Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Europe Page 1 of 18

Widespread Riots & Protests In Europe & India

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On October 20, 2026

21 Comments

France has been in a long decline. Money is constantly shifted the rich and to pay for it austerity is pushed. Most recently the French government wanted to, again, increase the pension age. This decline shows up in stats that most people ignore, for example, food consumption per capita:

As usual, France systematically understates inflation, so you can safely assume that the line hasn’t gone flat since 2004 or so, but continued to decline.

The war with Iran and Russia, meanwhile, has lead to increasing fuel shortages:

There are currently widespread riots in France. The triggering event was police brutality:

A high school student protested that the public school’s toilet was leaking and full of rats.

The protesting kid got beaten by the police until their mouth was bleeding, and even got shot right in front of their face. x.com/melenchon4ever

Several kids also ended up with their hands mutilated by the police. x.com/neruda57/statu

The peak of it was a kid getting drowned by the Police. x.com/alertesinfos/s

This police brutality awakened class consciousness among all the high school students in France.

> Intel started infiltrating. Some tried to deflect by pushing the narrative that this protest was caused by Muslim immigrants to scapegoat them for the unrest. x.com/abdoulafar7631

Rioting then spread to Spain and Belgium. Meanwhile there are massive protests in Albania, originally triggered by Kushner wanting to buy up a huge chunk of Albania’s seashore. This is so serious that when the Supreme Court ruled for Kushner, the protestors burned it down:


In India there are massive student protests. The government moved 50,000 troops and militarized police into Delhi and set up massive roadblocks. That didn’t stop the protesters, who used the roadblocks against the police and systematically slashed police vehicle tires. The roadblocks wound up actually slowing the police and military down.

The key thing to understand is that provocations happen all the time, the French police have never not been brutal bastards. Like a spark in a forest, it’s only dangerous if there’s plenty of dry tinder: people who are on the edge of rioting anyway because they’re unhappy with their lives.

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This is the start of a LOT more civil unrest unless the US and Israel end the Iran war. Fuel shortages will increase, food prices will jump this year and even more next year, and people who feel like they have little to lose will take to the streets. There isn’t a lot of trust left in the system: majorities believe that the people ruling them don’t care about them, and they’re right. If people believed in their rulers, this wouldn’t be happening, at least not yet.

So all of this will spread. In India I expect that there will be serious farmer riots in the next year, something that India is prone to anyway. In Europe, even after these protests are suppressed, there will be re-occurrences and they will become more serious and more widespread.

It’s always difficult to predict Trump, but the most likely scenario, supported by massive movement of ships, planes and troops, is that after the mid-terms the war will start up seriously again. The US and Israel WILL lose: they don’t have enough interceptors and munitions to win and the idea of invading Iran successfully is ludicrously stupid: it will not happen, and if it is tried, it will be a catastrophe.

But the Iranians have been warning that if there is an escalation, they will hit hard this time, and given how much they’ve increased attacks on tankers, their words are supported by their actions.

Meanwhile the Sauds are getting ripped up by Ansar-Allah. They are completely unable to defend anything from missiles and they’re doing badly on the ground. Egypt has said they’ll send troops, but for “defense only” and I doubt it will make a serious difference. So oil, fertilizer, helium and other resources from Saudi Arabia that aren’t already offline are at risk and there’s no reasonable possibility of fixing infrastructure, since Yemen can just blow it up again.

At the same time China keeps adding new items to its export bans. They’re particularly targeting Japan, but Europe and America are getting hit as well.

All of which is to say, this is just the start. Expect more civil unrest in more countries, possibly including your country. This entire mess has been handled very badly, with an emphasis on keeping oil prices artificially low and not in conserving inventories or making sure that affordable oil and fertilizer get to important sectors like farming. So fuel will go up, food will go up, prices in general will go up, there will be more unemployment and people will be angrier and angrier with less and less to lose.

The correct action would be to admit defeat and end the war, but until the US is under much more stress, that seems unlikely.

Brace yourselves.

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 4

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On September 30, 2026

26 Comments

I’m back again to bury the Biden legacy.

Once again, I have to remind readers why I’m bothering with this when the Corrupt Dotard Donald Trump is in full-on florid psychosis and threatening to annihilate Iran while breaking all records for Presidential corruption.

Since Trump sucks so bad (and yes, I’d say he’s even worse than Biden, and there IS a difference between the kinds of administrations we get with the different parties), why bother with ol’ Plagiarism Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.

There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide, anti-war candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and replacing them with consultant-pliable candidates who are willing to disappear their progressive bona fides, take pro-genocide money, stop talking like a local, and do embarrassing crap on social media.

