US Strategy Is To Fight against Strengthening European Politics and To Weaken Russia

As long as the U.S. continues to impose its “imperial” strategy on the confetti European states, which are clinging to their own national sovereignty, the European Union will have no strategic credibility – to the point of becoming a new Holy Roman Empire, the symbol of total political inefficiency.

In 1994, at the end of my command of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia, I came back home a European fully persuaded and inoculated against the type of flag-waving nationalism often tinged with fanaticism, chauvinism or racism, all wrapped up only recently in a true populist cancer on our democracies.

Today, the EU isn’t doing well. It’s breaking apart not only because it lacks political ambition, but is also doing so as memories of a modern-day Thirty Years’ War (1914-1945) gradually become more distant. That period marked the end of four centuries of predominance by European powers, and saw the emergence of a global nuclear superpower: the United States.

From 1945 to 1990: Common Interests

Faced with the ideological threat of communism, and while under U.S. protection, some European statesmen thought it was time for the Western European states to make peace, and for France and Germany to bury the hatchet. That is how, little by little, they succeeded; not for the purpose of creating a unified Europe – which would have been plenty on its own – but to create a peaceful part of the continent within a vast single market which would have many benefits, but alas, also many weaknesses.

From 1945 to 1990, the “vital” interests of the United States and Western Europe aligned. This “Cold War” period of alignment between NATO members and the Warsaw Pact states fortunately ended without armed conflict, thanks to successful nuclear talks between the USSR and the U.S. after the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and with the economic and social collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Humiliating a Weakened Russia

The last decade of the 20th century turned the situation in Europe upside down.

On the one hand, the United States believed it had become the superpower destined for world domination. In Europe, in particular, instead of promoting a slightly more stabilized continent between the Atlantic and the Urals, and with no response from European politicians who were only thinking of their own national sovereignty, the United States never stopped humiliating Boris Yeltsin’s very weakened Russia. This Russia was no longer the USSR, but remained a great nuclear power and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. And then Vladimir Putin came to power. But that’s another story.

On the other hand, starting in 1990, instead of uniting further, Europe went from failure to failure on the geopolitical front. Today, all one has to do is look at a world map to realize that the EU has become a new Holy Roman Empire, a symbol of total political inefficiency.

The Finistère of Eurasia*

A map of Eurasia – from the eastern boundary of the Chinese coast to the western boundary of the Pointe du Raz in Brittany, France – well illustrates that everything west of a line going from Helsinki to Istanbul – basically, the EU – justifies the name “Finistère of Eurasia” given to it by the geostrategist Gérard Chaliand. And instead of uniting, instead of ceasing its pestering of Russia to come under the European roof so dear to Mikhail Gorbachev and urging Russia to move toward a continental model as a peaceful power both prosperous and inviting, this Finistère has (once again) become, over the years, a mosaic of confetti-states clinging to their national sovereignty like a drowning man to his life preserver. Some of the confetti states still have the illusion – for how long? – that they represent a certain power: Germany for its industrial capabilities, France for its military, nuclear, and cultural capabilities. But the current big trend is enthusiasm for the sub-confetti states, of which Belgium is, sadly, one – but not the only – example.

Defense and Security Policy

So should we lose hope in the EU? A young president, Emmanuel Macron, has just become head of state in France, and he is convinced that something must be done to get the EU out of its current rut. Macron enjoys a political authority that unfortunately, Angela Merkel has somewhat lost in part in Germany, even though the new “Grand Coalition” should, in the European plan, help the French-German duo decide to move forward with those who want something other than subsidies. Numerous sensible European politicians are also of the opinion – in their words, at least – that the EU must think more about its defense and security policies. But what does such a wish actually mean?

Nicholas Spykman, one of the fathers of geopolitics in the United States, wrote in 1942, in the middle of the war, “A federal, united Europe would become so strong, it would endanger our stranglehold on the Atlantic and our dominant position in the Western world.”**

Control of the Pacific and the Atlantic has been a constant in American strategy since Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s writings at the end of the 19th century. Caroline Galactéros, in a remarkable little book, recalls that all presidents of the United States, “whatever their political stripes,” follow the same guiding principle in strategy, taking into account:

1) the hunger of the American military-industrial system;

2) the fight against any European political and strategic strengthening;

3) the political consensus about the necessary weakening of Russia to perfect the control of Eurasia, etc.

I don’t know what still needs to be written to confirm that today, it is useless to talk about European defense, much less a European army. This will continue to be the case as long as the EU limits itself to being a “Finistère – Holy Roman Empire,” for a European strategy actually predicates a psychological and intellectual split from NATO in its current form. And as long as the U.S. imposes its “imperial” strategy (René Aron)*** on the confetti pieces of the Finistère of Eurasia, the EU will have no strategic credibility.

Conflict of Climatic Origins

Incidentally, everything is against the EU:

1) Its own attitude: European states still don’t agree on anything in this domain, and their collective policy of sanctions against Russia even goes against the EU’s own vital interests;

2) Demography is a disadvantage for Europe, the only continent where the prospects for 2050 predict stagnation in the number of inhabitants, even a decrease in some countries, including Russia. Europe is gradually becoming an “old” continent whose health care expenditures will explode, hardly a situation favorable to an effective, forward-thinking strategy; and

3) The EU rejects a common reception policy for migrants that the consequences of climate imbalance, the main threat of the 21st century for the entire planet, will inevitably affect, posing the risk of conflict that technology will not be able to resolve.

There is still hope that the nuclear discussion will continue to function correctly to avoid an extreme military increase, which would undoubtedly provoke a mortal “malfunction” for Homo sapiens.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, as the first encouraging sign of real progress in European defense policy, some are fighting arduously to acquire an American fighter jet. Most likely to be in, or to stay in, the European cockpit, as our prime minister likes to say!

The author is a lieutenant general and former commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia.

*Editor’s note: Finistère is a department of France in the extreme west of the Brittany region.

**Translator’s note: Although accurately translated, the remarks quoted above could not be independently verified.

***Editor’s note: The author may have been referring here to Raymond Aron, a French political scientist who wrote about American imperialism during the Cold War era.