Fighting talk from the EU: Part 3

I’m still on the theme of EC President Ursula von der Leyen’s preposterous warmongering of March 4:

[Is] Europe ready and able to act with the speed and ambition needed? … The answer from European capitals has been as resounding as it is clear. We are in an era of rearmament. And Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending. Both to respond to the short-term urgency [in] Ukraine but also to address the long-term need to take on much more responsibility for our own European security.

Yesterday, March 29, former US Army Colonel Doug McGregor – a planner of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia under Bill Clinton, then Trump nominee (blocked by Senate) for US Ambassador to Germany – spoke with Norwegian academic, pundit and author of the outstanding, Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order.

McGregor: if the British and French moved forces into Ukraine, which would be phenomenally stupid, Germany would have hundreds of thousands of foreign troops in their country. The concentrations on railway lines into East Europe would be targets for the Russians. The German government is slow to catch on to that sort of thing but the German people get it, and recent polling data shows Poles turning against this war too. If the British and French are foolish enough to undertake any intervention in Western Ukraine, we should abandon them and make clear we will not support it. If you take us out of the equation, there is no command control that allows you to command forces across the European theatre. All of that resides with us, the United States.

Diesen: the then head of the NATO military committee [Germany’s former Bundeswehr leader, General Harald Kujat] warned at start of the Russian invasion that it was provoked, and the peace in Istanbul sabotaged [a month later]. If Germany walked into this war with Biden [said Kujat] it would end in disaster. The US would walk away to leave Germany to face Russia alone … the idea that the Europeans can simply fill the shoes of the Americans, replace the intelligence, logistics, weapons, planning – it does sound like fantasy land … something has changed in media over the past two weeks or so in which the Europeans start to recognize they don’t have the money or industrial capacity, and there’s no political will. There’s a lack of solidarity …

I site Col. McGregor alongside Alexander Mercouris, Scott Ritter and Judge Andrew Napolitano as too well informed and insightful to disregard, ¹ but overly inclined to give Donald Trump the benefit of doubt. As I argued in Trump does not  seek peace in Ukraine, we should see any US withdrawal, from a Ukraine crime scene for which Washington bears supreme responsibility, as strategic not principled. The colonel rightly mocks the all-mouth-and-no-trousers rhetoric of EU and other European leaders, caught with pants down and desperate to save their political skins, but that rhetoric is a response to Trump demands that Europe foot the bill, leaving Washington to salivate – how realistically remains to be seen – over Ukraine’s rare earths.

And more importantly to focus its fire on China. ²

Nor do I see the colonel as having the authority to speak in depth on the US economy. On that  I regard the work – both in general and on the failed economic war against Russia in Ukraine – of Michael Hudson, Radhika Desai and Richard Wolff as more important. Yet here the dialogue with Professor Diesen strays onto economic terrain:

Here’s another critical event which few talk about but will have a profound impact; massive economic recession inside the USA. Of course no one in the Trump administration wants to announce the fact when the sad truth of the matter is Trump had nothing to do with the onset of this recession. It’s not his but he’s going to have to deal with a recession that could border on depression. What the Trump administration does regarding tariffs and spending in general will impact on that recession so I think by June our government uh is going to have to make some tough decisions. We all know Congress and Senate will not make any decisions of any value because they are incapable of making hard choices that put them at risk they can’t get re-elected.

The president will have to step forward, assert his authority and make profound changes in spending, and in adjusting our economic interaction with other countries in ways he may not like but will impact on that recession. In Europe my impression is far more serious.  I talked yesterday to Martin Armstrong …

Thus the colonel distances the 47th president from Biden and Obama; in the US economy no less than in Ukraine. And it’s true, those earlier presidencies are hugely culpable. The Maidan coup was on Obama’s watch, as were those handouts to the super rich in 2008/9, while Biden’s vow to “reduce the rouble to rubble” was one of the stupidest public prophecies ever to come out of the White House. But it’s also true that Trump’s first term did nothing to reverse course, while his having been put on the backfoot by a Russiagate fabrication sold to credulous liberals both sides of the Atlantic only bails him out if we’re prepared to acknowledge that, like Europe, the USA is not really a democracy at all. I’m happy to do that, but is Col. McGregor?

