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Emmanuel Todd On Europe’s Hopefully Fading Submission To The U.S.
This blog has been following the writings of Emmanuel Todd for some time:
In the later one I had quoted a New York Times review of Todd's latest book:
This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat (archived) – New York Times, Mar 9 2024
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
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While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
The Italian version of "The Defeat of the West", Todd's latest book, has just been published. It is the occasion for an interview with Corriere Di Bologna. The answers Todd is giving during the interview deserve your attention (edited machine translation):
Q:You argue that Europe has delegated the representation of the West to the United States and is now paying the price. How do you think this trend can be changed?
A: “In the present state we cannot do anything else. A war has begun. It is the outcome of this war that will decide the fate of Europe. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans would be prolonged for a century. If, as I believe, the United States is defeated, NATO will disintegrate and Europe will be left free.
Even more important than a Russian victory will be the halting of the Russian army on the Dnepr and the unwillingness of the Putin regime to attack western Europe militarily. With 144 million people, a shrinking population and 17 million square kilometers, the Russian state is already struggling to occupy its territory. Russia will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted. Western Russophobic hysteria fantasizing about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe is simply ridiculous to a serious historian.
The psychological shock awaiting Europeans will be to realize that NATO does not exist to protect us but to control us.”
Since the beginning of the recent phase of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, I have argued that Russia does not want to take all of Ukraine but only those parts which, up to 1922, had been traditional parts of Russia before the communists added them to the Ukrainian borderland.
It is nice to see that Emmanuel Todd agrees with this analysis:
It is difficult to discern what the planed end state of this operation is. Where is this going to stop?
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
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This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
Excursus:
The yellow part of that map marked 'Ukraine in 1654' was actually the land of the Eastern Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks. Under threat from the Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, which at the time held the green parts under serfdom, they negotiated the Pereiaslav Agreement (1654) with Russia and pledged allegiance to the Tsar. They area thus became an autonomous part of Russia.
End Excursus
The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.
I have also argued previously that the current hostile German government position towards Russia is unnatural and will be corrected. In his interview Todd also agrees with this (edited machine translation):
Do you think Europe took the final step toward this subordination [to the U.S.] during the conflicts in the Balkans, and especially with the Kosovo issue?
“No, it all started in Ukraine. During the Iraq war, after Kosovo, Putin, Schröder and Chirac held joint press conferences. This terrified Washington. It seemed that America could be expelled from the European continent. Russia's separation from Germany thus became a priority for American strategists. Making the situation in Ukraine worse served this purpose.
Forcing the Russians into war to prevent Ukraine's de facto integration into NATO was, initially, a major diplomatic success for Washington. The shock of war paralyzed Germany and allowed the Americans, in general confusion, to blow up the Nordstream pipeline, a symbol of the economic understanding between Germany and Russia.
Of course, in a second phase, that of American defeat, American control over Europe will be pulverized. Germany and Russia will meet again. This conflict is in a sense artificial. The natural thing, in a low-fertility Europe, with its aging population, is the complementarity between German industry and Russian energy and mineral resources.”
The current situation and the sanctions on Russia are utterly harmful for Germany's industry and the people depending on it. I therefore hope that the process of reconnecting Germany with Russia will proceed as soon as possible. The current government which, for whatever reason, had agreed with the U.S. course on Ukraine, should be punished for the great harm it has caused.
There are a few more bits in the Todd interview. I'll leave it to you to read them.
Foreign Policy: Washington must ensure that “Berlin’s Gazprom era” is over
Foreign Policy, the newspaper of the highly influential Council on Foreign Relations, has published an article that once again vividly demonstrates the long-known goals of US policy, namely to permanently separate Russia and Germany.
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Don’t let Germany go back to its old Russia tricks
How Washington can ensure that Berlin’s Gazprom era is over.
Moscow’s decades-long use of energy as a weapon against Europe became an irrefutable fact in late 2021 and early 2022, when the Kremlin cut off natural gas supplies to prevent Germany and other European countries from helping Ukraine. To ensure Russia cannot use energy to wage war again, it is time for the U.S. to impose permanent sanctions on Russia’s remaining gas pipelines to Europe, starting with existing but soon-to-expire sanctions on Nord Stream 2, the inactive gas pipeline connecting Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
With Europe’s energy imports from Russia now down to a trickle, attention has increasingly focused on other questions—most notably how reliable U.S. support for Ukraine will be in the future. Not only did Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives block nearly $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine last fall and early this year, the Biden administration has been slow to advance aid and is on pace to let several billion dollars expire unused, and remains reluctant to allow Ukraine to strike military and infrastructure targets with long-range weapons.
But recent developments suggest that the next big question mark over support for Ukraine and Europe’s ability to resist Russia comes not from Washington, but from Berlin.
In the years before Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, the German governments under Chancellors Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz pursued policies of accommodation toward an increasingly authoritarian and aggressive Russia under President Vladimir Putin. These included the concepts of the “New Ostpolitik,” a supposed revival of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Cold War-era rapprochement with the Soviet bloc, and “change through trade.”
