FROM ATLANTIC WAVE TO REVOLUTIONARY CONTAGION

 

"  Palmer and Godechot presented the challenge of an Atlantic history at the Tenth International History Congress in 1955. It fell flat, dismissed by revolutionary historians as a poorly cloaked Cold War attempt to bolster NATO " 

Click here to read the full post:

Https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/from-atlantic-wave-to-revolutionary. 

US: from Nation-Building to all-out War

"Billions spent on the Kennedy School, grand strategies seminars, and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service has bought us an elite that's about to blunder us into a Ukraine war."(J.D. Vance)

In a few days from now, President Biden will host German Chancellor Scholz in Washington. The expectation of Washington neocons is that he will succeed in pressuring Germany to join a pan-European alliance against Russia. 

To be sure, the German refusal to send weapons to Ukraine - and thus help ignite a fratricide war between Ukraine and Russia - makes sense. Germany was right in refusing to join the neocon-inspired war against Iraq in 2003 and is even more justified in refusing to join NATO in sponsoring a war against Russia now.

Unfortunately, France is no longer led by a president as experienced or astute as Jacques Chirac: Macron seems willing to send troops to Romania, regardless of how pointless this is from a military point of view.

Since 2001 the US have embarked in quite a few military interventions or coups around the world, which were followed by a disastrous drive to promote nation-building: in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Ukraine (2014). All these ill-conceived nation-building efforts have backfired miserably. Undaunted, the Washington neocons who have monopolised American foreign policy for the last two decades are now promoting a war by proxy, encouraging the Ukrainians to fight the Russians.

Since 2007 onwards, Vladimir Putin has cautioned the West against pushing the boundaries of NATO eastwards. His pleas went ignored and - at the NATO summit in Bucharest one year later -  the George W Bush administration officially announced the intention of the US to include countries like Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance (these efforts were thwarted by the refusal of France and Germany to endorse the expansion). In 2014, the US engineered a coup d'etat in Kiev, replacing Yanukovich with an American puppet regime that ultimately bled Ukraine dry and is at the origin of today's crisis.

Unfortunately, after 14 years of unsuccessfully calling for a stop to NATO's eastward expansion, the Russians were deliberately left with no other option by US negotiators than to put a stop to this expansion through military action against Ukraine. 

The fact is that the treaty they are seeking to guarantee Russia's security can only be concluded after fighting a war, not before.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, Western intellectuals have elaborated projects aimed at achieving "perpetual peace". Some of the fruits of this labour have been the multilateral institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Sadly, however, humanity has been confronted with some of its biggest and most devastating military conflicts regardless of such well-intentioned efforts. To this day, no lasting peace treaty has been able to be concluded without fighting it out on the battlefield first.

The recent, ill-conceived US nation-building efforts abroad have coincided with a period in American history when consensus has evaporated, the nation is deeply divided and American society itself is in danger of internal collapse. Sure, the Pentagon and the US Defence Department are against a war breaking out in Ukraine, but the neocons in Washington and their supporters in the military-industrial complex want it and will most probably get it. 

As long as the American polity remains unable to expunge from their ranks the neocons putting America's future in jeopardy, however, the string of military and nation-building failures experienced by the US is set to continue.

US Diplomacy v. the Military-Industrial Complex

 The last time the United States achieved lasting peace with its former enemies was in 1945. Since then America has been dragged into an endless succession of regional wars, with its diplomats being forced to play second fiddle to the hawks in various US administrations.

Nowadays it's not diplomats who come up with solutions to solve tensions between states, but the direct or indirect representatives of the American, Russian or French military-industrial complexes, that is - military attachés or secret service chiefs posted  in embassies. The situation arose after 1945 and gradually worsened as the military-industrial complexes in question gained increasing levels of influence over politicians.

Of course, unlike diplomats, the people of the military-industrial complex (MIC) do not aim to settle conflicts between states, but to stall solving them in order to keep the level of arms sales as high as possible.

