Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek, and'm here with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

Are you feeling very liberated today?

Yeah, I feel like the scales have been lifted, Melissa, from my eyes.

And I'm wrapped in the warm embrace of freedom.

You know, Trump's okay, maybe. He's freeing us. He's freeing us. I don't know about you.

No, I'm going to be in serious debt because of all this bullshit. But, you know, at least I'll be free.

So in today's show, we're talking about European remilitarization. And that's something

that's been in the news in light of the developments going on with Ukraine and also in light of

Trump's comments and positioning, both in his first presidency and in his second presidency towards NATO.

Yeah. It's one of the most significant developments, Melissa, aside from all the talk around

tariffs, the remilitarization of Europe, by which we mean all the increases in defense budgets

that they're talking about, is part of a longer project of the transformation of the American relationship to Europe

and the European elites relationship to their own populations.

So it's a really important issue.

Yeah, I think sometimes it gets confusing in the way it's talked about

because it's like, oh, they're going from 1% to 2%, maybe to 3%.

And that doesn't really sound like very much.

But the reason it's significant is that it's indicating a real shift in defense spending in Europe,

where for decades, there was a huge decline in the percentage of GDP that European states were spending on defense.

And now we're finally starting to see an uptick.

So it's the trend that's significant.

Well, it's an uptick in defense spending at a time when there has been a flatlining of social expenditures.

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