4 p. How the United States fell into the Ukraine trap 1990 – 2022

FOURTH GUEST POST BY PERSPECTIVES, a chapter from Emmanuel Todd, 2024 looking from the EUROPEAN OUTLOOK (8,600 words)

It is my belief that the fate of the E.U. is the fate of all the western world, even their push toward war. What was for so long hidden, has now become apparent, for those willing to see it.  So it is worth watching the E.U., sort of like the canary in the coal mine, (or the dodo bird on the jungle-gym).

The E.U. was formulated through a long and iterative series of treaties, most all of which were rubber stamped by parliaments, and not voted-for in referendums. The Treaty of Rome in 1956, the Schengen agreement abolishing borders in 1985, the Single European Act 1986, Maastricht in 1992, Amsterdam in 1997, Nice in 2000, and Lisbon in 2009.  The net effect is the E.U. is anti-democratic, because unelected technocrats can override laws passed by national parliaments, even their adopted budgets and up to annulling parts of their constitution.

Some of the E.U. founding fathers, maybe it was Jean Monnet or Robert Schuman reportedly said that the E.U. will have to be installed behind the population’s back.  However, because of educational stratification, even if developed countries become more oligarchical, they remain literate countries. They will have to deal with the conflicts between the democratically leaning literate mass, and the university driven stratification that favors the oligarchical elites.

The outward clothing of the E.U. is the paragon of freedom, democracy, and of civilization.  It is a structure that permanently abolishes war on the continent. EXCEPT THAT, RIGHT NOW THEY ARE IN THE MIDST OF THE LARGEST WAR SINCE THE 1940’S, (hoping that their proxy can withstand it).  But this will overwhelm them.  It matters not whether this war is the brainchild of America.  Europe is foisting it upon their respective populations with all their force and rhetoric.

My latest post, 3 p. was from Ramin Mazaheri’s book on the Yellow Vests.  It goes on for a couple more chapters to outline why, what the Yellow Vests demand from Macron, is against the Treaty of Lisbon and can never ever be attained.  They should be demonstrating against the E.U., and not against France.  The clearest explanation of the E.U. is from the Yanis Varoufakis book, “and the Weak Suffer what they Must”.  I want to publish a chapter from that book also, and it is certainly worthy of your attention.  But just now I have read from this Emannuel Todd book.  It was translated from the French language just this year.

I can’t say that this is exactly my view of things, but what do I know about it, as a non-researcher?  It is another understanding, definitely worth reading about. 

We haven’t posted much from contemporary writings. Many of them seem to be echo-chambers, or slight variations. Where are those who can think differently from the standard narrative? China and Russia can, but they have their own echoes. This book is French, so let’s see what they have to say.

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The period since the fall of the Berlin Wall has not been well understood. The original illusion was to believe that the fall of the USSR resulted from an American victory. But by the time it occurred, as we have shown, (previous chapters), the United States itself had been in decline for twenty-five years. If communism imploded, it was for internal reasons: educational stratification shattered a system already weakened by its economic contradictions.

We have repeatedly traced the consequences of this illusion, but in scattered order. It is time, to close this book, to bring together in a sequence ordered by chronology the elements scattered throughout the previous chapters. We will use what we now know about the internal evolution of Russian, Ukrainian, Eastern European and Western societies to propose a new reading of the three decades which followed the Cold War and plunged NATO into the Ukrainian trap.

The fall of the USSR set History in motion again. It created a vacuum that sucked in the Western, and mainly American, system, while America itself was in crisis and atrophying at its center. A double movement was triggered: a wave of America's outward expansion, even while within the United States there was an increase in poverty and mortality. The decline of religion and, above all, of collective civic beliefs which assumed it was stronger, were more extreme than elsewhere in the advanced world.

Note that all the actors in the war, Russia included, are affected by the same movement towards a zero state of religion. It does not always manifest itself through the appearance of a nihilistic state of mind, which denies the reality of the world and tends towards war, but populations everywhere now seem incapable of reproducing, (low birth rates). In the Western liberal world in stricto sensu – fertility in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, the rate is closer to 1.6 children per woman; 1.5 in Germany and Russia. (2.1 sustains the current population.)

All nations, including Russia, are “inert,” rather than active, in the sense in which I denigrated this concept in Chapter 5. No powerful collective feeling animates them, not possible to restore their greatness through economic prowess, through war or any other project that would unite citizens in a fervent common effort.

Where complex family forms predominated, (with a definite hierarchy), integrating the individual into the group, there remains a residue of collectivity, which allows governments to take more effective action. I portrayed Germany (from the original family) as a machine society. I add here that Russia (a community family), despite the sovereignist ideal which animates its ruling class, despite its capacity to bounce back economically and technologically (like Germany), is not nationalist in the classic sense. It is also an “inert nation”, and this is why Putin wants, above all, to protect it from total commitment to war; he mobilized slowly because the Russians too, (even if they remain attached to their nation, (more than the French for example), they are postmodern individuals who think first of their pleasures and their sorrows. However, they are protected from the extreme form that postmodernity has taken: that of nihilism. This is the evil specific to societies that their anthropology denies as individualistic, with the Anglo-American world in the lead. Counterbalances to nihilism exist in France because a good half of its periphery contained complex family structures (root, community and others). Nothing, on the other hand, slows down the United States and England in their centripetal, narcissistic and then nihilistic drift. Thanks to a stem component, Scotland may be spared.

