AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.

Speaking at the NATO Summit, President Trump has defended the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, claiming the attack set back Iran’s nuclear program by decades. Trump made the comment today after a number of news outlets reported a classified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found the strikes likely set back Iran’s program by a few months. Meanwhile, Trump’s praised other NATO nations for agreeing to drastically ramp up military spending to 5% of GDP within a decade. Spain, however, pushed back, saying the goal was unreasonable. Trump spoke earlier today.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I’ve been asking them to go up to 5% for a number of years, and they’re going up to 5%. That’s a big – from 2%. And a lot of people didn’t even pay the 2%. So, I think that’s going to be very big news. NATO’s going to become very strong with us.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Iran, the NATO Summit, we’re joined by Richard Seymour, writer, broadcaster, activist based in London. His latest book, titled Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Richard. It’s great to have you with us. Can you respond to what has so far transpired at the NATO Summit?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Well, it so far seems that they’ve reached an agreement to raise military spending to 5%. That was controversial. You mentioned earlier in your broadcast the protests in Slovenia. But there are a number of European states that really don’t want to spend that much money. Spain, for example. In the UK, they’ve talked about increasing military spending to 5% of GDP at the same time that they’re cutting welfare by £7 billion and creating a massive political crisis for the government.

So, it seems there’s a real guns-and-butter dynamic going on here. It’ll be interesting to figure out why Donald Trump has insisted so much on this. In the past, when Americans have wanted Europeans to spend more on defense, it’s been so that America could range further abroad and concentrate its efforts outside of the European theatre. That doesn’t seem to be the logic here with Trump.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Richard Seymour, I wanted to ask you, the Peterson Institute recently put out a report saying that the United States itself only spends about currently 2.9% of its GDP on military spending, and over the last 50 years, it’s only averaged about 4.2% of GDP. So, Trump is pushing Europeans to spend a greater percentage on the military than even the United States, the military power of the world, is doing. Who benefits from this, other than the weapons manufacturers?

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Well, it seems that the European elites are very much in favor of it. This is one thing that Mark Rutte, head of NATO, was very keen to praise Donald Trump for in his very Trumpian missive, talking about how Europe would pay, it would pay bigly, not exactly his words, and it would be a great victory for Trump. Actually, it seems that part of what’s going on here, the logic of it, is that they can achieve through militarization a certain kind of industrial policy, an expenditure into modernizing their economies that they weren’t able to achieve by other means.

For example, Germany, in the last few years, has made an effort to overturn a clause in the constitution which says you can’t incur debt as a state. And they wanted to do that in order to invest in the climate transition. The courts struck it down. But now, they can spend 100 billion euro on military investment. So, this is military Keynesianism. And I think that that’s a big part of the appeal for governments across Europe, where essentially, the project of some form of left social democracy has hit the buffers, has been thwarted in many instances. Modernization of the economy by other means is a part of it, but I also think a part of this is political consensus and political management. A number of reports have been coming out in recent years talking about how European states need to prepare themselves for war on the unlikely prospectus that they would be in a direct confrontation with Russia and that this feeds into a general sort of contrasubversive thrust, talking about hybrid warfare, about informational politics, placating the domestic terrain.

In the UK recently, the counter-terrorism advisor, Jonathan Hall, argued that such matters as what he called gender ideology, trans rights, that sort of thing, could in fact be evidence of Russian subversion, and that therefore, the UK could need counter-subversion laws. So, there’s a logic on the one hand of domestic political economy and on the other hand of domestic political management. I think that’s as much to do with this as any putative geopolitical stakes with Russia.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds, but President Trump in the first term was going after NATO saying they wouldn’t support Article 5, the U.S. coming to the defense of another NATO nation but now playing around with that and saying only if they hit 5% military spending might the U.S. support them. 20 seconds, Richard Seymour.

RICHARD SEYMOUR: Yeah, briefly, I think the U.S. is abandoning hegemony. Hegemony meaning universal values, multilateral systems that everybody’s supposed to benefit from. Trump wants to move toward a much more instrumental and crudely material transactional politics. So, I think this is a version of imperial decline that Trump is trying to manage.

AMY GOODMAN: Richard Seymour, we want to have you back on to talk about your book, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. Thanks so much for joining us from London.

When we come back, a dad of three Marines, two active duty and one Marine veteran, is brutally beaten by Border Patrol. We’ll speak with the son. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Radio Jarocho in our Democracy Now! studio.