About Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg now says: “I welcome these developments and these decisions but it’s for individual allies to make the final decisions.” He means Europe. With US-led NATO, a pattern has clearly been emerging – one about shifting the burden (and blame) to Europe.
Some context is needed. I’ve written a number of times on how the Euro-American partnership and friendship consists of a rather strange alliance to the point of resembling a veiled enmity. Just consider this:
Washington does not refrain from openly employing terrorist operations against a major European power such as Germany, with no consequences – I am of course talking about the blowing up of Nord Stream, as promised by Joe Biden himself, a huge act of sabotage which, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, was Washington’s doing.
The US wages a “subsidy war” against Europe’s industry via the Inflation Reduction Act, while advancing its own energy interests to the detriment of the continent.
Even though this betrayal of Europe is in line with Washington’s historical record pertaining to partners, considering all the above, one can argue it is not far-fetched at all to describe the relationship between the United States and its transatlantic European “allies” as bearing a colonial character.
Hal Brands (Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies) describes the role played by an American “benign hegemon” by imagining the European continent “without Washington’s embrace” and then reverting to an “anarchic and illiberal past”. He describes such a scenario thusly:
“Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins… we may soon find out… A post-American Europe… might even revert, eventually, to the darker, more anarchic, more illiberal patterns of its past… Many people—Americans especially—have forgotten how hopeless the continent once seemed…. Europe was the land of “eternal wars” and endless troubles… [a] cursed continent…. U.S. military protection broke the doom loop of violence by safeguarding Western Europe from Moscow—and from its own self-destructive instincts…. Americans are the “best Europeans,” West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remarked in 1949… [The] transformation began with the forced democratization of West Germany under the Allied occupation. It involved using Marshall Plan aid to revitalize and stabilize fragile democracies…This was a uniquely U.S. solution to Europe’s problems… U.S. intervention helped turn a “dark continent”… into a post-historical paradise at the heart of an expanding liberal order”
It does sound almost like a defense of the American man’s burden, doesn’t it? It goes way beyond Pax American. Those European barbarians simply can’t get their act together and will naturally revert to their old illiberal ways, it seems.
It would be rather tempting to compare Brands’ rhetoric with European colonialist discourses on Eastern or New World peoples (I’ve commented on Hal Brands’s apocalyptic reasoning elsewhere). I believe that the point that I am trying to make by quoting Brand’s exercise of exceptionalism is quite self-evident. While some Western Europeans picture their civilization as a “garden” (and the rest of the world as a “jungle”), many figures within the American regime’s Establishment and Intelligentsia perceive Europe instead as a “dark continent”.
Again, this is not merely an exercise of rhetoric. Once one starts to understand the American hegemony over Europe as colonial in character, in a literal way, one can thus make much more sense of today’s world. For example, with regards to US actions pertaining to Georgia and Ukraine, we know that key European leaders such as former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy warned against it for several reasons – but ultimately then US President George W. Bush had his way, and American interest prevailed, as often happens.
The Atlantic Alliance 2008 Bucharest Summit Declaration then stated that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO” (23). The outcome back then was the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict – one can argue 2014 and 2022 are also part of the outcomes of an ongoing trend, namely NATO expansion. And yet, paradoxically, strategic Russo-European energy cooperation kept going, as recently as 2021.
How can Europeans allow such a disaster? Why won’t they stand against the Americans? The answer can be quite simple. As John Mearsheimer, the renowned University of Chicago political scientist, put it, in quite blunt terms: “the United States runs NATO and the Europeans do what we tell them” (see video here, at around 1h59min).
Make no mistake – there shall be no real American “withdrawal” from Europe. All talk about European “strategic autonomy” aside, what is happening now is that Washington is skillfully shifting the Ukrainian crisis’ burden onto the shoulders of the European bloc (which will have an impact on European welfare and standard of living), while still benefiting from it – by having ever-more dependent European NATO members purchasing American weaponry to comply with NATO standards (alas, even Trump’s rhetoric is really about it).
It has become clear by now that the political, economic, and moral costs pertaining to the Ukrainian effort are becoming too high – not to mention the risk of uncontrolled escalation potentially leading to nuclear war. It is thus time to further “proxify” the American proxy attrition war against Russia (as Former US ambassador to Finland, Earle Mack described it), by turning Europe itself into a full-fledged American proxy. It is not just about “pivoting to the Pacific”.
Realizing that the European bloc today is a de facto American colony is part of the theoretical effort to come up with an accurate description of the current state of affairs. Reflecting on what to do about it, upon realizing this, would be the next logical step, especially from a European perspective. Such reflection is a kind of forbidden discourse in Europe today, and it has become a monopoly of the Populist camp and the so-called “far-right”. It doesn’t need to be this way. It is about time to decolonize Europe.
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Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