In the Anglo-American world, the stage of the inert nation seems to have been passed around 2020. If the Russian, German and French ruling classes remain ethno-national, those of the Americano-sphere have lost their original cultural base. The aristocratic feeling that prevailed in England until around 1980 has since disappeared. As for America, we could still consider it, around 1990, as a nation, certainly imperial but which retained a vibrant cultural center. America today is no longer a nation-state; it has lost its ruling class and its ability to set direction. Around 2015, it reached what I called state of zero. This expression does not mean that the country no longer exists or no longer produces anything but that it is no longer structured by its original values: Protestant, and that the morality, the work ethic and the feeling of responsibility which animated its population has evaporated. The election of Trump, champion of vulgarity, then that of Biden, champion of senility, will have been the apotheosis (pinnacle), of this zero state. Washington's decisions have ceased to be moral or rational. I will therefore not give this America which no longer knows who it is, or where it is going the classic paranoid image of an effective manipulative system.

Let's return to geopolitics. The Ukrainian war closes the cycle opened in 1990. The expansionist wave, which continues to empty the center of America of its substance and its energy, came to break against Russia, an inert but stable nation.

How did we get there? Why have the Americans engaged in a fight they cannot win?

Why did they find themselves at war with Russia when, since Obama, their geopolitical literature made China the main adversary? Even though, also since Obama, a withdrawal seemed to be underway, a return to a more modest international posture.

The historical consciousness of Western actors (and not just Americans) is at its lowest. Our governments make decisions but their vision of the balance of planetary forces – military, economic, ideological – and their evolution is, as we have seen, fantasmatic. Their lack of awareness, and the absence of a real project that results from it, justifies a chronological approach: it is the examination of the concrete decisions of the actors, in a historical sequence that they have not mastered, which allows to understand the march to war, inexorable as well as absurd, that we have witnessed. The existence of a nihilistic component in the United States and another in Ukraine, of different natures, also a priori excludes a rational interpretation of History. Our only consolation will be to see the fusion of the two nihilisms, the American and the Ukrainian, lead to defeat, the ultimate revenge of reason in History.

The main stages

I will distinguish in the action of the United States, the central actor in this march to war (rather than Russia), four phases revealed by the evolution of American military spending as a proportion of GDP.

GDP, as we saw in Chapter 9, is not a good indicator of real economic power. If I therefore rely on the percentage of GDP devoted to military spending, it is because this indicator is likely to measure the interest of the United States in military matters.

Phase One

In the years following the fall of the USSR, the United States accepted the prospect of general peace: the fraction of GDP that it devoted to its military expenditure fell, between 1990 and in 1999, from 5.9% to 3.1%. The disarmament to which this fall corresponds allows us to confirm that, during this phase of around ten years, the United States does not have any plans for world domination.

Phase Two

Between 1999 and 2010, ten years of hubris took place. The fraction of GDP devoted to military spending rose again, reaching 4.9% in 2010. The United States began to dream of absolute control over the world. Failures – in Iraq, in Afghanistan – follow one another.

Phase Three

The time comes to retreat. I would place the beginning not in 2010, as military spending suggests, but in 2008, the year of the sub-prime crisis and the election of Barack Obama, an instinctively peaceful president. In 2017, military spending returned to 3.3% of GDP.

Phase Four

The fourth and final phase could be titled: the exit from reality. The United States falls into the trap of the Ukrainian war. Military spending is increasing, but insignificantly: 3.7% in 2020, 3.4% in 2021. These modest figures invite us to qualify Vladimir Putin's speech and, incidentally, Mearsheimer's analyses: far from being hawkish, the United States had renounced expansion and did not want a confrontation with Russia, but the nihilistic dream of the Ukrainian nationalists, a product of the decomposition of the Soviet Union, lured them in. Putin, however, had no reason to distinguish Kyiv from Washington. He decided to go to war at the moment that seemed opportune. Everything suggests that his calculation was excellent.

Current geopoliticians take into account three major players: America, China, the US main adversary, and Russia, its secondary adversary. I will keep them, but I will add Germany as a fundamental player. Its weight in Europe has continued to increase between 1990 and 2020. The Ukrainian war is taking place on its doorstep and we must not believe that Chancellor Scholz's evasive style sums up the role that Germany plays in this crisis. European becomes global.

I am personally convinced that the United States' efforts to separate Germany from Russia – one of its strategic obsessions since 1990 – will ultimately fail. On the map of Europe, two major forces stand out, Germany and Russia. Their common fertility of 1.5 children per woman calms them down and brings them together. They can no longer wage war; their economic specializations designate them as complementary. Sooner or later, they will collaborate. The American-Ukrainian defeat will pave the way for their rapprochement. The United States will not be able to undeniably stem the gravitational force, so to speak, which mutually attracts Germany and Russia.

Now let's look at the real story of the years 1990-2022.

