Ukraine: a NATO division of labour (b)

Social programs do not die in committee rooms; they die in the realm of justification. Through the threat of looming abandonment by Uncle Sam, German voters will accept that their €49 rail ticket cannot be renewed because the Bundeswehr needs new F-35s. Transatlantic burden-sharing finally appears on your pay stub as an extra defense levy or the quiet disappearance of school lunch subsidies. The cycle is elegant and ruthless …

Informing today’s post are two understandings, both easily verifiable, though to do so we need to take the unusual step of prioritising fact over demonising narrative. That’s no small ask for a species whose love of stories with strongly drawn heroes and villains likely served us well, with the occasional dark chapter, for most of the hundred and fifty millennia it has walked the earth in currently recognisable form, but which makes it highly manipulable in an age of mass media systemically answerable to tiny but unprecedentedly powerful elites.

We need also to prioritise fact – “watch what they do; not what they say!” – over the distracting babble of those same media. This too is a big ask given a Western culture steeped in idealism in the sense of understanding history as the onwards and upwards march of ideas, as opposed to being driven by material forces.

The understandings I speak  of being, first, that since the pliant drunkard Boris Yeltsin – he who had greenlit a decade of IMF prescribed disaster capitalism and concomitant rise of a gangster oligarchy ¹ – was replaced by the proudly patriotic Vladimir Putin, Russia has endured decades of lies, broken promises, insults and provocation heaped on provocation …

… second, that the abject willingness of Europe’s US-groomed leaders ² to participate, if not by supplying materiel then by economically suicidal sanctions, in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine subordinated the interests of their citizens and industry to those of US elites.

The narrative I speak of  being that Russia made an unprovoked invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, with the facts I ask you to prioritise over that narrative summarised here.

The distracting babble I speak of  being those endless tales, carried by all sections of our media – ‘quality’ no less than ‘popular’ – of a serious rift between Europe’s leaders and the Trump administration, tales themselves grounded in the delusion, embraced by critics and supporters alike, that Trump marks an unprecedented break with previous US policy

The piece featured today, brought to me by Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, is a natural follow up to the Brian Berletic podcast featured in Ukraine: a NATO division of labour (a). In a comment below that post I promised a second, featuring an article which:

… pace Brian but in greater detail, urges us to ignore media theatrics over a non-existent transatlantic rift. A new pharaoh may have come to Egypt Washington, and Merz, Macron, Starmer et al may not much care for him, but when he tells them to jump they’ll still ask “how high?”

This is it, written under the previously unknown to me byline, NEL. ³

The Transatlantic Split Myth: How U.S.-Europe Militarization Thrives Behind the Rhetoric

Synchronized defense budgets, shared doctrines, and welfare cuts expose the fiction of a ‘rift’— while citizens foot the bill for perpetual war readiness.

Prelude: a polite quarrel in Washington

In late 2022 an Atlantic Council discussion saw Lars Klingbeil, now German vice chancellor and finance minister, fielding ‘questions’ which were in reality crafted invitations to agree. The moderator delivered a raft of assumptions—Germany “plays a leading role,” must “create a new peace order,” and so forth—then asked:

That’s a big role for Germany to play. Do you think it’s ready to play that role?

Klingbeil replied with confessional humility:

I hope so, and we must be ready… we have to do our homework.

Scroll European op-eds and think-tank briefs, and you’ll find a familiar refrain: US and Europe are “drifting apart.” Look closer. Defense budgets both sides of the Atlantic rise, and security doctrines use the same PowerPoint slides, while the EU now accounts for a bigger slice of global arms-spend than Russia and China combined. The rift is rhetorical, the convergence material – and financed by the slow bleed of social programs at home.

The evidence isn’t buried. It’s in policy briefs, conference videos, and inadvertent slips by those implementing German re-armament. There’s a disconnect between the rhetoric of a split, and the reality of military and fiscal synchronization.

I. The crisis that isn’t

• • Defense budgets converge upward. 2024 world military spending rose by a record 9.4%; Germany alone jumped 28% and now sits 4th in global ranking, behind US, China, and Russia. NATO arms spend is 55% of world total: SIPRI
  • NATO target. Trump wants member states to hike defense budgets to 5% of GDP. German Foreign Minister Wadephul: “Russia will always be our enemy”.
  • Shared doctrines. Pentagon National Defense Strategy and Berlin’s new National Security Strategy share the same worry list, as A. Wess Mitchell of the Marathon Initiative wrote:

… the US should act now, but in ways that are not just dealing with “now. ˮ The US will have one big chance to create a demonstration effect in Europe to help avoid war in Asia. By dealing with the wolf closest to the sled, it will be in a better position later to deal with the larger wolf watching from the hilltop.