As for the choice of expert witness, Martin Armstrong is a maverick economist and market analyst who did eleven years behind federal bars for his dodgy doings. Which may be why the colonel hastens to add that:

he’s not the only economic analyst I’ve talked to lately but he suggested it was a coin toss who is most likely to default: London or Paris. I voted London as on the skids and likely to go under first. Just look at the bond markets, what they call Gilts. If you cannot finance your government, if no one will buy your debt, you’re out. We are nearly there now in Japan but France and Britain in particular have an acute problem so the the notion of spending hundreds of billions of euros you don’t have to finance a major military campaign against the Russian state is absurd so the British population by some estimates is very close to civil war particularly in England. I don’t know. I’m not there so can’t evaluate it.

No, he can’t, and I’d love to know what the authors of “some estimates” are smoking, but even if Britain is light years from civil war (as opposed to year on year erosion of the rule of law) the levels of rage – a necessary if insufficient condition – surely exist as an economically illiterate Labour Chancellor, her one remaining friend the duplicitous incompetent next door who vows to put British boots on Ukraine’s blood soaked soil, takes the knife to a dying welfare state.

FWIW I agree with the colonel that while Britain is the sick man of Western Europe, its nearest comparators seem for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere – reasons exacerbated by the failed Ukraine gamble ³ – bent on closing the gap.

… and I know in France the revolutionary fervor is sort of just beneath the surface. The proverbial pot is coming to a slow boil, I don’t know that Macron and Starmer and even Merz at this point are going to be there much longer. Merz may last longer than the others but I think the whole idea right now of going into Ukraine and opposing Russia is just fanciful nonsense …

No quarrel from me there. Whether Col. McGregor has the measure of European feeling is one thing, its capacity to drive change in fraudulent democracies another. But he is surely right in predicting the demise of expendable puppets like Macron, Starmer and von der Leyen – all of whom would continue the slaughter rather than face their own richly deserved and preferably literal defenestration. This, by the way, sits alongside complicity in Gaza as the reason folk like me consider them criminals who in a just world would sit in the dock at the Hague for the same reason Himmler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Doenitz, Keitel and Jodl did at Nuremburg; not, as is widely but erroneously believed, for near impossible to prove involvement in the Holocaust but for “the supreme crime” of  “waging aggressive war”.

… I think Mr Putin understands that, which is one of the reasons people ask all the time why hasn’t he moved more decisively. I think he’s exercising patience. If he waits long enough these economies in Western Europe are going to tank anyway and those governments will fall. The whole globalist leadership caste is in danger of going under, which I think is a very good thing for Europe, and for us too, but there’s going to be tough days ahead for the French, the Germans, the British. Tough days ahead for many people.

No quarrel there either. Today being a Sunday, why not enjoy – as always with critical faculties switched on – this conversation in its forty-four minute entirety?

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For livelier Sabbath fare, and since excessive indulgence of the Donald has been duly noted above, let me recommend today’s read, five minutes tops, from a Caitlin Johnstone even more on the ball than usual. Enjoy.

In a grim kind of way … 

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1. On coldly clinical reckoning, McGregor having been party to the war crimes against Yugoslavia is akin to Jeffrey Sachs having been party to the looting of Russia on Yeltsin’s watch: both men became – Sachs more fully than McGregor – gamekeepers turned poacher, both are useful because  of the experience and analytic skills they bring from their former roles, and both have flaws we can trace to failure – less in Sachs’ case than in McGregor’s – to rid themselves entirely of a weltanschauung  left by those roles.
2. Since Iran sits on the Hormuz Strait through which half of China’s oil imports flow, a US “pivot to China” cannot but see a concomitant US threat to the Islamic Republic.

   

3. As I wrote in Part 1:

   For years before February 2022, and in the heady months after, the expectation was of a Russia laid low by sanctions, defeated in battle and, with Putin ousted and an interim leader suing for peace on any terms, ripe for break-up. It would be boom-time once again, with mineral and energy rights sold at knock-down prices as apparatchiks pocketed bribes. Such was the dream of Europe’s rentiers, their heads already turned by decades of finance, insurance and real estate powering their own economies; manufacturing off-shored to the global south. Intoxicated, the financiers who’d captured government and prioritised risk-free profits over long term planning forgot, if ever they knew or cared, that GDP and wealth creation aren’t the same thing. Not in the West’s finance bloated FIRE economies they aren’t. Russian resilience, and ability to wage a war of attrition in which manufacturing and manpower are decisive, to emerge stronger than ever – with her ‘tyrannical’ president returned to office just months ago on the kind of majority and turnout Western politicians can only dream about – confounded such calculations.