1990-1999: the peaceful phase

Let's start with the implosion of the Soviet Union, between November 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) and December 1991 (of the USSR). On October 3, 1990, Germany was reunited under the leadership of Kohl. Bush senior accepts what must be considered as an annexation of the GDR by the FRG, against the advice of Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher, who, born in 1916 and 1925, remembered German predominance on the continent. Everyone, then, interprets the rise of communism as a victory for the United States, and is wrong. In America, we don't take Germany seriously. On this date, the FRG had 62.7 million inhabitants and the GDR 16.4 million. In total, that makes 79.1 million inhabitants. In the eyes of the French (58.1 million) and the British (57.3 million), this is already too much. For Americans (250.1 million), that's not much.

Panicked, our financial inspectors and other think tanks concocted the Treaty of Maastricht: they demanded the dissolution of the mark into the euro and obtained it, by accepting the creation of a European Central Bank in Frankfurt, that of the franc into the mark. Germany now holds the monetary key to Europe. But because the Germans were for a time confronted with the costs of reunification, the French and British believed them to be in denial and forgot the German problem. Post-war “young people” succeeded Mitterrand and Thatcher.

The question, so often raised today, of a guarantee that the United States would have given to Russia not to extend NATO towards the East is of little interest. It is an ahistorical debate which ignores the state of mind of the actors at the time. None!

No political leader had been able to envisage the collapse of the Soviet Union; once this disappeared, no one imagined the abyss into which Russia would fall. It remained in people's minds a superpower, a pole of balance. An extension of NATO was unthinkable.

The intentions of the United States were then peaceful. Between 1990 and 1999, their military spending, as we have seen, fell massively. But then the second unthinkable event occurred: after the USSR, Russia collapsed too. We did not understand that communism was more than an economic organization, that it had become, after Orthodoxy, the religion of Russia, a collective belief which united society. It’s disappearance led to a state of anarchy which brought the country to the brink of disintegration. Around 1994, life expectancy, declining rapidly due to sanitary conditions, homicides and suicides, reached its nadir. GDP per capita fell to its lowest point in 1996. As for Russia's overall GDP (more archaic, physical, and real than American GDP), it was in 1998 that it reached its lowest point, after a financial crisis. and a default on the debt.

Barter spread and people wondered if the ruble would survive. Let us add that in 1994-1996 the Russian army lost the first Chechen war and therefore proved incapable of preventing the dissidence of a very small population of the Caucasus, it is true very violent.

The United States looked with condescension at Russia which, between 1994 and 1998, hit rock bottom. They tried to continue to consider it as a nation in transition, capable of one day becoming a democracy like any other. However, around 1997-1998, their obvious weakness shifted America from a benevolent attitude to the dream of a knockout. Final. Here comes the beginnings of hubris.

Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard dates from 1997. In retrospect, we cannot say whether his book expresses fear or hope. It describes the American Empire born from the Second World War, with its footholds in the conquered nations of Germany and Japan. Let us first examine the fear that Brzezinski then felt: if the fall of communism made America useless, the Japanese but especially the German poles could join forces with Russia; a Eurasian mass would emerge that would marginalize the United States. The association of Germany and Russia constitutes the main threat.

The hope that animated Brzezinski now: with Russia collapsing, he suggested that it could be finished off if Ukraine were torn from it, an amputation that would forever deprive it of its imperial status. If the Ukrainian war ultimately leads to the fall of the American Empire, Zbigniew Brzezinski will go down in the history of geopolitics as the greatest involuntary comedian of all time.

1999-2008: hubris

In Greek mythology, Bellerophon, after many exploits, including the capture of the winged horse Pegasus, flies to the sky with the intention of sitting there alongside the gods. Zeus, furious at such presumption, sends a gadfly to sting Pegasus who unhorses Bellerophon. He falls into a thorn bush and only survives to lead the miserable existence of a blind man on earth. His story illustrates the destiny of all those seized by “hubris”, this excess which is born from a lack of understanding of ourselves and of our limits.

From 1999, the United States entered a state of hubris. For the first time in their history, they no longer have an opponent. Stunned by this emptiness, they lose their minds. Aeschylus claims that Hubris was the daughter of Dyssebeia, (Impiety). In fact, American hubris begins at the very moment when zombie Protestantism (one step up), disappears and the country plunges toward religious-zero.

Until then, no NATO enlargement had yet taken place. But in 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the Alliance in response to an invitation made in Madrid in 1997. Also in 1999, from March to June, NATO bombed Serbia, a seventy-eight day air campaign during which, for good measure, a few bombs were dropped on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Irony of history: 1999, which marks the entry of the United States into its phase of hubris, also saw the arrival to power of Putin and the beginning of Russia's recovery.

At this stage, we cannot yet speak of an anti-Russian fixation in the Western ruling spheres: how can we be hostile to a power that we believe to be completely defeated? We were content, during the 1990s, through OPNGs (pseudo non-governmental organizations) and American businessmen who were active in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, to try to take control of everything that can be in Russia, and particularly hydrocarbons. In the minds of the Americans, Russia has ceased to exist as an autonomous actor, its destiny is to enter their hegemonic system, a partner at a level that remains to be denied, but in any case, submissive.

