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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program begins by recognizing a certain link between two crucial facts. Fact number one, Led by Germany, Europe is committing itself to a rapid, enormous remilitarization. The German economy has committed to hundreds of billions of dollars in military buildup over the next few years. A commitment to military buildup unlike anything we have seen in Europe for generations. France is talking like that and the rest of Europe also. Fact two, Mr. Trump has announced that he will be going for an increase of the US military budget to $1.5 trillion in the coming fiscal year. The current expenditure is at the rate of about 900 billion. So that's an increase of $600 billion on a base of 900 billion. That's a 2 thirds increase of our total military budget in a year. This is an enormous buildup. It hasn't gotten anything like the attention it deserves. It means the government will go much more into debt than it ever imagined it would have to to pay for that. The tariffs, for example, are bringing in $200 billion a year. And he's talking about a $600 billion a year increase in military spending. Not even close. What's going on? Why? That's what we're going to talk about today. But before we do, I want to remind you that my course, marxian class analysis that I'm teaching, together with professor Sharon Azer of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, part of the Left Education Project, the spring lineup of courses that they're offering. My class begins on March 4th and it runs for the next four consecutive Wednesdays late in the afternoon. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please go to www. Leftforum.org lep left education project. There you'll find all the information you'll courses, lectures, this class that I'm teaching others that other folks are teaching. Look, we want to develop an education program for people who are interested in learning, who want to make a bigger and better impact on the society around them by learning more about it. That's what we're going to be doingteaching for people who want to learn, not highly specialized, but committed to the kinds of broad social change that defines the audience of this program. Of course, if you can support the rest of our work by going to democracy at work on substack or democracyatwork.info our website, there are ways there to participate, as there are ways to Click here on the like button to subscribe to this channel. To work with us to reach even more people than we can reach alone, with or without the classes and their support. We welcome you and look forward to to your participation. Okay, I want to explain how and why Europe and the United States, less unified, less solidaristic than they have ever been since the end of World War II, should now each in their own way, be building up their military. What's going on? Well, first and foremost, the most important aspect of this is the decline of empire. Right. A century ago, places like India, most of the places in Africa, etc. Were colonies. They were the property of European countries. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, at least before World War I and others. We live in an age of anti colonialism. The last 75 years have seen most of the colonies of the world break away from their European dominating countries because they hated them as colonizers. They wanted to be independent, they wanted to be free. In many cases, they fought long hard wars to become free. Like India against the British, or like the MAU MAU in Kenya against the British, or like the Vietnamese against the French. I could go on, but you get the picture. The European countries, starting almost a century ago, have steadily lost their colonies and lost all the benefits the colonies gave them economically. I'm going to come back to that in a minute, but I want to stress that the United States has now joined Europe. The United States never had quite the colonial properties that the Europeans had. No India like Britain had, no Central Africa like the French had. Yeah, we had the Philippines sort of for a while, and Puerto Ricoyeah. And then there's Hawaii. It's complicated, but never the same. The empire the United States presided over was informal. The countries of Latin America, subordinated to the United States by the Monroe Doctrine since 1830, has been totally dominated by the United States. Politically, militarily, culturally, economically, but not as formal colonies. But they're going their own way. Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Chile. Some for longer periods, some for shorter periods. But the direction is unmistakable. Anti colonialism. Anti is the spirit of our age, and it has been for a long time. And the people who don't focus on it and the people who don't dwell on what it means, and the people who don't worry about its implications cannot and do not make the problem go away because they pretend it isn't there. The United States, particularly in the last 15 years, has really begun to lose its empire. It lost the war in Vietnam, didn't it? And it lost the war In Afghanistan, didn't it? And it. I could go on. It's getting clear. It's the age of anti colonialism now. Why is that important people? Because the colonies gave an enormous boost to the wealth of Europe and North America. I'm going to go through very quickly what that was just so you can appreciate what it means to have lost it. Cheap imports of food and raw materials for our economies. It's not just that the third world, Asia, Africa, Latin America was where the cheap food increasingly came from. But I want to remind you it was cheap because those countries were not in a position to demand or get higher prices for what they sold because they were coloniesformal or informal. And the same is true of their raw materials, led by such things as oil and gas. Then there were the markets they had. Their people were required to buy Western goods that were shipped to them. They weren't allowed by their colonial masters, formal or informal, to develop their own industries, to service their own markets. No, the western capitalists in Europe and North America, they wanted their products to go to those people. They