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s get back to the Delaware groper’s (and credibly accused rapist) abysmal record as US President.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

Part 3 finished out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

This is the penultimate post in the series and will cover Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine throughout 2021.

I’ll come back to Trump’s term because the Donald laid the groundwork for Biden to entrap Putin into a costly and very bloody war in Ukraine, but I’m going to go ahead and rant about what Biden did in 2020 and 2021 that has cost so many Ukrainian and Russian lives.

Tough Talking Senior Citizen Made No Secret of His Plans

I’d written off Biden’s chances of winning the presidency throughout the early 2020 campaign season right up until Barack Obama and the utterly compromised and corrupt South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn conspired to rig the primaries (with the help of all the “moderate” candidates who dropped out en masse to help and Elizabeth Warren who stayed in despite having no chance of winning to hurt Bernie Sanders), only to be enraged and horrified by the 2020 campaign and the dreadful choice between more Trump and obviously senile and incredibly bellicose Joe Biden.

Biden made talking mad shit about Russia a centerpiece of his 2020 Presidential campaign (such as it was) from his January 2020 Foreign Affairs piece:

We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms…To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.

To his Sept 2020 Town Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania:

I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. But I assure you, they will pay a price.

To his Oct 2020 60 Minutes interview:

…the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our– our security and our alliances is Russia.

President Joe Was All Brinksmanship All the Time

Joe Biden entered office dead set on fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Like all neo-cons, Biden’s contempt for Russia knows no bounds, and there’s no evidence he’s ever lost sleep at the thought of the devastation his actions have wrought on Ukraine.

President Joe wasted no time in turning up the heat on Putin, from his February 4 speech to Victoria Nuland’s State Department:

…the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions… are over.  We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia.

To his March 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

You think he’s a killer? Uh-huh. I do. He will pay a price.

Putin’s reply was typically savage, for a playground:

…whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. I wish him good health.

Biden happily reiterated his support for George W. Bush’s aggressive policy of expanding NATO to include Ukraine at the June, 2021 NATO Brussels Summit.

And in July 2021, Biden revealed he completely underestimated Russia and had no concept of what an industrial autarky can do in wartime, saying, “(Putin’s) sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”

Don’t forget this policy was considered so aggressive at the time that it caused Bush’s Ambassador to Russia (and Biden’s CIA chief) Bill Burns to fire off the infamous Nyet Means Nyet Memo, and inspired Angela Merkel to write in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” aimed at Putin.

But that meant nothing to our big talking Joe, who told the DC press corps on December 3, 2021 that “I won’t accept anybody’s red line.”

I spent the whole year of 2021 freaking out about the potential of war in Europe even though no one I knew in real life or online seemed to care.

Gaslit to the Point of Panic

I’d been terrified about NATO expansion since I realized we’d admitted Albania and the Baltic States into the alliance at some point late in the Bush administration.

I was alarmed but not surprised when war immediately broke out between Russia and Georgia, but I was relieved when the American electorate reacted with utter bafflement to John McCain’s claim that “Today, we’re all Georgians” and threatened war with Russia on the campaign trail.

Little did I know that the insane warmonger John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain would become a lodestone and role model to mainstream Democrats by the end of the 2010s.

It was reassuring when Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was “without question our #1 geopolitical foe” in 2012 by saying “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”

But after the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for losing the 2016 election to Trump and the liberal corporate media went into a frenzy over RussiaGate, there were no more reassuring laughs to be had.

Friends, family, work colleagues all turned into blood-thirsty warmongers who saw Putin as the villain of villains, solely responsible for the Trump presidency, and were not shy in calling me a “Trump enabler” and worse for being profoundly opposed to any kind of military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia and the deadly serious and quite competent Vladimir Putin.

Only the excellent Congressional Dish podcast by the brilliant and incredibly thorough Jennifer Briney provided some well-sourced reinforcement of my sanity with its December 2021 episode “Keeping Ukraine.”

So I spent all of 2021 in isolated terror at what I saw as Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin and Russia, using Ukraine as his bludgeon.

As worried as I was, I could never have imagined the full-bore information war that would overwhelm the West in 2022.

We’ll get to that next time, but before I wrap, I need to go back to Trump, for completeness’ sake.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Despite Obama giving Biden, McCain, Nuland, and company a free hand to stir shit in Ukraine in his term, he refused to provide aid to the Ukrainian military, recognizing that Russia would always have “escalatory dominance” in the region.