A hyperactive child, America has difficulty focusing its attention on a single goal. Russia is no longer perceived as a threat and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was able to divert the agitation of the United States towards the Middle East, where it attacks powers non-existent. The invasion of Afghanistan is justified since that is where bin Laden took refuge. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not at all justified: it marks the entry of the United States into a new phase in its history, pure and simple, the war of aggression. What Iraq suffered will be remembered (after the defeat of the West) in the history books, as one of the shames of the 21st century.

The brand-new nihilist component of America gives birth to Colin Powell, who, test tube in hand at the United Nations, expounds that Iraq holds weapons of mass destruction. Nihilism denies reality and truth; it is a cult of lies. The Bush administration has, on this level, innovated to the highest level.

By 1999, the military budget had started to increase again. The little world of geopoliticians only talks about the American hyperpower and a unipolar world. The end of the story in its military version. Note that the September 11 attacks took place after military spending had increased, and therefore after the United States had entered into hubris.

They believe themselves to be so invincible that, on December 11, 2001, they brought China into the WTO (World Trade Organization), the most ill-considered political and economic act imaginable. Its consequences will be much more catastrophic for them than their retreat from Iraq or Afghanistan.

In September 2002, Bush has presented the new “US National Security Strategy” to the world. {All the countries of the world are converging towards “common values”, and “the great powers are now in the same camp”: “Russia,” he explains, “is at the heart of a transition on which we are basing a lot of hope, in search of a democratic future, and it is a partner in the war against terrorism. Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only source of wealth. In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness.}

America will encourage progress in democracy and economic openness in both countries. >> So much for the fairy tale side.

Then the military side. The objective of this new strategy is to achieve technological and military superiority such that it will discourage any arms race. The American dream has taken off into a new virtual world. Between 1995 and 2002, the proportion of Internet users in the United States increased from 10 to 60% of the population. The cinema has received well the new trajectory: in 1999 the film Matrix was released, which actually immerses us in a virtual world.

But we don't stop History, it continues, it goes quickly, surprisingly quickly, and especially since Francis Fukuyama declared it done. While the United States blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan, letting China decimate its industry, Russia is recovering. The speed of the rebound will surprise as much as the brutality of the collapse in the 1990s.

In August and September 1999, the Chechens invaded Dagestan and carried out attacks on Russian soil, notably in Moscow. Putin is crushing Chechnya with extreme brutality.

His popularity is assured. He then showed moderation by granting Chechnya an original status, an autonomy based on clans, not all of which were initially favorable to the Russians. The success of this policy will allow the Chechen regiments to play, on the Russian side, a major role in the Ukrainian war.

This second Chechen war was the first sign that Russia was not going to fall apart. Westerners paid little attention to it; nor did they notice that its economic situation had started to improve even before Putin came to power.

Optimistic or cautious, we don't know, Putin initially showed himself to be very complacent towards the United States. The day after September 11, he expressed his solidarity and opened Central Asia to the American army to facilitate the conquest of Afghanistan. His pro-Americanism then worried the Russian elites.

Russia was not, from 1999-2001, the only power that was recovering. The Germans only took ten years to digest East Germany. In 2001, their trade surplus began to soar, which in 2004 will exceed 5% of GDP and 7% in 2015. The reorganization of the German economy cannot be reduced to an industrial upgrade of the enlarged Bundesrepublik.

The integration into NATO of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary created a vast safe zone for German investments. The essential part of Germany's recovery consisted of integrating the former popular USSR democracies into its industrial system by putting their active populations, well-educated by communism, to work.

Germany's economic recovery preceded, as we have seen, the liberal reforms of the Labor Code. A bad mind will note that the undervaluation of the euro compared to what a maintained mark would have been subsequently, tremendously strengthened German exports. The explanation doesn't convince me. I have the feeling that, in any economic system or configuration, the Germans would have gotten away with it, simply because they embody Germany, with its anthropological (the root), an educational and technological potential. The same logic always made me think that the Russians would get through this because they embody Russia, with its anthropological (community), educational and technological potential. Today I remain convinced that Germany, once disorganized by the disruption of its Russian gas supply, will get through this. Since the British newspaper The Economist, which always gets it wrong, presented it again (on August 17, 2023) as the sick man of Europe, I am sure of the opposite.

Europe in the 1990s was shaken up by the fall of the wall but, since the 1980s, it has been doing better than the United States. Even before the Second Iraq War, anti-European resentment had arisen there. In the June-July 2002 issue of Policy Review, Robert Kagan published an article entitled “Power and Weakness.” The success he achieved led him to write a small book, Of Paradise and Power, published after the start of the Iraq War and therefore after the refusal of the French and the Germans to participate. But, in the 2002 text, it had broken out in it an envious contempt of the Europeans, whom Kagan said "were from Venus", while the Americans were "from Mars". In other words, Europeans were women, if not women, womenlets. This virilist aggressiveness had its origins in the more or less conscious observation that the United States was falling behind in relation to the Old World. In 2002-2003, it had been more than fifteen years (since approximately 1986) that the life expectancy of Europeans exceeded that of Americans.

Whatever. The megalomaniac delirium continues and grows. In 2004, NATO included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, after they were invited to Prague in 2002. In a coordinated manner, in 2004, these same countries (minus Bulgaria and Romania) joined the EU.

The two laggards will be absorbed in 2007. At this point, EU expansion is clearly a by-product of NATO expansion.

