Eurasia Press & News
Mere survival may become more urgent than Macron’s speculative musings on transforming the EU into a third force.
The Washington Post tells us that President Macron’s getaway to China sparked a European ” outcry “. That’s what it seems. Although at first glance his geostrategic recommendation that Europe should keep an equal distance from the American juggernaut and the Chinese colossus is hardly very radical, the fact remains that Macron’s underlying motivations do not are not the same. Yet whatever Macron’s underlying motives, his comments appear to have touched raw nerves. He is accused of what amounts to “treason”. The betrayal of the United States curiously – rather than a betrayal of ordinary Europeans.
This irritation may reflect our habitual love of comfort, normalcy, and our desire to “keep it quiet.” This penchant for normality freezes people into a state of status quo, as if an inner voice is creeping in and saying, “ It’s going to be okay one way or another. It will pass and things will go back to what they were . ” Everything must change so that everything remains the same “, according to the famous quote pronounced by Tancred, the beloved nephew of Prince Fabrizio Salina in ” The Leopard “.
On the other hand, Malcom Kyeyune, from Sweden, detects a deeper change, an agony within European Atlanticism:
“ The war fever that engulfed Europe in the summer of 2022 made any discussion impossible. Ritual denunciations of “Putinists” and even alleged Russian spies have become commonplace on social media, and clamors about the vast power of the West and NATO have become mandatory. Once again, enormous pressure was exerted so that nothing was noticed:
The only acceptable position was maximalist: To suggest that a peace deal would likely involve reaching some sort of compromise made you look like a “Putin loyalist” and a “Russian agent.”
But once again, the fever begins to fall. Few people still talk about Ukraine on social networks; most people prefer to pretend that nothing happened. The rants disappeared, replaced by a sullen, bitter silence. People aren’t quite ready to admit that the sanctions were a failure and that the West overplayed, but many know that these things are true and the economic and political consequences of these failures are only beginning to be felt. . »
Does Macron perceive these “vibrations”? That is to say the self-delusion, by which we feel the illogicality of carrying out our daily life with “darker and darker clouds” which are getting closer and closer, without ever asking ourselves why the Europe is deindustrialising, why its industry is relocating to the United States or China, or why Europeans have to import liquefied natural gas at three or four times its selling price.
Are Europeans then beginning to notice certain things? Are they wondering how the economic paradigm has been so drastically eclipsed, or how the mad fervor for the nascent wars against China and Russia has fallen?
Macron’s equidistant prescription is entirely aspirational. He gives it no substance; it does not explain how strategic autonomy would be achieved, nor does it address the issue of the “empty stable”. There is no point in closing the stable door now that the “horse of autonomy” has long since run away; he “ran away” with the fever of the 2022 war. So there we are. Can the horse of autonomy still be brought home? It seems unlikely.
Much of the “uproar” no doubt reflects the avoidance of uncomfortable confessions, as things begin to be noticed again. Macron at least opened the question (as sensitive as it is); he is currently an isolated case, but he is not the only one.
The head of the EU Council, Charles Michel, said in an interview: ” Some European leaders would not say things the same way as Emmanuel Macron “, he added: ” I think that ‘a number of them really think like Macron ‘. SPD chairman in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, meanwhile said that ” Macron is right ” and that ” we must be careful not to become part of a major conflict between the United States and China “.
Many revolutions are preparing all over the world. And Macron asks what is the place of the EU, which is very good. But he gives no answer. To be honest, at this point there may not be any, yet.
Equidistant from the United States? Does Macron mean “equidistant” from the neoconservative strategy of maintaining US global hegemony through aggressive projections of military power and sanctions? If so, this should be clarified.
Indeed, the United States is also experiencing a quiet revolution, and Macron’s prescription may need to be nuanced should the war in Ukraine mark the final collapse of the neoconservative’s short-lived “American century.” Last week, Western media reports took on a tone of desperation. Since the leaks from the intelligence services, it is the apocalypse, gloom and panic. The leaks made the inconvenient truths inescapable (even to those who preferred not to notice) that the vast “optical” construct that is the Ukrainian project is slowly unraveling.
The “Save Ukraine for Democracy” project was supposed to support the legitimacy of the US-led world order. In fact, Ukraine has become the ” harbinger of a terminal crisis “, suggests Kyeyune.
The political path likely to be followed in the United States, however, is far from obvious. It is possible, however, that today’s ” Other Project “, the reversal “project” of the “Western class war”, will also collapse in the crisis (in this case) of the American societal schism. . The woke “project” is unlikely – a strange neo-Marxist construction, in which an “oppressed class” is actually made up of the elite of affirmative action intellectuals (who claim the title of repentant oppressors), while the Americans, who work in manufacturing and in the low-wage service sector, are conversely denigrated as white supremacist oppressors and anti-diversity racists.
China is also in the midst of a transformation: It is preparing for the war that the “one-party” American hawks are increasingly demanding. Meanwhile, its “political warfare” strategy is to use geopolitical mediation, backed by a powerful economy, as a non-intrusive way to pursue Chinese operational art. This project has already reshaped the Middle East and its geostrategic appeal extends to the whole world.
