Who Commands Europe: the New US-German Conflict
For those of you still following what is going on in Ukraine, may I recommend:
I have been following this German blogger (who writes in excellent English) from the beginning of the conflict (though I don’t much follow the comments section which, like most comment sections, ‘runs the gamut’). He has been right far more than he has been wrong.
Why continue to follow what is happening there?
Aside from the humanitarian dimension — which is frightening — there are the geopolitics.
The most frightening aspect, in my opinion, is that there is a section of NATO’s leadership — starting with chair Jens Stoltenberg — who desperately want to ‘get in on the actionr’ in the first person. Stoltenberg has been promoting a ‘shooting war’ with direct involvement of NATO troops from the get-go.
I am not sure that US military leaders see it that way. There have been some strong indications over the last months that US military heads do not see this war ending well for the Ukrainians, and that they have been exerting pressure for a diplomatic solution. Nor is it just that the US’s eyes are turned toward the South China Sea. US industry, at the moment, is in the midst of a real production crisis, and military stockpiles are at record lows. Critical aspects of our military systems show a technological lag both vis a vis Russia and vis a vis China. And the high-tech weapons we have funneled to Ukraine, including our HIMARS, our anti-tank systems and our 155mm artillery systems, have proven vulnerable to attack, complicated to use and, at times, downright ineffective.
A number of commentators are suggesting that the Biden Administration is itself souring on the war. For one, the high price of oil is continuing to hammer US consumer prices. The EU’s recent oil price cap, at around $60/barrel, is too high to hit Russia economically. OPEC has shown no inclination to increase production. And Biden has already significantly weakened the US strategic oil reserve in an effort to lower prices domestically. With the midterms behind him, he may be thinking about cutting his losses before a full-blown recession sets in, or Stoltenberg gets too antsy with his buttons.
One place where the Biden Administration has supposedly had some success is Europe itself. On 11 May past, the New York Times published an opinion piece whose author stated that as a result of Russia’s invasion, “[t]he number of NATO troops in Eastern Europe has grown tenfold… A general rearmament of Europe is taking place, driven not by desire for autonomy from American power but in service to it. For the United States, this should be success enough…”
This ‘victory’ in Europe, however, may prove very costly.
These past decades have seen sectors of European society grow increasingly uneasy over US power on the Continent. In 2014, neo-elect French President Macron called for Europe to re-establish its strategic independence vis a vis the United States and US corporations. Macron particularly emphasized the growing rift between Western Europe and an Eastern Europe where US capital and military alliances dominanted. Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel forged an economic relationship with Russia as a push-back against this growing US hegemony. This provoked a US-German struggle which reached its apex over NordStream II, which every US Administration since 2011 has vehemently opposed, and which Germany built anyway.
The Ukraine War has taken this conflict for hegemony in Europe to a new level. In Eastern Europe there is a deep rift between the ‘little’ giants, Poland and Hungary, over US dominance, with Poland calling for more and more US troops and Hungary siding increasingly with Russia. Meanwhile, in the West there are serious divides among the ‘big’ giants, Germany, France and Italy, over this same question of what to do about the US. Back in September, German Chancellor Scholz called for a revival of European political and economic independence. Last month, in Indonesia, Mr. Scholz renewed that call:
“One of the first decisions that my government made in the aftermath of Russia’s attack on Ukraine was to designate a special fund of approximately $100 billion to better equip our armed forces, the Bundeswehr. We even changed our constitution to set up this fund. This decision marks the starkest change in German security policy since the establishment of the Bundeswehr in 1955.”
These words should give everyone who reads them pause. Germany has already fought two world wars over control of the economy of Continental Europe. Scholz’s words do not necessarily mean that the Chancellor sees a third such war on the horizon, but his statement in Prague in September left little room for doubt that Germany will not cede Europe’s wealth without a fight. Said Scholz, “our [European] security and our sovereignty… ultimately depend on European armament capabilities.” “Europe,” said the Chancellor, “owes its prosperity to trade. We must not leave that field to others.”
Yet this is exactly what Corporate America wants. A strong EU has been a cornerstone of this so-called ‘multipolar’ world everyone and his uncle has been talking about. And the ‘heart’ of the multipolar world is the reality (or ‘danger’) of a multipolar *economic* world, in which diverse players have the ability to challenge Corporate America over, and compete against it for, strategic resources. It is downright frustrating to Corporate America that after decades of successes, from killing Allende (1970s) to bringing down and taking over the import-substitution economies of Brazil and Argentina (1990s), to eliminating the USSR, to the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the economic penetration of Western Europe (2000s), to Maidin and the gutting of Ukraine’s economy (2014–2018) — that Corporate America *still* is not hegemonic on a global scale. To these interests, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a priceless opportunity, allowing them to wreck Germany, bleed Russia and dismember Europe — all in one, fell swoop.
What I ask you, Friends, to consider is whether all this is good for the US people itself. We have already fought two ‘hot’ world wars against the Germans for control of Europe, and a ‘cold’ war against the Soviets. In the last decades, we have fought two wars in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, two wars in Syria (one against Bashar Al-Assad, one against the Islamic State), with millions (not ‘thousands,’ but millions) of dead.
What are the social costs of these policies? Our national infrastructure is in a shambles. In most of the cities and rural communities of our country, our schools are a shame. We have the highest poverty rate of any industrialized country in the world. In terms of healthcare outcomes, educational achievement, quality of life, life expectancy itself, we rank at the bottom of most world indicators. Why? Because we spend obscene amounts of our national resources on two priorties: Corporate Welfare and armaments.
How many more wars will we be asked to fight? How many more sacrifices, from school funding cuts to social security cuts to inflation, to the lives of our children, will we be asked to heap on the altar of Corporate profit?
We have negotiated with the Chinese and Koreans after millions were killed in the invasion of South Korea. We negotiated with North Vietnam. We negotiated with the USSR. Every war-ending negotiation that has ever taken place in history has taken place between an aggressor state and a state that has been attacked. Ukraine-Russia is no different. But the only way a negotiation will start is if there is massive international pressure to bring the two sides to the table. Helping push Biden over the top, and get his Administration calling for talks, would be an important step forward. Call the White House, your Senators and your Representatives in Congress, and insist on negotiations now.