The rush to the East continues. From November 22, 2004 to January 23, 2005, an “orange revolution” took place in Ukraine. The United States plays a crucial role in this. It is not the European Union that is in charge, but them, either directly through their embassy, or through their services, or through NGOs, sorry, OPNG, (pseudo non-governmental organizations). At the same time, the American discourse on Russia is shifting. In The Dark Double, Andrei Tsygankov studied the appearance of Russophobia in the United States. He convincingly shows that the press and broadcast media were the source of their change of attitude. As early as November 2005, a Washington Post editorial was titled "Mr. Putin's Counter Revolution "

A few months later, in March 2006, a brochure from the Council on Foreign Relations appeared with the explicit title: Russia's Wrong Direction. They criticize a “de-democratization” of Russia. But the fiercest article appeared in Foreign Affairs, also in March 2006: “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy.” The United States is presented as so much more powerful than the rest of the world that a first nuclear strike could put its adversary out of action before it can retaliate. As it concerns nuclear weapons, Russia, (a historic competitor in this area), is, of course, targeted. Foreign Affairs is a rival to Dr. Strangelove, this hilarious film in which Stanley Kubrick staged an American nuclear attack on Russia, unintentional of course, but with the help of a recycled Nazi advisor (Peter Sellers), and a crazy soldier (George C. Scott).

Can the behavior of the Russians justify this shift? The crushing of Chechnya took place in the middle of a honeymoon between Washington and Moscow. The bringing of the oligarchs into line, including the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who was involved with ExxonMobil) in October 2003, is on the other hand a factor. Beyond the failure of an American attempt to get its hands on hydrocarbons, the bringing into line of the Russian oligarchs shocks the United States. Across the Atlantic, the oligarchs are in the process of winning over the State. However, I think that the real cause of the anti-Russian turnaround is more strategic in a classic sense: the formation of a common German-French-Russian front against the Iraq war put the American geopolitical establishment on alert, the Blob is in the making.

Even before the start of the war, Putin visited Berlin on February 9, 2003, and the next day in Paris. After the outbreak of war, three joint meetings and press conferences took place – Putin, Schroder, Chirac, the first on April 11, 2003 in Saint Petersburg; the second on August 31, 2004 in Sochi; the third on July 3, 2005 in Kaliningrad. During these two years, a continental realignment independent of the United States took place, at the same time as the German economy extended its hegemony in Eastern Europe.

Far from following France, Germany played a leading role in opposition to the Iraq War. The world remembers Dominique de Villepin's admirable speech at the UN, but Hans Kundnani clearly shows, in The Paradox of German Power, that it was the French who followed the Germans and not the other way around: Schroder had declared that he would oppose the invasion of Iraq even if weapons inspectors discovered secret weapons there, at a time when France still kept its Security Council seat.

 Germany is then a member options open. “Together with our French friends, with Russia and China, we are more convinced than ever that the disarmament of Iraq can and must be achieved by peaceful means,” declared German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder on March 14, 2003.

The main motivation for the anti-Russian turnaround of the Americans was therefore the fear of an independent and active Germany, and especially of a Germany wishing to get along with Russia. After the victory over Saddam Hussein, Condoleeza Rice, Bush's Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, formulated this truth through her denial: "We must punish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia. >> We know that Russia will not be forgiven, that France will not be punished. And Germany will be anything but ignored.

Brzezinski's nightmare seems to be coming true; and Russian gas darkens it further. Work on the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, resulting from a project launched in 1997, began in 2005 and ended in 2011, leading to effective commissioning in 2012. Apart from the very real importance of energy, you should know that gas and oil occupy a large place in the geopolitical psyche of America, just as blacks occupy another, disproportionate one, in its sociological psyche.

During the years 2003-2010, a German-Russian conjunction took shape, with the blessing of the French who, it must be said, give the impression of not really understanding what is at stake. The mental space of the Quai d'Orsay, far from being global, does not extend beyond Berlin, Beirut and Brazzaville.

What the Kremlin is criticized for is less for having made an autocratic shift (official argument from Russia's Wrong Direction in 2006) than for getting along better and better with two European democracies. The brochure might as well have been called Germany's Wrong Direction or France's Wrong Direction or, why not, Europe's Wrong Direction? If autocracy really worried the thinking heads of American foreign policy, a pamphlet entitled Saudi Arabia's Wrong Direction would have been more appropriate.

On February 10, 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin delivered a seminal speech. He declares, quite simply, that Russia will not accept a unipolar world where the United States would rule the roost. We can interpret the invitations addressed to Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, in April 2008, during the Bucharest summit, as being the United States' response to this Munich speech. It is the apogee of hubris, before the reux: the subprime crisis is growing. The fall of Bellerophon begins; the return to earth is approaching for the Washington elite. But it's too late, the gods have blinded those they want to lose and America is too committed.

At the Bucharest summit, by opening NATO to Ukraine, the United States began to dig a trap from which it will no longer be able to escape.

From August 2008, Georgia was the victim of one of the countless promises that the United States could not keep: the Russians intervened in the small republic's quarrels with its separatist province of South Ossetia and instigated its defeat. Georgia loses South Ossetia and as a bonus Abkhazia. America, which three months earlier invited Georgia to join NATO, did not budge. The small republic lost 18% of its territory.