A recent example from Australia illustrates how toxic a MIC can be for the conduct of normal diplomatic relations between states. Thus, a country like France - hitherto known to have the oldest and most prestigious diplomatic service in Europe - recalled its ambassadors from 2 of its oldest Western allies, namely the US and Australia, simply because the French MIC lost an order to supply submarines to the Australian Navy in favour of the Americans.

The Russian MIC is also a strong competitor to the American MIC when it comes to sales of military hardware.Thus, the Russians have succeeded in selling sensitive military hardware even to NATO members like Turkey. Cash-strapped nations like India are also traditional customers. The huge success of the Russian MIC, however, lies elsewhere. Twenty-odd years ago one of their own - Vladimir Putin - took over the presidency and made sure that no traditional politician will ever gain power in Russia again. The domination of the Russian MIC over state institutions is so complete due to the fact that no alternative power centres have been allowed to exist.

" Russian defense companies do not need to spend money on lobbyists (as their U.S. counterparts do) because key individuals working for them simultaneously hold senior political posts and already take part in high-level decision-making. Thus, Russia’s defense-industry lobbying, such as it is, focuses on access to the federal budget—funds distributed by the government with the active participation of the presidential administration and Putin himself for arms procurement, R&D and industrial modernization programs. " ( Pavel Luzin )

Many analysts and Western politicians have mistakenly compared Putin to the likes of Stalin or Hitler. For a start, unlike them, Putin is not a politician and has never aspired to be one. Secondly, unlike Stalin, he has an excellent working relationship with the top generals of the Russian army, or with the heads of Russia's main secret services like the GRU and the FSB. Thirdly, Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that when his country is backed into a corner, he and his army commanders act as one in pushing back against what they see as trespassers to the Russian security sphere. And finally, Putin and the other top leaders of the Russian MIC take a dim view not only of traditional politicians, but also of the role diplomats can play in solving international crises. In other words, unlike his Western counterparts, Putin is not a politician but the leading PR representative of the Russian MIC.

In the United States, the typical political representatives of the MIC are the  neo-conservatives, the most belligerent of Americans. They are often found in important positions, either in the White House or in the state or defense departments , where they exert a strong influence on US foreign and defense policy. (Two best-known such people are Paul Wolfovitz or Victoria Nuland.)

Even worse, four of the top 5 corporations in the military-industrial complex in the US are run by women , who unfortunately have a dubious reputation for being more aggressive in negotiations than men ...

Whenever the issue of diplomatic negotiations between states  comes up -  such as the planned Biden Administration negotiations with Russia this month - representatives of the mass media associated with the complex fill up the public space with articles describing the diplomatic efforts as being a sign of weakness on the part of the US, insisting instead on the need to send more weaponry to the US' allies.

In other words,  when it comes to extinguishing armed conflicts,  the tactic of ​​the American military-industrial complex is to pour more gas on the fire, in order to be able to provide as many weapons as possible to the conflict zones of the world.

The EU's Übermensch Politicians

 Initially at least, the advent of the EU seemed like a great idea. After two devastating world wars, six nations most affected by them decided to set their differences aside and form an economic union that would prevent further armed conflicts. Today Europe has known almost 70 years of peace, although the jury is still out as to where the credit should go for this. As an historian, I believe that keeping the peace in Europe is mainly the legacy of NATO, and less that of the EU itself.

Over this period, some politicians have conspired behind the scenes to transform the EU's community of nations into a federal superstate. Such politicians ignore the fact that - for better or for worse - the nation-states are the building blocks on which Europe stands. They hope that the EU superstate would in time be able to push member states to transfer most of their sovereignty to Brussels and that a new breed of politicians, as well as institutions, will replace current leaders  and national parliaments.

The philosopher in vogue among this federalist group of politicians is none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's ideas about transcending national politics and building a pan-European polity, totally emancipated from Christian morality and any concept of good and evil, have unfortunately brought to power in major EU countries such as France, for instance, political leaders like Macron.