Trump, perhaps stung by the Clinton campaign’s trumped-up (no pun intended, I lie) RussiaGate bullshit, handed his Ukraine policy over to neo-cons Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and had a much more aggressive policy posture than Obama had allowed.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Trump Gets Himself Impeached

The Democratic Congressional Majority had a principled opposition to charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause, despite the many open bribes he’d taken from foreign countries, but his clumsy 2019 efforts to get Zelensky to incriminate the crooked Biden family with naughty doings in time to impact the 2020 election brought the hammer down.

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Just Let the Peons Die, The Rich Must Get Richer, French Edition

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On July 31, 2026

13 Comments

Sometimes even I can be sickened by the banality of evil:

“Heavy users of healthcare”, aka: the sickest people.

Always it is the weakest who are targeted. Once we taxed the rich to help the poor, now we kill the poor so the rich can afford another vacation property or mega-yacht, or, really, keep up with the Musks.

When the revolution comes, people like Macron need to be charged with mass homicide, and either be executed or sent to prison if (when) they are found guilty.

The West’s rich are in a red-Queen’s race with each other. If you fall behind, you get bought out and even if you still have lots of money, you’re no longer a player in the game. To keep their place in this game they must immiserate everyone else. The other option, to stop playing the game and put in controls over buying out other members of the elite never serious occurs to them.

It’s similar to how carbon taxes are always regressive, rather than massively hitting private jets and private mega-yachts and people with multiple homes. Nope, hit farmers and ordinary people. Certainly don’t really tax oil majors.

The West has only one inviolable rule during this sub-ideological period: the rich must always get richer. Everything else is sacrificed to that goal.

 

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Can Europe Win A War With Russia?

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On June 25, 2026

58 Comments

European elites appear to be preparing for war with Russia. Lots of new military spending, lots of anti-Russia rhetoric, willingness to let Ukraine launch drones from their territory and plenty of provocations like seizing tankers. They’re pretty open about preparing for war.

So, can they win such a war, starting in say 2030?

On paper it shouldn’t be much of a contest. Europe’s GDP is about 8x larger and its population is 3x larger. In principle, Russia should be smoked. Nor does history support “you can never beat Russia”, Germany lost in WWII, yes, but it won in World War one, nor was all of Europe fighting with it.

I’m gong to keep this simple. It isn’t GDP that matters, it’s resources and the ability to turn them into war materials, plus the willingness of the population to fight and die in large numbers.

Right now Russia alone produces more of the type of armaments that matter than all of Europe. Missiles, artillery, drones, glide bombs and so on. It has more oil and more minerals. It does have less population, but Russia’s historically been willing to absorb massive losses to defend the motherland.

Then we come to allies: Europe might have America, Russia might have China.

China is stronger. A lot stronger. Everything that Russia can’t make itself China can provide. Everything Russia needs that it can’t grow or dig up itself can be sent thru China to Russia from China’s African and Asian allies and there is no way for either the US or Europe to intercept all of that.

Nor is there any possibility that China will let Russia lose in any big way to Europe. Europe wants Russia broken up and subordinate to America and Europe. That would be an existential threat to China, and they know it. America can lose Europe and it will suck, but it isn’t existential.

This is how I predicted that Western sanctions would not work on Russia. I predicted it when the war started. Again, because everything Russia needed they could either produce themselves or get from China and even then Western elites were clear that the idea was to break up Russia and that China was the ultimate enemy.

The Chinese would have to be morons not to give Russia whatever support they needed, and unlike the West, China is not ruled by idiots or fools.

Europe can fight a very nasty war with Russia which wrecks both of them. But it can’t win in any meaningful fashion. European elites selling war or genuinely planning on war are either liars or fools or both. Europe’s problems cannot be fixed by war. Keynesian war stimulus will not fix their economic problems which are a result of the fact that they’re falling behind technologically and losing their industry to high input costs, including energy. They have less and less manufactured goods to sell to the rest of the world, can’t force the rest of the world to give them what they want or sell it below cost any more, and have no significant natural resources to sell to the rest of the world. Nor are they big leaders culturally any more, especially as China’s cultural sector takes on the standard great power glow—tons of money and people to work on it, and it must be great because China is great.

If Europe fights a real war with Russia all it will do is drive itself into the ground so it can go back to what it was for most of history: a barbaric backwater irrelevant to most of the rest of the world.

They need to fix their society and economy, and starting wars they can no longer win won’t do that.

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It Doesn’t Matter What Europe’s GDP Is

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On May 14, 2026

22 Comments

Well, mostly.

Krugman shared this chart, as part of an argument that it’s ridiculous for Europe to be scared of Russia:

GDP indicates the value of the parts of the economy which are subject to money. (If you do something but don’t use money, it doesn’t get measured.) As such it theoretically measures how much you can mobilize using money. Back when most people lived off commons, before that was enclosed, and didn’t need to do much paid labor, you couldn’t mobilize much.