Looking at the map of Ukraine in September 2023, I noticed that at this point it had lost 18-20% of its population (including Crimea) and I wondered if some secret geopolitical law might not predict that all countries that count on American protection against Russia or China are destined to lose roughly 20% of their territory. No, I'm digressing: for Taiwan it could be 100%, for Lithuania at most 1 to 2% (the Suwalki corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad). As for Ukraine, if, as I believe, the Russians' ultimate objective is to annex the oblasts of Crimea, Lugansk, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipro, Zaporizhia, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odessa, the loss would be 40%.

2008-2017: American withdrawal and German hubris (special peace)

American military spending only decreased again from 2010, but from 2008 America was brought back to greater modesty. She attempts a return from hubris to sophrosun, (its opposite according to Socrates), this moderation which derives from a good evaluation of oneself. With the subprime crisis, the myth of an enchanting economy is dissipating. 2008 is also, of course, the election of Barack Obama.

The tragedy of Obama's presidency is that the man's personal qualities were unable to curb the forces of history. Intelligent, very, and instinctively peaceful, he had been one of the rare politicians who had the courage to oppose the Iraq War. Born in Honolulu, he was 47 years old in 2008, and as a result Europe and its Middle East annex do not obsess him like most geopolitician_gerontocrats in Washington, trained during the Cold War. He embodies the return of common sense to the White House. In 2012, he allowed Russia to enter the WTO.

✓He refuses to arm Ukraine. ✓Reaching a nuclear deal Iranian in July 2015, he strives to extricate the United States from the Middle Eastern quagmire. ✓He succeeded in Iraq, which the last American soldiers left on December 18, 2011, but he failed in Afghanistan.

If the United States agreed to withdraw from the Middle East, it is also because from 2009 they regained their energy autonomy. In 2008, the low point of their oil production, it was only 300 million tons; in 2021, it will reach 711 million. During the same period, their gas production increased by 71% and placed them first in the world.

I would be tempted to see in Obama the last of the responsible American presidents and basically, through his morality and his intelligence – let's dare say the word – the last representative of the WASP elite, even if he is only white through his mother. (Against Freud but like Erich Fromm and the rabbis of Israel, I believe in the predominance of the mother).

The American state, however, continues its race towards the abyss, in small steps, through inertia.

In 2009, NATO allowed Croatia to join. 
In 2010, the life expectancy of white Americans aged 45-54 began to decline.
In 2002, I wrote in “After the Empire” that the world was too vast and alive for the United States to control it. 
In 2011, it's obvious. If Americans are entangled in their internal problems – economic recovery and health system reform, 
History everywhere is accelerating, especially in the Arab world. 
On December 17, 2010, the Tunisian revolution broke out; 
Ben Ali fled on January 14, 2011.
On January 3, a protest movement began in Algeria. 
On January 14, it is the Jordanians' turn to demonstrate. 
The next day, the Egyptian revolution broke out. 
January 27 is the start of the Yemeni revolution. 
On February 14, the population rose up in Bahrain, 
on February 15 in Kadha's Libya. 
On February 20, Morocco was also affected by a protest movement. 
Finally, on March 15, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad began in Syria.
On March 17, 2011, the Americans allowed themselves to be drawn into a final intervention in Libya, without enthusiasm.

This is the tail of the comet. The heart is no longer there. Europeans, including the French, more than the Americans, were then carried away by the hype of bombing.

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. Angela Merkel announces, without consulting a single one of her European partners, that Germany will phase out nuclear power. The collapse of American military hubris seems strangely to coincide with another attack of hubris, this one German, and extremely original it must be admitted, because it excludes any military character. It could be described as peaceful, economic and demographic. Germany derives from its trade surpluses a financial power which makes it, in fact, the patron saint of Europe. The geopolitical erasure of France is immediate. The zero religious state of France very quickly corresponds to two presidents increasingly close to zero, Nicolas Sarkozy then Francois Hollande.

Absolute zero (in the sense sociological, which supposes a complete disappearance of traditional values and parties) will however only be reached in 2017 with Emmanuel Macron.

Nord Stream I was commissioned in 2012. Germany's link with Russia is being strengthened. In 2013, Croatia entered the EU: it is Germany's number one satellite (listening post), in post-communist Europe. Between 1989 and 2021, its population plunged from 4.8 million to 3.9 million, a fall of 900,000 people, but by that date 436,000 Croats were already living in Germany. The Greek crises of 2010, 2011 and 2015 show that Germany is in charge; it imposes the vision of a hierarchical Europe, conforming to the ideal of the original family, authoritarian and unequal: Berlin at the top, France at the bottom, Greece at the bottom. Adjutant Hollande specially dispatched financial inspectors to Athens to smoke out the Greek government.

In July 2013, Russia committed absolute sacrilege: taking undoubtedly for the England of the century or Switzerland of the time Nazi 19th century, it granted political asylum to Edward Snowden.

German hubris reached its peak during the summer of 2015, when Chancellor Merkel, once again without consulting her European partners, welcomed more than 1 million refugees, many of whom were fleeing Syria. “Wir schaen das”, she preaches, “We will do it”, Germanic version of Obama’s “Yes, we can” – with one notable difference: when the Germans announce that they are going to do something, they are more credible than the Americans.