wanted those markets for themselves. They wanted to make profitable investments. They got special dispensations. They knew the people who ran the country. They knew the people who ran everything that happened in those countries. They got the good deals. They learned first about where there was good stuff under the soil that they could invest in and make a killing from. Cheap labor comes to the metropolitan countries. Go to the slums of England or the slums of France or the slums of the United States and you will see huge numbers, millions upon millions of poor people from the colonies, formal or informal, who come and work for next to nothing. Cheapest employees abusively treated. Especially if you could deny them the legal papers that would allow them to go to the police when they were abusively treated. No, no, no, no, no. All of those benefits is what helped make Europe and North America live at a much higher standard of living than they otherwise could have. A much higher standard of living than they allowed in their own colonial territories. India is still crawling out from the poverty of being a British colony for hundreds of years. Many years ago, when I visited Kenya and East Africa as a college student, I saw four high schools in Tanganyika for an entire country. Roughly the same in Kenya. No schooling, no education, no railroads, nothing. Everything that was profitable for the British, everything that wasn't for the Africans. Extraordinary. But it's all over now. And what does that mean? It means that as the empire of Europe declined and the United States now following suit, we have the specter not only of the colonial world not being willing to provide cheap food and raw materials, cheap workers, wonderful opportunities for the metropolitan country to to invest, markets for the metropolitan colonizing country to exploit. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Now it's even worse because some of those colonial territories have banded together with the one of them that is the most successful to break out of colonialism, the People's Republic of China and its BRICS allies that include India, Indonesia and many other countries. We have them as competitors, not as prostrate colonial territories. And that makes it even worse because the whole world can go to them to get good quality products. They don't have to go to North America and the United States. We prepared a market that the Chinese are filling. It's a whole new world. And what I'm going to talk to you about after we take our mid program break is how and why this reality closing in on North America and Europe has led to the decision to stoke up the military in North America and Europe. That link is what we're about to examine. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy, signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. We've been talking about the decline of the capitalisms of Western Europe and North America. I could add Japan because the colonies that all of those countries once had are gone. And the impact, however long it could be softened, however long it could be delayed, is having its final impact. In a previous program I spoke about that impact as showing up in the Munich security conference of February 2026 when the Europeans and the Americans fell out like thieves falling out. They're not helping each other. They're not solid with each other. They're not protecting each other. That's over, they said. And I want to echo, yeah, that is over. But I want to explain why. Which they don't do. Why not? Because they're complicit in the problem and they don't want to admit it. But we're not bound by them. So let's look at it. The United States and Europe realize that the arrangement they had most of the 75 years since World War II was an arrangement to hold on as much as they could to to the old colonial system, even as they had to give independence to India, to Indonesia, to Kenya, to all the rest of them. Yeah, the empires were being weakened. Colonial status was overthrown. Military efforts like the British in India or Kenya or the French in Vietnam or were failures. The colonial people defeated the colonizers, but still, in all, economically, they were not so free. They were not so independent, which they discovered. Political independence was crucial. It was necessary, but it wasn't sufficient. The one economy that broke out of its colonial subordination, partly because it had never been a full colony, was the People's Republic of China. And by the new century, the 21st century China had developed so well, so fast under its Communist Party leadership, without the help or the oppression of the west. Because they were Communists, they didn't get any Marshall Plan aid, they didn't get any foreign aid. They didn't get legions of American economists telling them how to develop their economy. Lucky for them, they did it on their own, and they did it faster and better than anyone had imagined they could. And then they went to work to build an alliance with the other former colonial territories. India, the subordinate to Britain, Brazil, the informal subordinate to the United States, and so on. This is all over now. That deal to hold on as best you could in the aftermath of the Second World War, did postpone the collapse, did delay and slow down the decline. But it didn't stop, didn't deal with the underlying shrinkage of Western capitalism. No, it was busily developing that in their own territory, where they could, because they had gotten political independence. And so they did. And by now the United States, Europe and Japan have woken up and realized that they're the shrinking part of the world economy, that China and the BRICS is now a richer, larger economic totality than the United states and the G7. That's the truth. Been that way for the last six years, and it's getting more so. So the regime of the last 75 years has exhausted itself. It's not working. In fact, it is failing. And therefore goodbye. Who says goodbye the United States? Who says goodbye Europe? Who says goodbye Japan? And how do they do it? By saying it's the end of the rules based international order. Okay, that's lovely. That's when you change a bus driver into a transportation engineer. The words change, the function doesn't. Whatever you