Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of "preponderant power" was an explicit goal of US imperial strategy. Control over Eurasia was a key component of that objective from the start.
https://x.com/pawelwargan/status/1970809144077635642
Trump's apparent reversal on Ukraine should come as absolutely no surprise to those familiar with US imperial strategy in Europe.
Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of "preponderant power" was an explicit goal of US imperial strategy. Control over Eurasia was a key component of that objective from the start.
From the late 1940s, US officials spoke of the need to integrate Western Europe under US control. An integrated, capitalist Europe, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson said in 1947, was "the fundamental objective of [US] foreign policy".
The Marshall Plan helped advance that aim. It not only ensured that Europe's economy would be capitalist and open to US exports, helping relieve the post-war crisis of overproduction in the US. It also directed a significant amount of funding to clandestine activities designed to sideline political opposition in Europe and advance anti-communist and consumerist propaganda. Between 1949 and 1952, the US Office of Policy Coordination — which merged with the CIA in 1952 — saw its budget grow from $4.7 million to $82 million.
NATO helped secure that objective. Until the 1990s, when it launched its brutal assault on Yugoslavia, the organisation set its sights almost exclusively on internal political opposition and the maintenance of European colonialism. The presence of US troops on the continent — and NATO's funding of right-wing terrorist groups — created tensions that suffocated alternative political projects.
From the late 1960s onwards, US officials complained that Europe was "freeloading" on the US security umbrella. “[T]he Europeans get free defense and give nothing for it,” Henry Kissinger said in 1974. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the US made threats to leave NATO, arguing that Europe's dependence on the US cultivated in it 'dangerous' currents of pacifism and neutralism.
Whenever Western Europe drifted away from US orbit, it was punished. Like the bombing of Nordsteam II, Ronald Reagan's destruction of the German-Soviet Druzhba pipeline four decades earlier prevented closer integration along the Eurasian landmass. The US would not tolerate a Europe that shared in the benefits of imperialism while leaving the burden of imperial villainy to Washington and — god forbid — enjoying the benefits of peaceful cooperation with the socialist bloc and Third World.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, US strategists saw an opportunity to secure "unlimited access to this hitherto closed area", as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in The Grand Chessboard. Leaked strategic documents explicitly said that the US's principal aim was now to "establish and protect new order" that would "prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere". That is why it sabotaged the creation of a new European security architecture in favour of continued NATO expansion, binding ever-greater parts of the continent to strategic objectives outlined in the Pentagon and State Department.
Trump did nothing new. But he arrived facing a weakened and ideologically-pliant cohort of European leaders — moulded into their current submissiveness by decades of subordination to US imperial interests. And, together with Biden, he succeeded where many others have failed. He got Europe to love war again.
posted by Satish Sharma at
11:14
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