But that’s theoretical ability. It’s important, but what matters is what you do with it.

And the thing is that Russia does with it is build drones, advanced missiles, advanced jets and other weapon systems. And they build them in large amounts. Europe’s production of weapons is much smaller, and they’re less advanced than the Russian weapons. Russia also produces lots of oil and natural gas and has a huge refinery sector. They have a lot of rare minerals and resources in general. And they do still have both heavy and light industrial sectors.

Meanwhile Europe is hemorrhaging industrial jobs and its industrial energy costs are much higher than Russia’s.

So Europe may have more theoretical economic capacity, but it can’t translate that capacity into state capability where it matters. Russia is stronger than Europe.

It’s not that it necessarily has to be this way, but for Europe to match Russia it has to maintain and expand its industry, find cheap energy, and source natural resources that are scarce in Europe. It also needs a lower cost structure than it has in general terms.

These are not trivial problems. Europe is pushing on renewables, to be sure, but has some way to go and effectively has to buy those from China. It needs to get resources like oil and minerals from other countries and the closest and cheapest source of hydrocarbons, which it needs during the transition, is far more expensive than it otherwise would be. American oil and natural gas is FAR more expensive.

The other traditional source of resources was Africa: mostly ex-French colonial possessions. France never forgave their debts, had military bases all over and often forced them to sell resources at very low prices. But now that Africa doesn’t need European goods, they’re kicked the French out and raising prices and moving to do primary processing domestically.

So sources of cheap minerals are drying up.

All of this could be worked around, if Europe was a technological leader, but…

Now legacy industry matters. Machine tools. Steel. Chemicals. Stuff that Germany is good at. (Automobiles are dying, because yes, the future is EVs.) But Germany and Europe are losing those industries. And they aren’t producing the industries of the future. Everything they have is basically legacy industry, developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They aren’t creating, mostly, the industries of the 21st century.

GDP only matters if you can use the resources it suggests you have to produce what you need. When it comes to competing with Russia, Europe’s ability to do so is limited. Not non-existent, Germany has significantly increased artillery shell production, for instance, but not what it needs to be.

Without a colonial empire and without resource rich nations willing to trade Europe the resources it needs at reasonable prices, and without a tech lead, What does Europe have?

Very little.

And this is why Europe’s in for a long fall. There’s no easy route out and no one is even talking about doing what’s right. The center still thinks that the problem is that workers have pension and time off, the rising right are complete idiots who think the US is a good model and the left is not, in most cases, in contention. Germany’s AfD will not make Germany better off, it will continue destroying Germany. The same is true of UK’s Reform part and France’s right wing.

GDP is a stupid stat. It conceals more than it reveals. It doesn’t tell you much about the structure of a country. India, which in GDP terms is a great power just lost a minor war to Pakistan. High GDP can actually be bad, since it includes waste, billionaire income that does nothing for the country, and all the money earned in harmful industries like finance and private equity.

Europe’s high GDP isn’t meaningless, precisely, but it isn’t what matters. If it was, Ukraine would have won the war already and the EU wouldn’t constantly be on its knees groveling to America.

What matters is what an economy CAN do. And Europe’s economy can’t create what Europe needs.

 

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Germany Wants to Double Down on Failed Policies

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On April 21, 2026

28 Comments

The neoliberal era, which is dying but not yet dead, has been extremely tiresome for anyone with an IQ higher than a tomato, and even a scintilla of intellectual honesty.

Witness the current German chancellor, Merz, intent on doubling down on the same policies which have failed to work for generations:

“With 450 million consumers, we are already larger than the United States. We must break free from what is holding us back. We are being slowed down by labor costs, energy prices, taxes, and social contributions. We must push through reforms, and overcome resistance.”

My bolding, of course.

So, let’s demolish this. We’ll start with productivity versus corporate tax rates:

 

So, the lower the tax rate, the lower the productivity increase (and thus competitiveness.) This is correlation, not causation, but it does clearly indicate that lowering corporate tax rates doesn’t automatically increase productivity. Looking that this table, you’d assume the opposite.

What actually matters is how much of profits are kept inside the company and used for investment in the business. High tax rates on non retained earnings, combined with high tax rates on dividends and executive income encourage firms to reinvest rather than disburse. The neoliberal story is exactly wrong: high tax rates on corporations and high progressive taxes on income and wealth encourage growth. You want ordinary people to pay to lower taxes, so they buy products, and you want high income people to pay high taxes so they don’t take wealth out of the companies they own and run, but rather insist those companies re-invest.

