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LudwigF's avatar

Thank you for sharing your interesting and informative writings.

I find this all very deeply depressing. How has it come to pass that we in the West are nowadays ‘led’ by such incompetent, cowardly, stupid, ignorant, mendacious, depraved, and corrupt politicians?

They do truly seem to me to epitomise the very worst elements in our sadly fractured societies.

I suppose we get the leaders that we deserve, but I don’t know what I or my friends have done to deserve this lot.

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Simon Hodges's avatar

All important history but this is missing some very key and world changing historical details. One aspect, which I will explain shortly is how much the EU and US relationship has changed since 2003. Whilst Ian's article deals with the expansion of NATO then he fails to point out that this expansion has taken place in lock step with the expansion of the EU. Its almost as if that when eastern european countries joined NATO then they were also given automatic entry to the EU in a kind of buy one get one free offer. In 2025 it is very hard to distinguish between NATO and the EU. They are both headquartered in Brussels and one can see in terms of characters like Stoltenberg and Rutte that there is a revolving door between EU political leaders and NATO leadership. The net result of this has been that in a very strange way the EU have seemed to have morphed into the unquestioning vassals of the US and no-one really seems to know why and how this occurred?

Worse still, this has all been very detrimental to the EU. In 2000 it was a union of strong economies but in its and NATO's expansion, it was forced to absorb and subsidize a great many failed ex-Eastern block countries. This becomes most apparent in the fact that despite its huge expansion in terms of member countries and population - that the EU's share of global GDP has tanked in the subsequent years. The only 'benefit' of admitting the Eastern countries was that they all fled their countries for jobs in the old EU which did nothing but drive down working class wages in the original EU members. This also had a negative impact on the Eastern countries. This is a good article from 2017 outlining such issues.

http://web.archive.org/web/20180925022932/https://journal-neo.org/2017/06/25/second-tier-eu-states-are-barely-holding-on/

All this recent history aside we have to go back and evaluate what the EU's options actually were before all this happened and assess how different the world and the EU could have been if they had followed the right path.

In order to do this we need to go back to 2003 and the proposed invasion of Iraq and the EU's response to it in terms of their being a coalition of the unwilling to engage in Blair and Bush's Neocon adventures. The following in from the Irish Times but much of the coverage seems to have been memory holed ever since.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/russia-france-and-germany-issue-joint-declaration-on-iraq-1.348467

Basically, in 2003 France, Germany and Russia made a joint declaration condemning the proposed invasion of Iraq. This is important in that the 3 countries effectively became a power block of 290 million people coming together which directly contravened and challenged unipolar aspirations of the Wolfowitz doctrine from February 1992 and the Project for a New American Century of 1997.

In order to understand how this went down in London and Washington at the time then you need to read Tony Blair's declassified letter to George W. Bush from March 2003 'The Fundamental Goal'.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160804020601/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/244166/2003-03-26-note-blair-to-bush-26-march-2003-note-the-fundamental-goal.pdf

This is a very illuminating document from Blair in that it highlights in his statement about the 'so called right' that he was essentially a Neoliberalist and Neoconservative who saw no difference between his own political and economic views and those of the Bush administration of the time which was chock full of hard core Neoconservativees: 25 of whom were signatories to the PNAC of 1997.

https://powerbase.info/index.php/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

What is also significant in Blairs letter in not only how the US and UK were bullying, bribing and generally threatening the UN members to get behind the second resolution for the invasion of Iraq but how he also identified the urgent need to dismantle the coalition of the unwilling that France, Germany and Russia constituted at the time. This effectively sealed Russia's fate and it became the enemy of the US once again and the almost immediate target of colour change revolutions and other regime change operations with the US falsely leaking information to France and Germany that Putin and Russia were seeking to re-establish the Soviet Union and invade Europe.

The EU completely fell for all of this. Back in 2003 the smartest move the EU could have ever made was to leave NATO and bring Russia into the EU as a fully fledged member. Russia is the largest country in the world with the largest amount of natural resources of every kind whilst Europe possesses virtually nothing in terms of resources other than notional timber and coal which is of very little value in the Net Zero world. If this had happened it would have made Europe by far the strongest and wealthiest continent in the world and the Euro would likely have replaced the $dollar as the world's reserve currency. Anyone who knows the Machiavellian nature of US geopolitics since 1945 and the real history of the CIA and its regime change operations around the world since 1947 will see how this new Europe with Russia at its heart was never going to be allowed to happen. The rest I'm afraid folks is the unfolding of US Machiavellian foreign policy which has directly led to the demise and deindustrialization of Europe.

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