President Putin’s slow, long-term practice of political warfare (as opposed to China’s operational “art”) is clearly designed with the consideration that the slowly building disillusionment in the West with awakened liberalism requires time in the chrysalis. From the Russian perspective, this Sun Tzu approach (defeating the Western paradigm without fighting it militarily) calls for “economy of military enforcement” within the framework of a global and holistic political “war”.
The Russian approach is therefore perhaps more complex and more revolutionary: It encompasses reform and efficiency in all areas (cultural, economic and political) of Russian society.
China rejects the explicit goal of forcing behavioral change on the West, but for Russia, its security depends on the United States fundamentally changing its military posture in Europe and Asia. This goal requires both patience and the use of all complementary means at Russia’s disposal (i.e. the effective “militarization” of non-military tools such as financial and energy) to defeat the enemy – while remaining at a certain threshold, just before total war.
The West, on the other hand, conceptually separates military means from political means, which perhaps explains why Western analysts mistakenly consider that Russia’s “switch” from military procedures to diplomatic or financial pressure reflects a deficiency or a failure of the Russian military machine. This is not the case. Sometimes it’s the violins that play, other times it’s the cellos. And sometimes it’s time for the bass drums to sound; it’s up to the conductor to decide.
Julian Macfarlane said Russia had started a real “revolution”, which China is now joining. To make his point, Macfarlane adapts Thomas Jefferson’s speech ” We hold these truths to be self-evident… ” and glosses it by saying ” …that all states have a right equal to sovereignty, undivided security and full respect ”. He contextualizes this by referring to Jefferson’s emphasis on the tyranny of the British Crown, while Putin formulates his doctrine of multipolar order in opposition to the hegemonic tyranny of the “rulers” of the United States.
Xi Jinping does not mince his words: “ All countries, regardless of their size, power and wealth, are equal. The right of peoples to independently choose their path of development must be respected, interference in the affairs of other countries must be resisted, and international equity and justice must be upheld. Only the person wearing the shoes knows whether they fit or not .”
This is a doctrine that enjoys worldwide support. The EU would be ill-advised to ignore its attractiveness.
So back to Macron and the European Union’s equidistant concept of “strategic autonomy”: It is difficult to see what space could constitute middle ground between the homogeneous “hegemony of rules” and the Sino-Russian declaration of “rights heterogeneous nationals. It will be one or the other (with perhaps a small “in-between” possible, if the United States abandons its dogma of “with us; or against us”).
Similarly, Macron warns the EU against the extraterritorial reach of the US dollar (and therefore sanctions against third countries).
Yet the EU cannot escape the US dollar. The euro is its derivative.
Europe has few stand-alone defense equipment manufacturing infrastructures. NATO is the political and military framework within which the EU operates. How to escape from a NATO framework which is so closely linked to the political framework of the EU?
The EU is deeply divided over its future: Macron wants more strategic autonomy for Europe (and Charles Michel says this is supported by quite a few member states), while Poland, the Baltic states and some others want more USA and more NATO, and a continuous war to destroy Russia. Poland proved to be a vocal critic of Western Europe, which was seen as too soft on the Kremlin .
Indeed, the war in Ukraine ushered in a sort of geopolitical shift in Europe, writes Ishaan Tharoor, shifting ” NATO’s center of gravity ” – as Chels Michta, a US military intelligence officer recently put it – far from its traditional anchorages in France and Germany, and eastward to countries such as Poland, its Baltic neighbors and other former Soviet republics. In Central and Eastern Europe, wrote Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial writer for Le Monde newspaper , ” the weight of history is stronger […] than in the West, the traumas are fresher and the return of tragedy is felt with greater acuity ”.
The EU is also deeply divided over structure: Warsaw, nervous ahead of general elections due this fall, is fostering anti-German paranoia. Its propaganda suggests that Polish opposition politicians are secret agents in a German plot to take over the EU and impose the West’s degenerate permissiveness on heterosexual Catholic Poland – a “bastion of Western Christian civilization” – unlike Brussels, which is seen as a “Germanized” conspiracy to nullify the right of independent nations to make their own laws.
Jarosaw Kaczyski, leader of the PiS party, plays with an alternative future for Europe. It would be a Europe of fatherlands, almost on the model of de Gaulle: an alliance of fully sovereign nation-states, within NATO but independent of Brussels, which would include Great Britain after Brexit, rather than just current EU members. (There is no third EU “empire” here).
In an important speech, the Polish Prime Minister stressed that the time had come to shake up the status quo in the West and to deter those who, in Brussels, would like to “create a superstate ruled by a small elite. In Europe, nothing can protect nations, their culture, their social, economic, political and military security better than nation states ,” Morawiecki said . “ The other systems are illusory or utopian ”.
Elections are due to take place this fall in Poland and polls suggest the outcome will be close.
It seems that Macron has opened a veritable Pandora’s box. Maybe that was his intention, or maybe he didn’t care, his objective being above all national: to shape a new image in the context of a changing and turbulent French electoral landscape.
Either way, the EU is caught in a whirlwind of geopolitical change at a time when it faces the possibility of a banking crisis, high inflation and economic contraction. Mere survival may become more urgent than Macron’s speculative musings on transforming the EU into a third force.
