrial
superpower.

Recognizing the Pentagon as a source of instability and insecurity in
working-class life is essential to building human security across the
world. Alternatives to the new Cold War must be a priority for the
Left on both sides of the Atlantic. This means highlighting the
perversity of expanding military spending and its basis in
geopolitical competition rather than genuine security. While campaigns
for investment in life’s essentials — health, housing, green
energy — are imperative regardless, the interests of working-class
communities lie in demonstrating that the insatiable demands of the
military-industrial complex are a barrier to collective flourishing.

A political program based on multilateral climate collaboration,
rather than destructive competition, would also create the space for
new industrial priorities. This would free research and production
capacities from the war machine and direct them toward meeting human
needs. As shown in the cycles of military spending over the last
century, industrial production can be converted by the state when it
sees fit, whether to escalate toward war or to take advantage of
peace. In this context, politicians seeking to represent the working
class must recognize that military expansion and escalation is being
driven by great power interests. In a moment of spiraling and
escalating transitions, human safety can only be safeguarded by
setting aside rivalry and the elite desire to accumulate amid the
chaos.

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Khem Rogaly is codirector of the Transition Security Project, a
research center that investigates the US and UK military-industrial
complexes as economic, climate, and geopolitical threats.

Patrick Bigger is codirector of the Transition Security Project, a
research center that investigates the US and UK military-industrial
complexes as economic, climate, and geopolitical threats.

* Military Industrial Complex; Climate Change;
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