What Inspired America's "Drang nach Osten" Drive

 Democracy promotion is used by the current US government to hide the crypto-Nazi nature of its policies in Eastern Europe. This policy is actually emulating Athens' Delian League democracy promotion drive within allied city-states from the V-th century BC. In Ukraine, the US is unfortunately protecting a repressive regime with ultranationalists and neo-Nazis calling the shots.

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Arnold Toynbee was right when he argued that civilisations are not destroyed by external forces, but disappear from history by committing suicide. Five hundred years since its emergence, this is exactly the stage that Western civilisation is going through right now.

It is interesting to note that both the rise and fall of this civilisation have been determined by Catholic leaders: the papacy and the kings of Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century; respectively, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Boris Johnson today.

It is difficult for many to understand what has happened to the US and UK-led West. Why on earth has it come into conflict with Russia? The misunderstanding is justified. Its latest policy towards Russia is not rational, but pure suicide. To quote a famous American general, the Ukraine conflict is "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy".

We can begin by recalling that the fundamental characteristic of the Western civilisation has been expansionism, either regional or global. Anyone who opposes such expansionism - economic, military, religious, or political - automatically becomes the sworn enemy of the West's leaders of the moment, whether we are talking here about the Spaniards, the French, the English, the Germans or about Americans today.

The French and Germans had mostly continental expansionist ambitions ("Drang nach Osten" was the official policy of the Third Reich and targeted Russian territories). The Spanish and Portuguese took over specific regions in the New World, Africa or Asia. The British colonised North America, but also Australia and New Zealand, and conquered India. All these past expansionist expeditions were supported in one way or another by the Catholic Church, which exponentially increased its fortunes and the number of believers.

In our own century however, US expansionism has global ambitions, although outside of the Western Hemisphere it has managed to impose itself only to a limited extent economically, but not from a military or political point of view, despite NATO's large membership. Americans have always been expansionists, their geopolitical thinking being dominated by what historians call the "frontier mentality." They managed to impose themselves on the entire North American continent and in Latin America in the 19th century, but the 20th century was not as favorable for them. In Europe, American expansionism was limited by the Soviets to the west and parts of the continent's centre. In Asia, the United States was stopped by China in its expansion into the Korean Peninsula and by Vietnam or Afghanistan in Southeast or Central Asia. 

The disintegration of the USSR and especially the separation of Ukraine and Georgia, unfortunately gave American neoconservatives the false impression that they could revive - in new forms - Nazi Germany's expansionist policy to the East, this time with them in control. This mega-error is now on the verge of destroying the entire Western civilisation, annexed as it is via NATO to the American locomotive. This despite many American political leaders realising that the era of Western expansionism is over and that its current chances of success are zero.

However, as America and Britain are now led by the abovementioned Catholic leaders, the Western alliance is making full use of age-old Catholic statecraft tools. To illustrate this, think of the massive use of private military contractors who currently fight to implement the US's global agenda, just as Spanish royalty used the conquistadores in the territories of the New World. This transfer of knowhow from the 15th century to the 21st cannot be but Catholic-inspired. These days, the American version of the conquistadores are the bosses of American PMC's, such as Blackwater or Titan, active in all theatres of operations, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Ukraine. This industry is now worth  240 billion dollars. The PMC's largely escape the control of US military authorities, being in the employ of the State Department or the CIA . People like Erik Prince, for example, are the modern-day incarnations of Pizarro or Cortes.

It is a tragic development that the West's current leaders prefer civilisational suicide - because that is what is going to happen if the US continues to fight Russia in Ukraine - instead of pursuing a rational policy of retreat to the Americas and of renouncing global ambitions. However, humanity as a whole may ultimately benefit from the downfall of Western civilisation, as ordinary citizens are fed up with the tragedies caused by the successive imperialisms of the West.