Americanised Europe – a reoffender

The war in Ukraine is escalating towards a possible third world war. And this in times of the Anthropocene, of man-made global change that requires a new mentality and intense international integration and cooperation between the great powers to be reversed. We are facing the greatest folly in history, and historically it is a scandal that in Europe, a continent that is a reoffender in this respect, there is still no sign of a popular movement for peace.

Public spirit instead of madness –
where is the peace movement?

It should exist. A broad movement that would make it clear, beyond the differences of opinion about responsibilities in this conflict between great powers and intervening countries, that the enemy is war. At the same time, European institutions, regardless of their neoliberal and oligarchic orientation, should remember the public spirit expressed by President Kennedy in June 1963, exactly 60 years ago, in the heart of the empire:

“In defending our own vital interests, the nuclear powers must above all avoid such confrontations as would leave an adversary with the choice of either withdrawing humiliated or waging nuclear war. Such a course in the nuclear age would only be evidence of the bankruptcy of our policies or of a collective death wish for the world.”

Instead, it is now no longer the traumatised Baltic states, the mad Poles and the Eastern Europeans in general – with the exception of Hungary – who are the transmission belts of the United States on the continent, but it is the Germans and the French, the northerners, the Belgians and, behind them, the Mediterranean countries who continue to add fuel to this senseless fire. This is not just a “political change” that can be remedied with a new election, but something much more profound. It makes it necessary to question and thoroughly review everything that has happened in Europe over the last 30 years.

Clarification is needed:
what has happened in Europe in the last 30 years?

This examination must of course include the blind disorientation of the entire “right-wing left”, which supports the supply of arms to Ukraine. That this is the official position of Yolanda Díaz¹ may be a marginal note in the European context – given the allegiance of our foreign policy to Brussels – but it is not in Germany, a country that plays a central role in determining the path to be taken. There, the foreign policy line is not set by the timid Chancellor Scholz, but by the unspeakable Green Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is in favour of “ruining” a nuclear power. And at the level of NATO and its subordinate European Union, it is the Balts and the Poles who carry the most weight when it comes to deliberations and decisions.

European civilisation gave way
to the dominance of a US gringo-mentality

What has happened in the last 30 years to bring Europe as a whole to this point? The question remains open, but we should realise that what we knew 60 years ago, at the time of Kennedy’s statement, as “European civilisation” – of which American culture was a kind of branch – is now subordinate to “American civilisation”. After decades of “cultural” penetration, it has imposed a new mentality on the old continent, to the extent that it is more dominant and influential than ever before. It is a curious fact that the “cultural” dominance of the United States in Europe has increased enormously, while at the same time the weight of the US itself has decreased in the world.
  The “gringo” mentality with its imperialist wars sold as struggles for freedom and human rights, against dictatorship, autocracy and even for gender equality (Afghanistan, Iran) has taken hold in Europe. The infantilism of the Hollywood script with a happy ending, moralising Manicheism and journalism that names the bad guys have replaced rational questions about resources and interests, about history, trends of domination and geography that could still be heard amidst the general din in the 1960s.

A sort of privatisation of the state

The x-ray of this European malaise is complex, but in recent decades, the neo-conservative ideas of the United States that guide Western foreign policy have been adopted in NGOs, media and think tanks that have the gringo stamp engraved in their respective DNA. In general, then, what is evident is not too much but rather too little state, the consequence of a kind of privatisation of states and governments. The result is disempowered authorities and governments that are even more dependent on private economic oligarchies and less able to defend “public” interests, all the more so because they have always been determined by the privileges of those from above.

