The empire and the “neo-colonization” of Europe

• Atilio A. Boron 

• Source: Al Mayadeen English

How can we understand that the governments of the main European nations are willing to turn their territory and population into cannon fodder for a war that is not theirs but that of the United States?

In its declining path, the United States is willing to destroy the last vestiges of national sovereignty of its own - mainly European - allies, as well as of those who for a certain time liked to pose as neutrals. It is commonplace to note the dishonorable capitulation of European governments and not only of the weakest, such as Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia. Yet, no more dignified was the behavior of Berlin, London, Paris, Rome, and Madrid, much stronger countries that still bowed to the criminal orders issued from Washington.

This deplorable trend did not go unnoticed under the watchful eye of Vladimir Putin who, in mid-June 2022, in a meeting with young businessmen, said verbatim that “if a country or a group of countries (obviously the European Union) is not capable of making sovereign decisions, [it] is to some extent a colony and has no prospects for surviving in the ongoing cruel geopolitical struggle."

Indeed, how can we understand that the governments of the main European nations are willing to turn their territory and their population into cannon fodder for a war that is not theirs but that of the United States, behaving like opulent but infamous colonies subject to the whims of Washington? A war, let's repeat it, that was meticulously planned by US strategists and military.

This assertion is backed by numerous documents leaked to the press from 1992 onward, which reveal the macabre scope of an evil plan to destroy Russia and create a handful of client states in its immense geographical space that would serve to launch the final assault against China. Because, make no mistake, the belligerence of the US government is not exhausted in Russia; this country is just an intermediate station. The final destination is China. And to achieve this objective, it is necessary to destroy any pretense of national sovereignty, among European countries, in Latin America and the Caribbean, and even in the Far East, forcing, as has been done in the case of Japan, to re-launch the rearmament of that country, something that had been expressly prohibited by the Constitution enacted in the first post-war years.

In this sense, it is not a lesser fact that Japan, the country with the worst relationship between public debt and GDP size (a scandalous 259%) and the one with the highest personal indebtedness in the world, has given in to pressure from the United States, from Obama onward, and unleashed an arms race. As the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, said, “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation: one is the sword; the other is debt." And this aphorism applies, to a great extent, to most of the countries of the indebted capitalist periphery but, in recent times, also to those of the central core of the system.

That is why it is not surprising that multiple signs of growing heteronomy and submission to an unjust and violent "neocolonial order" have proliferated. In the European case, their governments have become accomplices in a crime and in the sacrifice of a people, Ukraine, to accompany the US aggression against Russia. It is urgent to reverse this trend and rebuild national sovereignty because without it, we will not only get closer to the cataclysm of a thermonuclear war, and European democracies will also end up becoming a sinister farce ready to be replaced by a host of the extreme right, or fascist, dictatorships.