This is another copy and paste job, with a hat tip again to commenter NFO and Moon of Alabama. This time it’s a relatively brief excerpt from a very long essay titled The EU after Ukraine. The excerpt, the concluding section, is brief relative to the entire essay. I thought that this European perspective on American might be interesting to readers. It exhibits the usual biases, but that’s reality, too. The author, Wolfgang Streeck, is “director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne”—why did I never associate Max Planck with the study of societies? Is it just me? Anyway.
American Dreams
One of the many remarkable developments around the Ukrainian war is how the dismal record of recent American military interventions has almost completely disappeared from European public memory. Until only a few months ago, the disastrous end of American nation-building in Afghanistan was a frequent theme for the European commentariat. Also present, if more in the background, were Syria, with Obama’s “red lines” first drawn and then forgotten; Libya, which was abandoned after being turned into a living hell; and Iraq with a conservatively estimated two hundred thousand civilian deaths since the American invasion. Nothing of this is mentioned these days in good European society, and if it is mentioned outside of it, it is immediately branded as an anti-American diversion from the evils committed by Putin and his army.
As the tensions increased around Ukraine, visible in the massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian borders, western European countries, apparently as a matter of course, handed the United States power of attorney, allowing it through NATO to act in their name and on their behalf. Now, with the war dragging on, Europe, organized in a European Union subordinate to NATO, will find itself dependent on the bizarreries of the domestic politics of the United States, a declining great power readying itself for global conflict with a rising great power, China. Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan should have amply documented the American penchant to exit if their, always and by definition well-intentioned, efforts in other parts of the world fail for whatever reason, leaving behind a lethal mess that others must clean up if they require a minimum of international order at their doorsteps. Astonishingly, nowhere in western Europe is the question asked what will happen if, in 2024, either Trump is reelected—which seems not at all impossible—or some ersatz Trump is elected in his place. But even with Biden or some moderate Republican, the notoriously short attention span of American imperial policy should, but does not, seem to enter into the strategic calculations, if there are any, of European governments.
This next paragraph surprised me. I would have thought that this explanation for America’s imperial misadventures would be totally obvious to people on the other side of an ocean from us.
One explanation that is too rarely invoked for the recklessness with which the United States all too often enters into and exits from far-flung military adventures is its location on a continent-sized island, away from those places where it might feel an urge to provide for what it considers political stability. Whatever the United States does or does not do abroad has few if any consequences for its citizens at home. (Iraqi troops will never march into Washington, D.C., and arrest George Bush to deliver him to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.) When things go wrong, Americans can retreat to where they came from, where nobody can follow them. There is, if only for this reason, an enduring temptation in American foreign policy to be guided by wishful thinking, deficient intelligence, sloppy planning, and a fickle tailoring of international policies to domestic public sentiments. This makes it all the more amazing that European countries should, apparently without any debate, have so completely left the handling of Ukraine to the United States. In effect, this represents a principal turning the management of his vital interests over to an agent with a recent public record of incompetence and irresponsibility.
This next paragraph makes a point that is similar to what Mercouris was talking about, regarding the instability afflicting most of Europe as the combined military and economic disaster of the Neocons excellent Ukraine adventure forces itself upon the attention of the subject populations of Western Europe. However, I very much wonder whether a “lasting confrontation” will be the outcome. The economic hardships that are developing may force a change. Interestingly, however, the author does raise the possibility of a Russia and Europe developing “a Eurasian security architecture of its own”—something America will wish to thwart.
What will be the war aims of the United States, acting for and with Europe through NATO? Having left it to Biden to decide on its behalf, Europe’s fate will depend on Biden’s fate, that is, on the decisions, or non-decisions, of the U.S. government. Short of what the Germans in World War I called a Siegfrieden—a victorious peace imposed on a defeated enemy, as probably dreamed of in the United States by both neocons and the liberal imperialists of the Hillary Clinton school—Biden may go for, or even prefer, a drawn-out stalemate, a war of attrition keeping both Russia and western Europe, in particular Germany, engaged with each other. A lasting confrontation between Russian and Ukrainian, or “Western,” armies on Ukrainian soil would unite Europe under NATO and conveniently oblige European countries to maintain high levels of military spending. It would also force Europe to continue wide-ranging, indeed crippling, economic sanctions on Russia, as a side effect reinforcing the position of the United States as a supplier of energy and raw materials of various sorts to Europe. Moreover, an ongoing war, or almost-war, would stand in the way of Europe developing a Eurasian security architecture of its own, inclusive of Russia. It would cement American control over western Europe and rule out French ideas of “European strategic sovereignty” as well as German hopes for détente, both presupposing some sort of Russian settlement. And not least, Russia would be occupied with preparations for Western military interventions, below the nuclear threshold, on its extended periphery.
In this final paragraph the author envisions a subject Europe—Europe subjected to the United State—as a possible outcome of a protracted confrontation with Russia. Obviously, I can’t make assured predictions, but working against this scenario is the dynamic that such an outcome seems to be very much against the interests of both Russia and Europe. The question then becomes, Will Putin be able to de-Nato-ize Europe, as we speculated was his intention? While the cards may currently appear to be stacked against such a development, the economic disarray that Biden has brought to the world may render that possible.
Very likely, a protracted confrontation over Ukraine would force Russia into a close relationship of dependence on China, securing China a captive Eurasian ally and giving it assured access to Russian resources, at bargain prices as the West would no longer compete for them. Russia, in turn, could benefit from Chinese technology, to the extent that it would be made available. At first glance, an alliance like this might appear to be against the interests of the United States. It would, however, come with an equally close, and equally asymmetrical, American-dominated alliance between the United States and western Europe, where what Europe can deliver to the United States would clearly exceed what Russia can deliver to China. Something like a stalemated phony war in Ukraine could be in the interest of a United States seeking to build global alliances for an imminent battle with China over the next New World Order, monopolar or bipolar in old or new ways, to be fought out in coming years, after the end of the end of history.
"where what Europe can deliver to the United States would clearly exceed what Russia can deliver to China"
What, exactly, can Europe deliver to the US? Anti-democratic globalism? A Green New Deal ideology that takes us back to an early 1900's economy and standard of living? Cutting edge LGBTQi+? A degree of medical tyranny about which Fauci would only dream in the US? A culture being demographically overrun by younger, confident, fertile Islam?
A China - Russia axis would control large percentages of the world's supply of rare earth minerals and potash fertilizers. Throw in Saudi and there is plenty of oil to power their ambitions. Thanks to globalist Chamber of Commerce-driven outsourcing, China has stolen more than enough US technology and process knowledge be dangerous. Oh, and Russia hypersonic weapon capability seems to outstrip ours and pretty much everybody agrees that Russia and Chinese cyber weaponry is world class.
I wouldn't want to live in either China or Russia, but I wouldn't bet against them given the devolution of American / Western culture.
"Russia, in turn, could benefit from Chinese technology, to the extent that it would be made available."
??? Chinese what? This guy just discredited himself. Russia doesn't need CCP technology. Quite the opposite. It really reveals just how pathetically uninformed and chauvinistic most Western opinion has become.