In my last post but one, written just yesterday, I wrote of the USA having two war aims in Ukraine:
Regime change in Moscow or, failing that, weakening Russia in a long and costly war of attrition. (While business booms for America’s $1tn a year for-profit arms industries.)
Coercing Europe, Germany especially, into greater reliance on Washington as the craven leaders in Berlin – doubtless with heavy hearts – forego lucrative business contracts with Russia and hence China in favour of appeasing an increasingly unappeasable Uncle Sam.
I’ve touched on that second aim several times in posts on the war. A week ago, on November 24, the centre-left American-German publication, The Politico, added its own two penn’oth:
Europe accuses US of profiting from war
EU officials attack Joe Biden over sky-high gas prices, weapons sales and trade as Vladimir Putin’s war threatens to destroy Western unity.
By Barbara Moens, Jakob Hanke Vela and Jacopo Barigazzi
Nine months after invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is beginning to fracture the West.
Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer.
“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.
The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry. The Kremlin is likely to welcome the poisoning of the atmosphere among Western allies.
“We are really at a historic juncture,” the senior EU official said, arguing that the double hit of trade disruption from U.S. subsidies and high energy prices risks turning public opinion against both the war effort and the transatlantic alliance. “America needs to realize that public opinion is shifting in many EU countries.”
Another top official, the EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell, called on Washington to respond to European concerns. “Americans — our friends — take decisions which have an economic impact on us,” he said in an interview with POLITICO.
The U.S. rejected Europe’s complaints. “The rise in gas prices in Europe is caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s energy war against Europe, period,” a spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council said. Exports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S. to Europe “increased dramatically and enabled Europe to diversify away from Russia,” the NSC spokesperson said …
Read in full at The Politico site …
See my post of February 13, Can Europe break free of a dying empire? It features the opening paragraphs of a four thousand worder by Michael Hudson: America’s Real Adversaries are its European and Other Allies.
See also Caitlin Johnstone’s blog today. In a post on the circularity indicated in its title …
… she follows this paragraph:
NATO’s existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there’d be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO’s actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone …
… with this:
And this is all happening as news comes out that European nations are beginning to notice they’re bearing a lot more of the cost of Washington’s proxy warfare in Ukraine than the US is, while the US reaps all the profits.
I’ll add simply that the final paragraph of my extract from the said piece …
“The rise in gas prices in Europe is caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and energy war against Europe, period,” a spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council said. Exports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S. to Europe “increased dramatically and enabled Europe to diversify away from Russia,” the NSC spokesperson said …
… is staggering. Where should we begin unravelling this masterclass in lies and sanctimonious disingenuity? Here I guess:
One, the war is not of Russia’s making, a truth graphically shown by, among a plethora of other evidence, this. Yes, again.
Two, to say that “The rise in gas prices in Europe is caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and energy war against Europe” is a barefaced whopper of the kind only the USA can get away with. 1 For one thing it was Washington that got Europe to commit economic hara kiri through its sanctions war on Moscow. (The blowback from which is causing the traitors who run Europe as a semi-colony of the USA 2 to get antsy, as The Politico rightly notes, over rising public protest.) For another, the world and her grannie knows – on grounds of motive, means (direct or via a subaltern state like Britain), opportunity (the Baltic being a NATO boating pond) and Biden’s own words – exactly who blew up the Nordstream pipelines:
Three, I don’t much believe in conscious evil of James Bond villain stripe. So how explain that spokesperson keeping a straight face while touting the gob-smackingly self-serving circularity that Uncle Sam has come to Europe’s rescue (again!) by replacing cheap Nordstream gas with expensive LNG to help Europe diversify away from Russia?
If I were his/her lawyer at The Hague, 3 I’d be advocating an insanity plea.
* * *
- “… barefaced whopper of the kind only the USA can get away with …” I’m minded here of the late Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel acceptance speech:
The crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
- My use of ‘semi colony’ for Europe’s status vis a vis the USA is cavalier. The term is more usually reserved for indirect rule, aided by a comprador class, of a state – almost always a former colony under direct rule – within a context of modern imperialism. (As defined by the export from global north to south of capital, and repatriation from south to north of profits.) I’m misapplying the semi-colony term here in a spirit of disdainful hyperbole, when a more accurate descriptor would be ‘Washington’s junior partner in alliances – de jure or de facto – which in ‘normal’ times disguise underlying conflicts of interest.’
- I jest of course. The only agents of states, usually in the global south, which obstruct US designs ever stand in the dock at the Hague.
The cover graphic on the recent weekly edition of The Economist succinctly portrays the present perilous state of Europe:
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2022-11-26
A Europe that has gone so far down the road of de-industrialising itself on behalf of it’s US/WEF masters it is unlikely to recover in the lifetime of our grandkids (for those who have them).
An act which surely meets the criteria of a comprador class doing the bidding of their Mafia bosses.
This winter may well be bad. Next winter, and the subsequent ones are likely to be quantitatively and qualitatively far worse given how much basic survival needs depend on energy inputs. Fertilisers, food production, delivery systems – from transport to utilities such as water and waste – and a whole lot more.
Missiles and bombs are not the only means by which to remove such everyday vital to survival systems. Europe seems to be unique in this regard in that its ruling elites have voluntarily dismantled – or are well down the road of dismantling – its own systems without the employment of any munitions.
As, I think it was Fred Hoyle?, wrote: ‘Energy or Extinction?’
Yes brilliant piece. I read Caitlin’s article this morning.
I bloody loved that speech from the late Harold Pinter RIP. He was smeared in response as crazy/out of his depth/stupid, whatever by the usual shower of shite.
Mafia bosses is right.
The US doesn’t have allies, only interests. So true.
European “leaders” ought to be worried about public opinion over their craven obedience towards their mafia bosses.
The idea of America as a force for good in the world is up there with that of media independence from power. Both top the charts as the greatest and most stupefying myths of our age. Both are the reason you and I have so much difficulty with friends and family. Discussing something as big as Ukraine – with people who insist that (a) for all its faults, America is on the side of the angels; (b) our media more or less call it right on a matter so vital to power – is like discussing astronomy with a flat earther.
Except that flat-earthers are in a minority.
Still, we do what we can, if only because the alternatives are unacceptable.
Ok. If you insist …
In truth, I may be guilty – on the specific question of subservience to Washington – of drawing too nit-picking a distinction between Europe’s junior imperialisms, and the imperialised global south. (In most other contexts the distinction is as night and day.) To be sure, with the part exception of France, which in the past has thrown a strop every now and then, European states have had no independent foreign policy since Harold Wilson kept Britain out of Vietnam.
To look on the bright side, if Europe collapses into a state of Dark Age poverty, it is at least starting to be admitted by the compradoros that the US is to blame. It’s only a short step for the plebs to catch on and start blaming both these parties. Let the anti-empire/compradoros deluge then begin.
Well I’m seventy Jams, but have brought children into this vale of tears. I see no bright side to Europe collapsing into a state of dark age poverty
Btw, I’m very impressed with the Seshadri Kumar piece you alerted me to on this very matter. I’ll be producing a post on it asap …