In theory, these two concepts were supposed to lead to stable relations and even democratic reforms in Russia, with the assumption that increased trade ties with Europe would show Putin the benefits of peaceful relations with Germany and the West. Unlike Brandt, who knew that the carrot of Ostpolitik only worked with the stick of a strong Western deterrent, successive German governments not only let their defense capabilities atrophy but also vetoed NATO contingency planning on the eastern border so as not to anger the Kremlin.
Close ties with a resource-rich Russia also suited the interests of the German corporate sector, which has long exerted outsized influence on policy in Berlin and is rarely deterred by pesky distractions such as national security or human rights when doing business with authoritarian states.
This is not just consideration. For nearly two decades, there have been repeated warnings about Berlin’s Russia policy, the absurdity of which is as obvious today as it was when it was adopted. Despite Putin’s increasingly brutal actions at home, multiple occupations of neighboring countries, and mounting attacks on Western democracies, German leaders have continued to use their tired arguments about Russia to cover up the increasingly sordid business and energy ties they have forged with Moscow.
Each of Germany’s three leaders contributed to this. Schröder signed a highly controversial energy deal with Russia just months before leaving office in 2005, and moved to Kremlin-controlled Gazprom shortly thereafter. He eventually held posts at several state-controlled Russian energy companies, including as chairman of the shareholders’ committee of the Gazprom-backed Nord Stream 1 pipeline project, which he approved as chancellor.
Merkel, his successor, then pushed through another pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, despite the Russians carrying out cyberattacks on the German parliament and a campaign of assassinations in Europe, including one just steps from the Chancellery in Berlin.
tremoved. Not even Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 could stop the project.
In mid-2022, Merkel admitted that she never indulged in the “illusion” that Putin would change by increasing trade with Germany, but she pursued the deals nonetheless. To be fair, Merkel has never ruled alone, and in 12 of the 16 years of her chancellorship, the traditionally pro-Russian Social Democrats held influential positions. These included then-Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a close confidant of Schröder, and then-Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who gave the green light to the sale of Germany’s largest gas storage infrastructure to Gazprom.
Steinmeier, who embodies Berlin’s failed Russia policy like no other politician, is now Germany’s ceremonial Federal President and missed an excellent opportunity to resign on February 24, 2022, after Russia began invading Ukraine. Gabriel, meanwhile, has paid little political price either. He belatedly acknowledged mistakes in his relations with the Kremlin and appears to have reinvented himself as a staunch transatlanticist with top positions at the Atlantic Bridge, Harvard University and the Eurasia Group.
Scholz, for his part, clung to Nord Stream 2, which was nearing completion as Russia’s war against Ukraine brewed in 2021 and early 2022. He refused to even consider supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons, offering instead to deliver 5,000 helmets. Eventually he caved to overwhelming pressure and revoked the pipeline’s operating license just hours before Putin’s invasion.
To Scholz’s credit, just days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he announced a bold reorientation of German foreign policy, the so-called Zeitenwende, aimed at finally confronting the Russian threat and renewing German defense readiness. Since then, Germany has become the second-largest donor of military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine after the United States.
Little remains of that turning point today. Last month, Germany slashed military aid to Ukraine in its draft 2025 federal budget, roughly halving the 8 billion euros ($8.9 billion) it spent last year. Although Berlin’s defense budget has finally reached the NATO minimum of 2 percent of GDP, the German government is showing little rush to increase weapons stockpiles and military readiness. With next year’s federal elections in mind and growing support for pro-Kremlin parties in recent regional elections, Scholz appears to be campaigning as a “peace chancellor” who has kept Germany out of war. Too much aid to Ukraine would only be a hindrance. It is clear that a cut in aid from Berlin would deal a severe blow to Kyiv’s war effort, especially given doubts about Washington’s reliability following the November elections and the possible need for Europe to fend for itself.
While a cloud of uncertainty looms over German military aid to Ukraine, the cloud over Berlin’s future energy policy may prove equally dark. Germany has accomplished the feat of replacing Russian gas supplies in an astonishingly short time, but it would be naive to think that there would not be strong pressure from German companies and across much of the political spectrum to restore trade relations with Russia once a ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv was announced. This pressure would be particularly felt in the energy sector, where Germany has long sought deals in relatively cheap pipeline gas from Russia. Germany’s energy options have shrunk even further since the shutdown of its last nuclear power plants last year.
It is in the interest of the United States and all supporters of a free and peaceful Europe that Germany does not revert to its old Russia tricks.
Fortunately, the United States can help prevent that from happening. In 2019, the U.S. Congress passed limited, technology-based sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the form of the bipartisan Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act, which led to a one-year delay in construction as Russia sought other technical options to complete the project. But the law, whose scope was expanded a year later, is set to expire at the end of this year unless Congress acts. Although rd Stream 2 never came online, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently introduced new legislation that would extend the sanctions.
This should be a no-brainer for Congress. The Senate Armed Services Committee and Banking Committee have reportedly already approved an extension of the sanctions through an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Now all that is needed is approval from the leadership of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which will likely happen soon.
