Authored by Conor Gallagher via NakedCapitalism.com,
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last week decried the end of Pax Americana and declared that Germany will fill the void:
“The decades of Pax Americana for Europe and Germany are largely over for us. It no longer exists as we knew it. Nostalgia will not help us, and I would be the last person to give in to this nostalgia. This is a reality! The Americans are now very fiercely defending their interests. And that is why we must now defend our interests.”
What were the first acts in defending those interests? Germany approved a nearly $60 billion spending package—believed to be the largest in post WWII German history— that provided aboost to defense stocks, which have begun to come down slightly from their record highs. And on Friday the EU approved 90 billion euros in joint debt in an attempt to keep Project Ukraine limping along.
What does it all mean? Is Germany seriously considering conflict with Russia or is it more subterfuge to push the train down the dual tracks of enriching the capital class while holding together the supranational European project? Probably both—but as the European elite bust out their own countries, run up the tab on rearmament, and do all they can to antagonize Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, when exactly is common sense supposed to kick in?
Let’s start with what we know.
The German political class has been going on about the end of Pax Americana for years now, just as they’ve been talking about rearmament for years. What these discussions allude to is a Pax Germanica taking the place of Washington in the European theater.
Yes, perhaps it should have “stopped Europe cold”, but then, so should have much of the events of the past four years or so. Yet whether by design or folly, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the vaunted German efficiency is a myth.
They keep pouring money into the rearmament black hole while hollowing out the economy and cutting social spending. It was fitting that on the same day the Bundestag approved the $60 billion in defense spending, the government also moved to cut welfare payments.
Merz’s speech was similar to Angela Merkel’s 2017 warning that Trump’s America was turning its back on Europe. But Merz goes much further by arguing that Europe “is no longer in peace” and that only a strong Germany can return it to such a state.
This argument is similar to the much-discussed Zeitenwende of Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz. The Zeitenwende has surely been a turn, just not so much in the way it was marketed. It was supposed to mark the dawn of a new era in Europe and Germany in particular, which would undergo a massive overhaul of its armed forces in order to “deter” Russia and bring peace of course. It hasn’t done any of that. In fact, coupled with a refusal to compromise or even hold genuine discussions with Moscow, it’s made conflict more likely. But it also hasn’t produced much in the way of results for the German armed forces, which are still a long ways from being ready for any sort of sustained conflict (more on that below).
More recently, a report last year from The German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) titled “Europe and the End of Pax Americana” is nearly identical to what Merz said last week. SWP is one of the foremost think tanks in Germany, and it advises the Bundestag and the federal government on foreign and security policy issues so it’s worth paying attention to, although it usually produces quite bland, toned down versions of reports from the imperial capital in DC. Here’s the meat of its Pax Americana Finis report:
Ultimately, the decline of Pax Americana also raises the question of what role liberal-democratic values could and should play in foreign policy. German and European advocates of a values-based foreign policy could lose an important backer – namely, America – in the coming years. As far as the European security order is concerned, the situation is quite clear: the conflict with Russia is only superficially about territorial claims and military power relations; its real cause lies in irreconcilable values about Europe’s internal and external order. From the perspective of the EU and the European NATO states, Europe’s security is therefore inextricably linked to the defence of liberal-democratic values.
Standing up for values outside Europe should therefore focus on those norms, institutions and rules that directly affect the peaceful coexistence of states: international and maritime law, multilateralism and, consequently, the often-cited “rules-based order” at the regional and global level. These principles are also supported out of self-interest by authoritarian states that are not major powers and therefore are confronted by more powerful neighbours. However, none of this changes the sobering fact that without the United States, it would be much more difficult to protect the remnants of the rules-based world order.
Ah yes, the rules-based order:
Beyond the obvious joke of the rules-based order, what is being proposed here? That Germany will keep the fight against Russia in the name of this order (which is code for neoliberal capitalism controlled by Wall Street and the European financial class).
In What Form Is This Fight?
If this is the war Germany is engaged in, it started a while back. And it surely isn’t for the benefit of all Germans. Let us briefly once again recall that the final nail in the coffin of the German economy was Berlin’s decision to move away from cheap and reliable Russian natural gas. Amid the hysteria of the conflict in Ukraine, which is backed by Germany, the response in Berlin has been an assault on the working class in Germany.
While the valuations of weapons companies soar, foreign investors are feasting on the German economic carcass. And the government in Berlin is now committing $35.2 billion in public guarantees, loans, and equity to “de-risk” private equity investments in energy, industry, and advanced technology. This is happening as the German engine of Europe breaks down and is dragging the Eurozone with it. So the military keynesianism ain’t working (it’s a highly inefficient way to boost the economy) while more and more money is being directed away from social programs and into weapons companies and financialization schemes in the name of competitiveness and defending the country against the dual so-called threats of Russia and a retreating America. Nevermind that US troops remain in Germany and that Moscow was perfectly happy doing business with Germany, wanted further integration with Europe, and has no interest in having to go to war with and subdue a continent of 450 million people who are cursed with fanatically Russophobic leaders.