• • Industrial policy locks in. US and Germany aim to funnel public money toward dual-use tech, i.e. repurpose civilian industry for military use.

Where is the rift? On talk shows, where it serves two political functions: (1) shielding elites from domestic anger over social retrenchment; (2) selling higher arms-spend as reluctant self-help.

Germany will arm fast and heavy not because Washington and Berlin are fighting, but because they’ve never been more in sync.

II. Taskmasters with open microphones

Stratfor founder George Friedman spells out the century-long U.S. objective:

The United States has spent the past century pursuing a single objective: avoiding the rise of any single hegemon that might exploit Western European technology and capital and Russian resources and manpower.

His candor is the norm in corporate think tanks refreshingly free of humanitarian garnish. We need not rummage clandestine cables for these blueprints:

Peter Rough (2022), writing for Atlantik-Brücke in an article titled “Germany needs to protect Europe”, asserts:

The rise of China is occupying more American attention by the day, making it urgently necessary that Germany relieve the US in Europe … As the most influential, prosperous, and powerful country in Europe, it is up to Germany to take the baton.

Elbridge Colby, US Under Secretary of Defense, tweeted that Berlin should “ramp up to 5 % of GDP” for defence, pledging DOD help to “enable this necessary and critical effort” by working closely with its allies.

In a 2004 paper, Strategic Sequencing, Colby asserts:

… this is not about “abandoningˮ Europe. Even once the US has prioritized Asia, it will be a European power and continue to have compelling strategic reasons to keep high-end military hardware in that theater, both to augment European capabilities and have a point dʼappui from which to project power to other places, including Asia. The point is to manage time wisely by using the proxy wars in Ukraine and Israel to increase our own capacity to wage war, so that a larger and more consequential war may yet be avoided due to our enhanced strength.

Any quarrel is theater. The marriage is thriving.

III. Rhetoric as budgetary Pavlov

Social programs do not die in committee rooms but in the realm of justification. Fearing US abandonment, German voters will accept that their €49 rail ticket cannot be renewed because the Bundeswehr needs new F-35s. Transatlantic burden-sharing will take the forms of an extra defense levy, or the quiet disappearance of school lunch subsidies. The cycle is elegant and ruthless …

Once Berlin dropped its flirtation with Moscow in September 2022 …

September 2022, recall, is when Biden sabotaged – as both he and Victoria Nuland had in so many words promised – the Nordstream pipelines supplying cheap energy to German industry. At which point Berlin got the message.

… Biden rushed to lock it into a dual mission: backstop NATO’s eastern flank and free up U.S. bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific: a mission Trump is continuing.

IV. Why Berlin? A brief genealogy of delegation

The US cannot patrol Baltic littorals and  Taiwan Strait with a dominant force. Europe must hold the line as carrier groups steam east. Enter Germany: geographically central, fiscally flush, and psychologically eager for redemption  …

In this section and the next, which expand on the above, NEL backs arguments not via sources critical of the US but via that remarkable candour with which papers put out by Pentagon and Washington funded think-tanks hide hair-raising ideas right out in the open.

From the 1990s onward, US policy papers spoke of a Germany that should “grow up” inside NATO. Just read this aptly titled RAND paper, “Germany’s Geopolitical Maturation,” from 1993. Or look at this 1995 NATO paper that includes a section called “The Russian Enigma,” followed by “The German Question”

NEL offers three motives for Germany. One, echoing Radhika Desai’s wider point (footnote 2) about Europe’s comprador leaders in general, is what NEL calls the “Atlanticist pipeline”. A second is the benefit to Germany’s own military industrial complex while a third, “historical phantom pain”, invokes psychological aspects which, when aligned with self interest, are not to be underestimated:

… former foreign minister Baerbock talked to the Atlantic Council of how her grandfather fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1945. This, she says, is her inspiration for fighting for Europe and for Ukraine. In contrast, or not in contrast at all, the [far right] AfD parliamentary group’s defense policy spokesperson Lucassen, a NATO and Israel fan, called for massive rearmament and conscription on behalf of the AfD. He also appreciates the achievements of Hitler’s Wehrmacht through the feats of his father who also fought on the Eastern Front, even tweeting: “To this day, the key dates and names of this battle are familiar to our Bundeswehr soldiers, even though the political leadership tries to suppress it.”) [Germany] has never fully processed the defeat of 1945, experienced less as liberation than as humiliation. Re-armament cloaked in liberal internationalist garb offers a path to restored pride without explicit revanchism.

