As the article points out, there's little prospect of any serious rearmament happening in Europe because the continent's energy costs and capitalist dynamics have already made the model unviable.

Military Keynesianism assumes a manufacturing powerhouse that can rebuild its economy around a fossil fuel war economy, as the US did during the second world war. Europe today is a deindustrializing net importer of expensive US LNG. Germany in particular, which is the intended engine of rearming Europe, has suffered back to back recessions since 2023, lost 245,000 manufacturing jobs since 2019 watching steel and car output collapse while its industry flees to China for cheaper energy.

Arms production is unproductive of future value because weapons do not re-enter the next production process, so diverting scarce surplus into military spending weakens the accumulation process that's meant to fund it in the first place. Military Keynesianism did not even lift the US out of the Great Depression incidentally. Rearmament also deepens dependency since over half of European arms imports come from the US. So, purchases like the F-35 and Tomahawk lock European supply chains into American ones. The 800bln euro Rearm Europe plan and the additional 544bln euro annual NATO bill actually serve to subsidize US weapons manufacturers and bond investors rather than build sovereign European capacity.

The whole thing is a farce given structurally high energy costs along with a shrinking industrial base, and an aging population that's becoming increasingly angry about the austerity. Europe cannot generate the surplus needed to sustain any sort of a war economy. It can only mortgage its remaining productive capacity to US LNG exporters and US arms cartels which turns the whole rearmament into a further instrument of vassalization.