Unprepared for a Real Fight
While the European political class wants to keep Project Ukraine going, longer term their stated goal is to be ready for war with Russia. They are nowhere close. A June report from the Kiel Institute and Bruegel highlights the lack of preparedness. The authors don’t proclaim that Germany and Europe will not be ready to fight by 2030 but consider the obstacles:
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An inability to translate spending into real capabilities and sustained growth in European force generation, sustainment, and military modernisation.
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Reducing dependency on US systems and the overstretched US defence industrial base will be a challenge.
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Cost effectiveness is a major problem.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge is reducing dependency on US forces, which means raising a large number of European troops for which the local population has shown no appetite for.
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Meanwhile, Russia has only increased its advantage since 2022.
It would take an enormous amount of political will, vision, population-wide sacrifice, and even then they might still be far behind Russia but at least able to last more than a few weeks.
Does the current crop of European elected officials or any on the horizon appear capable of anything beyond busting out their own countries?
How about what we don’t know.
Is It All a Ruse?
It’s entirely possible. As we see, there are benefits for capital and its long-held wish to dismantle European welfare states. Beyond that, it aids the expansion of supranational EU power, which has nothing much to offer anymore except fear mongering of the Russian horde.
Living standards in the EU continue to decline as prices go up, real wages decline, and the social safety net is cut, and all the borrowing to juice weapons companies and pave the path for private equity are only making matters worse. As a Friday paper from the Kiel Institute highlights:
Current NATO rearmament plans could lead to permanently higher taxes in member states, according to a new analysis by the Kiel Institute based on a unique dataset. The dataset covers the financing of rearmament and wars over the past 150 years in 20 countries. It shows that military spending is initially financed through significantly higher public debt, while in the medium to long term the tax burden rises.
Spook Alignment?
The fact is we don’t know with any degree of certainty what European governments have planned because they long ago quit paying attention to voters, and so much of foreign policy (and domestic) is nowadays conducted by the spooks. As just one example, here’s the situation in the UK, which is openly discussing continuing its dirty war against Russia beyond the inevitable Ukraine collapse:
And we see Western governments engaged in all sorts of games like fake negotiations designed to trick targets, narrative control, false flags, etc. The Washington Post, for example, just confirmed what was long suspected: that the US pretended to be in negotiations with Tehran in order to help Israel target Iranian nuclear scientists and other officials. And I’ve lost count of the number of stories over the past few years that detail angry calls from the White House to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and tell us a serious rift is emerging between the US and Israel.
With spy games as statecraft, the interests of capital taking precedent over national interest, and crazies running the show, the idea that Europe might try to further “extend” Russia into its own yard doesn’t appear far-fetched—despite their lack of preparedness for such a fight.
For example, if there is “spook alignment” in the West, the plan as discussed by some American think tankers and officials to transform the fight against Russia into an EU project while the US tries to play mediator and make imperial gains elsewhere, looks more possible—if not gaining much in the way of sense. But if the European Blob was delusional enough to go all in on Project Ukraine, what about the larger Western Blob project underway for the US to regain hegemony using oil and AI, which involves strengthening control over West Asia and domination in the Western Hemisphere in order to better confront Russia and China economically, if not militarily.
Even if there isn’t such transatlantic Blob alignment, there exists a great deal of danger for Europe.
Russia is treating the European threat very seriously. As the military buildups continue in Eastern Europe and the dirty war plays out in multiple theaters, the chances of more direct conflict increase. The madness surrounding the so-called shadow fleet with Ukraine (with whose help?) now hitting Russian tankers in the Mediterranean Sea leaps immediately to mind as a potential source of more direct confrontation once/if Moscow runs out of patience. Even if the titans of finance and the EU power mad bureaucrats see benefits in drumming up the threat of conflict, the fallout from Europe’s economic decline will only become more unpredictable and lead to more desperation.
For now, the idea that the Europeans are bluffing and are wise enough to fold at some point requires us to ignore that nearly the entire European political class has already been willing to decimate their own countries economically in the name of this conflict, and wisdom would have been not to start it to begin with. Their actions show that they value the lives of their fellow countrymen as much as they do Ukrainians. If these actors truly believe in the logic that extending Russia will ultimately weaken it (thus far, the evidence is to the contrary) and topple the government, then when they’re no longer able to outsource the job to Ukrainians they won’t hesitate to further wreck their homelands.
They might not be insane enough to send battalions eastwards, but if they can successfully goad the Moscow, imagine how beneficial some Russian strikes on EU territory would be for the effort to burn more cash on rearmament, further scale back social spending, and centralize more power in Brussels.
So as the EU continues its free fall, perhaps the scariest thought is that the political class has already dug so deep, they’re already at bomb shelter depth.