Section VI returns to China, where NEL echoes Brian Berletic …

Germany must bulk up against Russia so the USA can spare forces for China. The implicit bargain,“stay under our nuclear umbrella, but prove yourself on the Donbas steppe”, pries open the German treasury …

… while Section VII, on how Russia views all this, notes the takeaway as heard in Moscow:

“We suffered once at German hands; we won’t allow it again.”

In Section VIII NEL asks what end is served by what I called the “distracting babble” of a rift between Europe and the USA. This he summarises in a three part litany:

Budget alchemy

Claim: “The U.S. is tired of protecting Europe.”

Effect: German voters accept austerity to “take responsibility.”

Industrial hand-off

Claim: “Europe must match U.S. aid to Ukraine.”

Effect: EU diverts cohesion funds to ammo factories; Pentagon reallocates to the South China Sea.

Diplomatic smoke

Claim: “Franco-German friction shows EU independence.”

Effect: Washington still authors the playbook while Paris and Berlin squabble over props.

In conclusion, well, let me return to NEL in his own write:

The real divide: citizens vs. the permanent war coalition

The alleged trans-Atlantic split conceals the true fracture line, between a managerial-finance class bent on preserving U.S. primacy at all costs and the populations who will finance that project with higher rents, lower pensions, and riskier security environments.

When Chancellor Merz thanks only the Western Allies, he’s securitizing memory to justify tomorrow’s arms contracts. When Pentagon officials tweet that Berlin must reach 5 percent of GDP on defense, they’re not scolding free-riders; they’re outsourcing Washington’s European chores so the U.S. Navy can ring-fence the South China Sea. When think-tankers reassure us that “Europe must lead,” they’re really telling municipal treasurers to close libraries before they cancel drone orders.

Closing Notes: Follow the Money

A genuine rift would manifest in diverging budgets, incompatible doctrines, and hostile trade blocs. We have the opposite: synchronized spending, interoperable doctrines, and industrial policies so alike. None of this is inevitable. Elites coordinate because it works for them; the public can coordinate because the internet still allows lateral exchange. So here’s the ask:

• Send this article to a friend who still believes the alliance is on the brink of divorce.
• Support independent outlets that scrutinize military-industrial story-lines; cite the data, follow the money.
• Dispute memory wars. Insist that the Red Army’s dead matter; historical erasure is pre-war propaganda, and we’ve seen where that leads.

The real divide is not Washington versus Brussels; it is citizens versus the permanent war managers. Naming that reality is the first step toward ending this theater.

For those inclined to read in full, and I do recommend that, here’s the link again.

* * *

1. For a gripping but impeccably documented account of the “wild east” that was Russia in the first decade after the USSR’s dissolution, see Chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. As for its “concomitant rise of a gangster oligarchy”, the irony, funny if we’re in a good mood, that instead of Western asset strippers profiting, as they had in Pinochet’s Chile, post-apartheid South Africa and newly “liberated” Poland (to name but a few of the economies subjected in trauma conditions to Chicago School neoliberalism on steroids) the lion’s share of the spoils fell to those erstwhile apparatchiks uniquely placed to form an overnight plutocracy, is not lost on Ms Klein. Lastly, those who say, or more commonly imply, that Putin could turn this toxic legacy around by presidential fiat – as if a federal republic as vast, ethnically diverse and culturally heterogeneous as Russia could be run by top down decree – display a kindergarten grasp of realpolitik. To have made so rapid a recovery, from looted economy to national resurgence, Moscow had to cut deals with a plethora of regional strongmen. Ask those critics, even the few who do know something, what alternative courses were available. The silence is deafening.
2. When the Canadian political economist, Professor Radhika Desai, was asked by the host of a discussion last September why Europe’s leaders act manifestly against the interests of their citizens, she replied:

   The entire Left in most Western countries – by ‘Left’ I mean the Social Democratic Left, the Green Parties and perhaps most of the entire political establishment – is now led by individuals who have been through the US ideological factories … the think tanks, the annual meetings etc. You know, the Leaders of Tomorrow type programs for which these people go to the USA on junkets, and become part of a network of leaders with a similar understanding of what is to be done, both domestically and internationally. People like Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen and Baerbock … they belong to these circles. So in answer to the question – why are European governments acting so manifestly contrary to the interest of their economies, their people etc? – the only reason I can find is that at the present moment the United States is in this sweet spot where the people it has groomed have taken power in major European capitals.

3. NEL’s words, given in red text, have been edited for brevity.