The problem, however, is the White House. In late 2021, when Putin was already deploying troops on Ukraine’s doorstep, the Biden administration lifted the sanctions that had delayed Nord Stream 2. It struck a deal with the outgoing Merkel administration: in exchange for lifting the sanctions, Berlin promised sanctions at the national and EU level in the event that Russia “attempts to use energy as a weapon or commits further aggressive acts against Ukraine.”
Despite clear evidence that the Kremlin has already undersupplied European gas storage facilities and threatened Moldova after the election of a pro-Western government in 2019, no sanctions were imposed under German leadership. Instead, the Merkel administration sped up the approval processes and sent envoys to Washington just weeks before the Russian invasion to lobby Congress to spare Putin’s pipeline. Biden and Scholz, who replaced Merkel as chancellor in December, ultimately stopped the project just before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border.
There is no excuse for a repeat. The era of Gazprom’s dominance in Europe must finally be over, and neither the German economy nor the country’s pro-Kremlin political factions should help to undermine peace and stability in Europe again. And if the Biden administration, which has moved closer to Berlin to the exclusion of most other European allies, decides to oppose the plans of the two congressional parties to extend sanctions, it should reconsider that approach.
After all the sacrifices of the past few years, there is no reason for malign Russian energy interests to use their friends in Germany to sneak back into Europe. And whoever wins the U.S. presidential election in November, American European policy should stop listening so one-sidedly to Berlin’s opinion.
Biden, however, may once again be playing to Scholz’s worst instincts if he seeks to block the extension of Nord Stream 2 sanctions, which are set to expire if Congress does not act. On Capitol Hill, support for extending the sanctions is bipartisan. It is time for Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin, both of whom have less than five months left in office, to strengthen Europe’s long-term security by allowing the sanctions to be extended.
While they’re at it, Biden and Cardin could also propose new legislation that would once and for all ban former officials from working for Russian state-owned companies or their subsidiaries. And they should put pressure on Berlin to do the same. Otherwise, Russian interests will ensure that a lot of trade comes through the pipeline without much change.
End of translation
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https://anti-spiegel.ru/2024/foreign-policy-washington-muss-dafuer-sorgen-dass-berlins-gazprom-aera-vorbei-ist/
Posted by: ossi | Oct 9 2024 17:36 utc | 67
@ Posted by: Constantine | Oct 9 2024 18:22 utc | 89
There is no “projection” here, I’ve stated clearly that the US is the world’s major imperialist power, and that it, too, has had an economic interest in bringing Ukraine into its sphere of influence. Namely, keeping the Russians hemmed in, and the Ukrainian market buying US commodities. Now, that ship has sailed, and the US has moved onto another adventure, which is “bleeding the Russians dry”, which it seems Putin is more than happy to go along with, throwing a comparable number of young Russian lives into the trash heap of history in a shorter time period than the US did to protect its imperial interests in Indochina.
The notion that Russia is not imperialist does not pass any examination of basic facts, which you have provided, of course, none of (the boosters of Russian imperialism merely play counter-identitarian games, calling their opponents names and alluding to geopolitical “vibes” rather than constructing rational arguments – Honzo, to his/her credit, is the only campist in this thread who has shown any intellectual ability at all). The idea that the Russian ruling class, erm, “oligarchs”, were uniformly against the war was not true in 2022 and is not true at all today, as no “oligarchs” in Russia proper speak out against the war (lest they risk “accidentally” falling out a high-rise window, accidents engineered by the pro-imperialist ruling class of Russia to shore up its own ranks).
Note that, unlike our Slovenian friend Slavoj, I have not placed any hopes in the political bureaucracy of the US/EU, which I have called for – in this thread no less! – the revolutionary overthrow of (which I do at personal risk, as the Smith Act is still on the books and still can be enforced). What I have no tolerance for is campism, especially campism which sees capitalist Russia as some savior from US imperialism, rather than an imperialist power in its own right. There’s a saying on the communist left that the only thing dumber than being a nationalist for your own country is being a nationalist for someone else’s. Take heed, sympathizers of Russian capital.
But me, crypto-fascist? I’m not the one leading cheers for the same Russian state that has imposed fascist thought control and abrogated the bodily autonomy of the Russian people along theocratic-traditionalist and neo-fascist lines, or who sees in every rainbow flag the possibility of one’s own castration (I beseech thee, read Wilhelm Reich and act accordingly). The advocacy of the social sovereignty of the workers of the entire world is the only political line which really stands against fascism globally. It is global socialism or barbarism. That is the situation that confronts the global proletariat today (and global revolution has been the aim of communism since 1848, please recall the concluding lines of the Manifesto, comrade).
One last thing:
Typically, no mention about the fact that the KPRF was more vocal on the defense of Donbass than Putin’s own party
The KPRF is not even revisionist, let alone communist, nor are they a relevant political force outside of the happenings engineered by those who control Russian political media. They are the controlled opposition of United Russia, a position that gen. sec. Zyuganov has been happy to keep, as it ensures him some political sinecure (perhaps a lingering effect of Soviet bureaucratism).
Posted by: fnord | Oct 9 2024 18:46 utc | 92
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