The previous year, German hubris had a huge consequence:

Unlike what happened in 2005 with the Orange Revolution, the Americans no longer played a leading role here. This time, it was the European Union led by Germany that was at the forefront of the maneuver.

The Orange Revolution ultimately came to nothing: the alternation of pro-Western and pro-Russian phases continued, Ukrainian anarchy and corruption persisted. The Orange Revolution, however, had hiddenly raised Ukrainian nationalism. It reaches maturity in 2014 and all its strength will manifest itself during the crisis. But it is the European Union which triggers the collapse of the regime by demanding that the Kyiv government choose between it and Russia. The EU is tearing Ukraine apart and giving nationalists from the west of the country, historically linked to the Germanic, Austrian and then German worlds, a chance. It was indeed German Europe which, through its unarmed expansion, forced Ukraine to choose. Without being absolutely certain myself, it seems to me that what Germany was looking for in Ukraine was, in accordance with its new nature as a machine society, an active population rather than just territories. The final economic collapse of the Ukrainian economy, which the severance of the link with Russia had made inevitable, would mechanically release an emigration that Germany, and Russia for that matter, could share. This is exactly what happened.

America had no interest in the whole matter even though Germany, in its fit of special pacific hubris, still counted on the United States to ensure its security. They are, however, led by their momentum, forced to follow, even to outbid each other, under penalty of losing all control in this fundamental strategic zone where Russia and Germany meet, to oppose or to negotiate.

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The Americans have abandoned the Middle East, one of their three poles of external domination with Europe and Eastern Asia. They cannot bring themselves to see the emergence of a Europe that could do without them. When they intervene in Ukraine, from now on, it is not to break Russia through offensive action; it is to hold the Germans and stop the European autonomous politics (and very clumsily), that is taking shape in America, around 2015 it has clearly gone into defensive mode.

Let's listen to Antony Blinken, then deputy secretary of state under Obama, in June 2015: “Both in Eastern Ukraine and the South China Sea, we are seeing efforts to unilaterally and forcibly alter the status quo – transgressions opposed by the United States and its allies” The wording reflects a strictly defensive posture. This however, is of a unique kind because the United States is located on the borders of Russia (in the Baltic countries) and China (in Taiwan) very, very far from their own borders. A megalomaniac defensive posture, one could say, particularly in a country which is now weakening at its center. In 2014, Russia regained Crimea. The United States had not moved. On September 30, 2015, Russia intervened in Syria. The United States still does not move.

2016-2022: the trap of Ukrainian nihilism

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted in favor of Brexit. On November 8, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. The Anglo-American world is entering a state of weightlessness. From the point of view of historical sociology, it is, let us repeat, the year of absolute zero. We will now observe and have to explain strategic decisions devoid of logic. Pure hazards with no benefits. Without being there yet, we must prepare for geopolitical equivalents of these mass shootings which have been increasing in the United States since the 2010s.

I have long looked for consistency in Trump's foreign policy. I had to give it up. He is accused of having benefited from Putin's support, but it was he who, from December 2017, began arming the Ukrainians when Obama refused to do so. Trump provided the Ukrainians with the Javelin anti-tank missiles they had been asking for since 2014. These formidable weapons will allow the Ukrainian army to break the Russian offensive towards Kiev in February-March 2022. Nobody knows yet but these missiles are the key which will trap America in the closing vise.

Under Trump, the Blob is no longer only proliferating, but still disorganized. The neoconservatives fail to identify with the president of “American rust”, who through his proclamations seems hostile to any international commitment, to NATO, to war, and puts their careers in danger. Robert Kagan, Republican pillar, disappeared for a moment, but only to reappear after 2020 on the Democratic side. In September 2018, he published a pessimistic book, The Jungle Grows Back, which illustrates quite well the new state of mind of the Blob, which I would describe as regressive-violent. Kagan once again unleashes his resentment against the Old World: Japan and Germany only became democracies thanks to the American army (this is not false, only Russia emerged from totalitarianism by its own efforts). He reiterates that military action remains necessary but in a defensive mode. We find in this botched book the blind spot of most American geopoliticians:

Kagan denies the economic decline of the United States

There is certainly now an anti-Chinese line in Washington that unites Republicans and Democrats, but it is initially more of an economic nature and will prove to be a failure. The protectionist turn cannot succeed, because America is already too weak industrially and above all structurally a victim of its “Super Dutch Disease”, the toxic agent of which is, as we have seen, the easy dominance of the dollar.

It fails to develop an import substitution industry. In any case, the necessary qualified labor force no longer exists there. We cannot retrain overpaid dentists and workers made unemployed by the automobile decline into producers of integrated microcircuits.

Trump's foreign policy is erratic. On December 6, 2017, he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. For what reason? To appeal to the American Jewish electorate? But the Jewish are predominantly Democratic and will remain so. To please the evangelists? But the latter ceased to exist as a political force. A fad, then? Why not? On May 8, 2018, he announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement and that the “level of economic sanctions against Iran would be as high as possible.” To please Israel? To raise the price of oil, knowing that American oil companies are rather Republican? Why not? We could also explain the sanctions against Venezuela in the same way: they increase the price of oil, for which the United States reached a zero net balance in 2018. But precisely, a zero balance means that the financial gain is also for the country, even if the support of the oil price is pleasant, internally, for Texan oil companies. Zero morality? I’m not even ruling out the possibility that Trump felt childish pleasure in saying “no!”, well done ! >> or “prout!”>> as so many new modalities of American foreign policy. Nevertheless, in a final access lucidity, Trump signed a withdrawal agreement from Afghanistan with the Taliban in Doha on February 29, 2020.