want to call the deal that Europe and North America and Japan had for the last 75 years is over. Everybody's on their own, the United States on our. We're going to go and do whatever we need to do with our military because it's the one thing we still dominate in. We don't dominate anymore economically or politically or culturally. Politically, we're solid with Israel and the United Nations. Everybody else votes against us economically. I mean, we protect our industries because they can't compete with the rest of the world. That's why we don't have electric cars from China or solar panels from China or a whole lot of other things. Well, what's happening. What's happening is the deal is falling apart. So the capitalists of Europe, for example, they don't know what to do. They had a deal with the United States. The United States gave them military protection against Russia gave them military protection against their own working classes. I want to remind everyone, at the end Of World War II, Communists and socialists were the majority in most European countries. They had been the backbone of the resistance. They had been organized in the first government of Charles de Gaulle in France at the end of the war. Several Communist party leaders were members of his cabinet. He had to put them in there. That's how strong the party was. And it was in Italy and it was in Greece and I could go on. America protected the European capitalists from their own working class because they could not have turned their own military against their own workers. It wouldn't have worked. It would have made revolutions inside Western Europe. And what did the United States get? Europe agreed to become basically the junior partner. They would buy American stuff. They would allow the American dollar to be the global currency, not their British pound, which had been that before. They would allow the United States to go in to every one of the ex colonies. Being the we're not a colonial, we're an independent, we're the United States. We don't like colonies. We once were a colony and we don't want to do that again. Go in there and replace the European and keep it open to Europeans for a while. And it worked for a while and then it didn't. Then the rest of the world realized the United States was operating a minor variation of the old colonialism. The very people in Vietnam who fought the French then fought the United States. It's extraordinary. But here's what it meant. It meant that the United States now looked upon Europe and said with modern military technology, we're not worried about the Soviet Union. By the way, the Soviet Union's gone. They're not a communist country in the way they once were. They don't have close relations with communist parties in Western Europe the way they once did. And those parties are much weaker than they once were. That whole business, NATO defense, meaningless. The conditions are gone. America is going to go it alone. That's what Mr. Trump is saying. And most American capitalists are going to go along with that because they don't see the argument as having any alternative. And the Europeans are now going to have to go it alone. The Americans are not going to spend money to protect them. Don't need them. Plus, the American economy is shrinking too, and it needs all the money it can gather for itself. The United States has to kill fishermen in little boats in the Caribbean to assert its control over Latin America. It's not in a position to be the world's policeman and it knows it. So what's left for the Europeans? What's left for the United States? Here it is, folks. It's a recognition, maybe not yet in your mind, but in the minds of the capitalists who run the United States and Western Europe and and Japan. The big businesses that sit at the top, who sometimes put on the hat of president or prime minister but are in charge whether they wear the hat or not. They know what's coming. They're going to try to have to hold on to the wealth and power they accumulated over the centuries of, of the colonialism that's now gone. And how are they going to do that when their economic resources and their political position and their cultural power are all shrinking because of the competition of China and the brics and the anti colonialism that is the spirit of. Of this planet at this time and into the foreseeable future. You know what? They can rely on one. Their own military. Aha. The capitalists of Europe are building up their military. The capitalists of the United States are building up their military against foreigners. Don't be fooled. It's not about foreigners. Russia has never invaded the rest of Europe. Would be crazy to do so, probably can't do so and would have a rebellious population on their hands. They don't even want to think about. No, no. The hysteria about Russia is a smokescreen. It's a way to get the European masses to vote for the leaders who are building a military to protect them against their own working class. And that's what's going on here too, in the United States. We're not worried about Russia and we're not worried about the Chinese. The Chinese have invaded. Exactly nobody. What is this? The United States has 700 military bases around the world. Nobody else has that. Russia doesn't have that or anything like it. And China doesn't have anything. This is make believe. They are hoping it works. It's an old idea, a foreign danger that justifies us to. To have the military that we're going to be using against you. We may be shooting fishermen in a barrel in Latin America, but the major use of US troops is in American cities, isn't it? And what the excuse is. It'll vary. One day it'll be immigrants, the next day it'll be something else. But the problem is structural. It's not going to go away. The shrinkage for the people at the top gets tighter all the time. That's why they provoke strikes of nurses and teachers across America. That's why affordability is the problem of the working class. And when the working class rebels, which they can smell coming, they want the biggest military available for the domestic purpose, just like in Europe. So it is here. I hope you found this intervention interesting and provocative for your own thinking. And as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.