Nato enlargement:
provocation to maintain US hegemony in Europe

The war in Ukraine is the result, on the one hand, of 30 years of NATO provocation and NATO expansion, with the aim, above all, of maintaining the political-military hegemony of the USA in Europe after the end of the Cold War, and, on the other hand, of the illusory desire of the Russian elite to be integrated on an equal footing into Western-dominated capitalism – which they called “civilisation” in the Moscow of the 1990s. The war is developing, as already said, into a kind of third world war. The possibility of direct military intervention by NATO forces and greater Chinese involvement, with possible expansion into East Asia, is increasing. It is important to recall the process in order to understand what is coming.
  The Kiev government could count on the full support of NATO’s ears and eyes on the ground from the beginning, its military trained and funded by it for 8 years. From February 2022, the assistance took the form of supplying “defensive weapons” to stop “unprovoked Russian aggression”, which was indeed a real, but certainly provoked and induced, attack. To go further would be to “risk a third world war”, President Biden said in March. The failure of the initial soft Russian invasion, which the Kremlin described as a “Special Military Operation” aimed at collapsing the Ukrainian regime, led to greater Western intervention in the face of Russia’s apparent weakness and opened the door to the gradual delivery of heavy equipment, tanks, artillery, ammunition, air defence systems, old Soviet-designed aircraft from Eastern countries and, finally, the announced and not-so-old F-16 aircraft.

More than provocation

The economic sanctions against Moscow, which in the words of the grotesque Commission President Ursula von der Leyen or the French Finance Minister Bruno Leclerc constituted a veritable “declaration of war”; the assassinations of people in Russian cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg or Nizhny Novgorod in the best “terrorist” tradition of NATO or against “collaborators”, i.e., pro-Russian Ukrainians, in the occupied territories of Ukraine; the military incursions into Russian territory by ultra-mercenaries financed by the West with the aim of sparking a civil war in Russia; the attacks on two Russian strategic air bases and even on the Kremlin, all of which would not have been possible without the cooperation or control of Western powers. The tens of billions in arms and financial aid to the Ukrainian state – all of this has proved insufficient to prevent a military defeat of Ukraine, as the failure, at least for the time being, of the delayed Ukrainian counter-offensive shows.
  In July 2022, President Zelensky announced the goal of an “army of one million men”. It became 700,000 and today it is 400,000. The rest have fled, deserted or been destroyed, while Russia has reorganised – with varying degrees of success – and built up clear numerical, artillery and air superiority while its war industry is in full swing.

Western warmongering – to what end?

With hundreds of Western advisers and soldiers fighting in the ranks of the Ukrainian army, including several thousand Poles, and amid images of German Leopard tanks and American Bradley tanks burning on the battlefield and reports of Patriot defence systems being knocked out by Russian fire, a possible failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive could become another escalating step on the road to crushing Russia: “The possibility of Poland getting even more involved at the national level and the Baltic states following suit, including with troops on the ground,” former NATO secretary-general Anders Rasmussen, who speaks of a “coalition of the willing”, said in June. Should this new phase also fail, the logic of escalation dictates direct and official military intervention by NATO troops, as suggested by the “Air Defender 23” manoeuvre, the largest in NATO history, which recreates such a war from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
  The West’s increased military pressure on Russia will not only increase Russia’s own military actions, with the possibility of an extension of the occupation to the Romanian border, which would completely deprive Ukraine of access to the sea. This, if conditions are favourable and the current Kremlin incumbents continue to hold out. At the same time, there could also be greater military-industrial engagement by China with Russia, while a second front in East Asia is being prepared. The spiralling tide of warmongering will continue.  •

¹ Yolanda Díaz is the Spanish Minister of Labour and Social Economy and the left’s hopeful for the parliamentary elections on 23 July 2023.

Source: https://ctxt.es/es/20230601/Firmas/43239/ of 13 June 2023

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Rafael Poch-de-Feliu (*1956 in Barcelona), studied modern history in Barcelona and Russian history in West Berlin. First correspondent for the “taz” (German daily newspaper) in Spain, editor for the press agency dpa (German press agency) in Hamburg. From 1988–2002 first foreign correspondent of the major Catalan daily “La Vanguardia” in Moscow, from 2002 to 2008 in Beijing and then in Berlin and Paris. He is the author of several books on political developments in Russia, China and Germany. He currently writes regularly for the online newspaper ctxt under the heading “Imperios combatientes” and runs the blog rafael.poch.com. In April 2023, he published his latest book “Ucrania, la guerra que lo cambia todo” (Ukraine, the war that changes everything).