The inconsistency continued until the end of his mandate. He has threatened to leave NATO, but this does not prevent the Alliance from expanding further by absorbing Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

Joe Biden was elected in November 2020. He initially seemed to reconnect with the reasonable state of mind of Barack Obama. American troops will withdraw from Afghanistan on August 30, 2021 (under the agreement negotiated by Trump). The evacuation took place in the most shameful conditions, but we have been used to it, since the fall of Saigon. There was even something reassuring about an old-fashioned American debacle. Biden resumes negotiations with Iran. He is once again polite with Europeans. There is nothing to suggest that he would adopt a more aggressive posture towards Russia. Ukraine's rearmament, however, continues. In the context of decomposition, both state and social, of the United States (let us not forget the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021), we can hazard the hypothesis of a State which is splitting into its various organs – the army, the police, the navy, the intelligence services, etc. –, which now act without control or coordination. The idea of a “blobization” of the State comes to mind.

The United States (or its component parts) are drawn into Europe against their will. The German problem: work on Nord Stream 2 ends around the end of 2021, symbol of this German-Russian agreement that the Blob so fears. Above all, Ukrainian nationalism is gaining strength. The Kiev government is pursuing its impossible, and therefore nihilistic, dream of recovering Donbass and Crimea and re-enslaving (or expelling) Russian populations by prohibiting them from using their language. It not only behaves as if Ukraine were a de facto member of NATO (as Mearsheimer rightly noted), but also as if NATO were an offensive alliance serving its de facto members!

The Russians' mistrust is then fully justified: towards the end of 2021, a Ukrainian attack is in preparation. But, at this stage, the White House is not the sponsor. This or that branch of the CIA, perhaps, I don't know. The fact remains that Washington will find itself trapped, within a few weeks, in a generalized conflict.

On December 17, 2021, Putin wrote to the Atlantic Alliance asking for written guarantees on Ukraine. On January 26, 2022, Blinken responds: “There is no change, there will be no change. >> This does not mean that NATO will attack.

Putin was well aware that the American administration could not accept the principle of guarantees and reveal its weakness by giving in to what was in fact an ultimatum. Blinken therefore did what Putin expected of him: he said “no”. Russia enters the war at the time of its choosing. The Russians had assessed the forces present and decided that, for military and (their own) demographic reasons, they would have an optimal firing window between 2022 and 2027. Russia had certainly underestimated the potential resolve of the Ukrainian army, but not underestimated the very weak industrial potential of NATO.

Kyiv's effective resistance, which created the illusion that a Western victory was possible, was the ultimate tragedy for the United States. The first successes of the Ukrainians turned the head of a Blob maneuvered by the neoconservatives. The withdrawal of the Russians from northern Ukraine, the success of the Ukrainian counter-offensives in the fall of 2022, to the South towards Kherson, to the East in the Kharkiv oblast, allowed militarism to mentally-invade the White House. The dynamic of war had become irresistible, because war is, always and everywhere, one of the virtuality’s of nihilism. The American military reux of the years 2008-2016 was reasonable, but fragile, because it intervened at a moment when a nihilism was germinating, which suddenly, in 2022, began to vibrate in phase with Ukrainian nihilism.

The ephemeral military successes of Ukrainian nationalism have launched the United States into a bidding war from which it cannot escape without suffering a defeat, no longer simply local, but global: military, economic and ideological defeat. The defeat now would be: the ✓German-Russian rapprochement, the ✓de-dollarization of the world, the ✓end of imports paid for by the “internal collective printing press”, and a ✓great poverty.

But I'm not at all sure that people in Washington are aware of this. Let us even pray that they are not, and prove capable of concluding a peace which they would believe only announces, for them and for Kyiv, another Saigon, another Baghdad or another Kabul, and not total destruction.

America's sociological zero state, however, prevents us from making reasonable predictions about the ultimate decisions its leaders will make. Let us keep in mind that nihilism makes everything, absolutely everything, possible.

Doelan, September 30, 2023.

NOTES

1. Andrei P. Tsygankov, The Dark Double. US Media, Russia and the Politics of

2. R. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, op. cit.

3. A. Tsygankov, The Dark Double, op. cit.

4. Ibid., p. 46

5. Hans Kundnani, The Paradox of German Power, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 57-59. Values, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 74.

6. See my interview with Olivier Berruyer, “Germany holds the continent European”, published on the Les Crises website, in September 2014.

7. Emmanuel Todd, “The Coming Crisis Between the US and Germany”, lecture delivered at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in February 2016. I announced the coming of a conflict between Germany and the United States.

8. Quoted by Pierre Melandri in “Americans First: the geopolitics of the Biden administration”, Foreign Policy, 3-2021.

9. R. Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back, op. cit., p. 135.

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