According to Hugo Drochon (author of "Nietzsche's Great Politics"), Macron is a true blue Nietzschean political figure. An Ubermensch, so to speak. From Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", we all know what the Ubermensch stands for in political terms. Such a politician is animated by "the will to power", he or she does not have any strong principles and they believe that the state is just an overseer of the operations of private companies. Together with a bunch of like-minded intellectuals, this type of politician is basically anti-democratic and believes in a sort of a future "caste society" in which the servile Untermenschen are supposed to produce the goods and services for the new European elites. 

In short, what we are witnessing is the advent of one of the most illiberal elites ever, bent on repressing the will of European national political leaders and ultimately bringing about the fusion of nation-states into the EU superstate. 

Naturally, Macron is only the most accomplished product of Nietzschean political philosophy, but of course there are others sharing these values and a pronounced distaste for democracy. One can easily recognise them by their support for EU federalism, for the primacy of EU directives over national legislation, or by their advocacy for the creation of transnational political parties.

As Brexit has already proved, however, European nations will not put up for long with politicians and EU bureaucrats inspired by a German philosopher who at 45, in the prime of his life, suffered the complete loss of his mental faculties.

A Farewell to French Submarines from Australia

Make no mistake, I was born in Romania, a formerly Francophone country, I hold a master's degree from a French university and I am a great admirer of French gastronomy.

The submarine crisis, however, is overblown. France's neo-Napoleonic dream of becoming top dog in the Indo-Pacific region is naive. The French cannot conceivably guarantee Australia's security in case of troubles with China: only the United States could. What's more, France's diplomatic relations with Australia have been tepid until a few years ago, when Francois Hollande and a misguided Australian prime minister decided to sign a contract for 12 French-built submarines in order to upgrade the Australian fleet. Unlike the UK or the US, France has been a continental - not a maritime - military power. As Charles de Gaulle astutely pointed out to Macmillan, on the other hand:

"the sense of being an island remains very strong with you. England looks to the sea, towards wider horizons. She remains very linked to the United States by language, by habits and by certain agreements. The natural course of your policy leads you to seek the agreement of the Americans because you are ‘mondiaux’ … .”

Looking back in history, one should not forget that Napoleon even planned to invade Sydney in 1814 and to evict the newly-established British colonists from New South Wales. To date, Australians have contributed far more to the security of France during the  2 world wars than the French will ever contribute to Australia's security, now or in the future. 

The Australian government has a duty to its citizens to choose from all possible strategic partnerships the one that best ensures the security of the country in today's tense Indo-Pacific strategic environment. Accordingly, Australian leaders should not feel compelled to apologise for changing their minds and putting their country's interests first.

Should the EU Agree to the Partition of Libya ?

 April 13, 2017

News has it that White House foreign policy aides are toying with the idea of partitioning Libya in three, roughly copying the Ottoman Empire’s former administrative entities in the region. As the “America First” political philosophy seems to have lost its appeal for the Trump team’s policymakers, there is now a flurry of initiatives on the foreign policy front. Needless to say, most such initiatives are misguided and, according to French and American experts, the grand strategy is not even decided upon in Washington, but in Israel.

The idea of partitioning Libya is yet another example of an amateurish approach to international relations which does not bode well, either for Libya or for its neighbour across the Mediterranean, the EU.

It would be useful at this point to remind readers that for at least 50 years before the September 11 attack, North Africa’s Maghreb had been the special responsibility of European powers, especially France, whereas the problems of the Middle East had for obvious reasons, for better or for worse, been handled by the United States. Since the start of GW. Bush’s “war on terror” however, the Americans have decided to enlarge their footprint in the Arab world. Consequently, a new strategic region was created to that end, commonly known as MENA (Middle East + North Africa). The Pentagon’s Africa command started to interfere in the way Maghreb countries were being run, the plan to partition Libya being only the culmination of such meddling.

European foreign policy experts and political representatives should, however, insist on adopting statecraft solutions for Tunisia, Libya and Algeria that are consistent with the region’s past and options for the future without any interference from America’s foreign policy operatives or from the Pentagon. Failing that, this region of the Arab world which has been reasonably peaceful until recently risks being engulfed in the same intractable conflicts that have characterised American leadership in the Middle East.