Europe/Ukraine/US: It's the End of the World as We Know It

This is from Brave New Europe. I think it's an excellent piece.

It's the End of the World as We Know It Two months ago I began my end of the year newsletter with the sentence: “I doubt many of us grasp the true magnitude of the past year. It marks the end of Western civilisation of the past four centuries.” Donald Trump has only been president of the US for round seven weeks and this is already being born out.   I do not pretend to understand how Donald Trump thinks, nor do I plan to join the corps of pundits speculating on this topic. We do not know if his many declared policies will ever come to fruition and in what form in the end. Nonetheless I believe certain developments have become clear.  The one I wish to concentrate on and probably one of the most momentous is the displacement of Europe from the echelon of leading world powers. The most obvious example of the new world order is that the Europeans, who as loyal members of NATO have been supporting the US proxy war in Ukraine, have not been invited to participate in the peace negotiations with Russia. They will simply have to accept the deal the two super-powers negotiate. Furthermore in recent UN votes, China, Russia, and the US voted against Europe. Europe has been effectively sidelined, humiliated, and abandoned by the US. In a recent cabinet meeting Trump vowed to slap 25% tariffs on European Union imports and insisted the bloc was "formed to screw US." For the US Europe is currently simply a nuisance, not a bloc to be taken seriously. One might say the exclusion of Europe from the peace process serves them right after refusing to speak to the “dictator” and “Nazi” Putin for three years. It is noteworthy that anyone who disagrees with the authoritarian liberal European political class is a Nazi, especially as many of these same EU leaders are fanatically supporting the only current Nazis (which I defined in an earlier newsletter) in the world, Israel.  Now we are witnessing European leaders, many of whom branded Trump a neo-Nazi during the election, as supplicants fawning about his legs, and trying to offer him something to appease him. The problem is that they do not have anything of value to offer or any cards in their hands for that matter. Last week Macron and Starmer were publicly humiliated by Trump. The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio cancelled his meeting with EU High Representative Kaja Kallas after she had travelled to Washington. These were all harmless compared to the public dressing down of Zelensky in the Oval Office on live television. At the same time we are already seeing self demeaning gestures towards the US by the Europeans such as the release by Romania of Andrew Tate and his brother, who were facing charges of rape, trafficking minors, and money laundering and were under a travel ban during the investigation. This occurred after US special envoy Richard Grenell recently raised the topic of the Tate brothers with Romania's Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the Munich Security Conference. More is sure to follow. All these events are not isolated and are indicative of the decline of Europe. It has lost all moral and intellectual integrity. The EU has destroyed Europe’s cultural, political, and economic diversity. After all these centuries of being the haven of enlightenment and liberal values, these claims have become like a silver-plated trophy cup that has been so often polished for show that the silver has been worn off and only the base metal in visible. What ever happened to the rule of law, basic morality, common decency? The Europeans may be shocked by the US violation of rule of law, but what about their own dismantling of the rule of law with their support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine and most recently when Germany’s future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, was welcome in Germany despite an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, of which Germany is a member? Incidentally, at the same time Romania opened a criminal investigation against Calin Georgescu, whose win in the first round of the recent Romanian presidential election was annulled. Apparently he too is a Nazi. What is also conspicuous is that we appear to be witnessing the imperial rape of Europe, for the time being solely verbally. Trump claims the US wants to take over Greenland to secure its mineral wealth. He is forcing Ukraine to give over a great part of its mineral rights. Trump has stated he will be taking over Gaza, which he assumes is part of Israel, which many claim is European. As I wrote above, I have no idea how any of these issues will end. Denmark may strike a bargain with Trump as Ukraine has done, giving the US a large part of Greenland’s minerals in exchange for keeping political control.  Let us take stock of what Europe has become. In the past thirty years Europe needed no defence, because there was no one to defend themselves against. The only attack the EU has suffered on its own territory was when the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline. Worse yet, it had delegated its foreign policy to the US and is now exposed as bereft of strategy. Europe has always reckoned with the US coming to its rescue if necessary, thus neglecting its own defence. Despite this Europe has clambered to its “glorious imperial past” by joining in grubby foreign wars in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Africa, and now Ukraine. In the latter it has launched a propaganda campaign that would impress Goebbels. Worse yet, despite all their efforts and those of the US, they have lost the war in Ukraine, something the US in the meantime publicly acknowledges. The Europeans are vehemently denying this, calling for a doubling down in their efforts to achieve victory. This is reminiscent of the Götterdämmerung play book of Nazi Germany. The Zelensky-cult, a cheap propaganda gimmick that became pathological, has become the glue holding Europe together. Europe has become politically so heavily invested in the Ukraine war that peace is the worst thing that could happen. The EU has been transformed into a war project, abandoning its claimed raison d'être of being a force for peace in Europe. Strategic thinking has been replaced with ideological slogans. One can see just how delusional Europe’s authoritarian liberal political elite has become when it claims Europe should become the new leader of the “Free World”. With regard to Europe taking over the war in Ukraine on its own, this already has a whiff of the Suez adventure of 1956. Hardly is the talk of a militarised Europe than Germany has already asserted its leadership: We know how this ended last time. And do not believe this is selfless. Merz was previously employed by Blackrock. Blackrock, under the impression that Ukraine would win the war, made massive investments in that nation. These are now endangered should Ukraine lose the war and Russia annexes large parts of the country, which appears certain. The governments mainly responsible for this war-mongering are not surprisingly plumbing unknown levels of political unpopularity as evidenced in Germany, France, and Britain. While they exhort their citizens to tighten their belts and accept austerity, these same citizens watch as hundreds of billions are to be expended on the lost war in Ukraine and defence spending due to a threat from Russia that does not exist. Together with corporate and state media the European authoritarian liberal political class have spread an extremist rhetoric that is just as toxic as that they accuse their opponents of using. How did we get to the point that the Germans, grandchildren of the perpetrators of the holocaust, now claim the right to determine which Jews are anti-Semitic because they oppose Israel’s genocide in Palestine and are being stripped of their basic civil rights? This must be the zenith of European hypocrisy, depravity, and turpitude comparable to the words “Arbeit macht frei” (Work liberates) on the gates of Auschwitz. At the same time Europe’s political class is taking a wrecking ball to the European economy. Let us be honest, the European economy is in decline led by its self-inflicted de-industrialisation. Its capitalist class have no loyalty to the continent, refusing to invest unless investments are subsidised or de-risked by governments. Where once they paid taxes, they now use the same money to buy government bonds, making handsome profits risk free (well almost), and providing them with a political lever. Thus Europe has little to show in the way of technical innovation in this millennium, but much to show with regard to a crumbling infrastructure. The sanctions against Russia have done egregious harm to Europe, that would have been more severe if European corporations, who set profit before ideology, had not ignored or circumvented them. The answer of the European political class to this economic crisis is investment in armaments. Beside the fact that there is no military threat to Europe – and Russia is most certainly not one – this is a branch with no benefit to European citizens and offers little economic perspective. So every morning we wake up to see the newest misadventure the European political elite is leading us into, promoting the continent’s own irrelevance and initiating the latest degradation of the fabric of our societies. Maybe it will do Europe good to learn some humility and return to the values that were once its strength: rational thinking, rule of law, and humanism. War has never benefited Europe. It never will. (And I Feel Fine)