Now let’s look at wages:

There are some ups and downs, but generally speaking during the earlier periods wages increase at a higher percentage of productivity.

Now there are two important recent breakpoints. First is the tax changes of 2000: you’ll notice that wage increases and productivity increases from 2000 to 2020 are abysmal. Corporate tax rates were dropped from 40% to 25%: if neoliberalism worked, then reduced taxes should have led to more investment, instead it lead to more stock buybacks and more executive compensation, in part, because at the same tiem they changed tax laws in ways that made stock buybacks and stock options for executives far less taxed.

So the freed up money, instead of going to reinvestment, went to shareholders and executives.

They also made it so that investments in other countries, not Germany, were taxed less than investment in Germany.

I want to say that the sheer stupid is breathtaking, but of course, this wasn’t done to improve Germany productivity and ordinary people’s wages, it was done to make the rich in Germany even richer.

The actual strategy which works, if anyone cares, is high corporate taxation, with tax relief if money is spent inside Germany to improve a company’s productivity: if it’s actually reinvested.

So the tax changes of 2000 hurt productivity and hurt wages and made Germany’s rich even richer. Quelle surprise.

Now let’s take a look at what happened post 2020 – a radical change. This is German de-industrialization. There’s a massive inflation shock, both from increased energy prices due the Ukraine war and pipeline destruction, plus inflation from Covid and corporate price gouging. Wages rise because they have to: after years of slowing wage increases, Germans need enough money to pay for housing and food. Corporations have to pay more or people won’t work.

Productivity actually DROPS. This is the energy shock that has caused so much German industry to relocate out of the country or to shut down entirely. It’s not just that China has advantages, it’s that Germany shot itself itself in the foot going along with anti-Russian energy sanctions and not fixing the pipelines.

Merz is in a panic. His actual constituents, Germany’s rich (he doesn’t give a damn about ordinary people) are in trouble. So his idea is to reduce taxes and force down wages.

Never improved Germany’s economy in the past, of course, quite the opposite.

So what will happen if he reduces corporate taxes? They’ll move industry out of the country faster because he hasn’t dealt with energy prices. (He mentions them, but he has no plan.) Reducing individual taxes might allow for decreased wages, or at least decreased wage increases, but if German companies aren’t competitive with Chinese companies, any extra consumer spending from reduced taxes will flood out of the country, and in the long term reduced wages means less potential domestic income.

Again:

Germany companies won’t invest more in Germany, they’ll invest more outside of Germany, including in China, if taxes are reduced without any legal changes to force reinvestment in Germany.

The actual solution is to force reinvestment in Germany thru tax changes that make foreign investment less profitable, and targeted tariffs, subsidies and industrial policy to make German goods more competitive.

Oh, and to end the Ukraine war, fix the pipelines and get energy costs down, though that may no longer be possible, as Putin has indicated Russia is no longer interested in long term energy deals with a Europe who hates Russia.

There is no cheap source of hydrocarbons any more and that situation is just going to get worse, even leaving aside the shock from the Iranian war. So Germany’s ultra-double-fucked. They need to figure out how to build nuclear fast and cheap and double down on renewables, primarily solar and perhaps tidal (the exact opposite of what right wing fools want.)

There’s no easy way out. Reducing taxes without restructuring taxes to force domestic investment will accelerate de-industrialization. Lower taxes on individuals might help lower wages somewhat, but will damage the German state’s fiscal ability at a time when massive public investment in energy is required.

Neoliberalism failed to do anything but make the rich, richer. If Merz happened to want to actually rescue Germany from de-industrialization he’d have to raise corporate taxes and change taxation and compensation rules to force reinvestment in Germany, while massively increasing public spending on energy. Any corporation which won’t reinvest needs to be taxed into the ground, and that money should be used for the energy build-out.

Taxes on the rich, including a wealth tax, should be increased. (No, they aren’t leaving the country in large numbers. Where would they go? China won’t take them if they can’t bring their money with them, and maybe not even then. America is no longer attractive, and the rest of Europe is doing badly too.)

In general, laws need to force Germany corporations and rich to invest in Germany, and make it so they can’t move their resources out of Germany. (Or perhaps not out of Europe.) None of this is ideologically, and thus politically, possible.

Merz won’t fix anything. Instead he’ll make everything worse. If the German hard right gets in power they might cut a deal with Russia, and that would help somewhat, but they won’t fix anything fundamental either.

A complete revision in economic ideology, of the same magnitude as the New Deal is required, and Merz and the opposition parties are incapable of that.

Germany, and Europe, will continue an inexorable decline.

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European Leaders Realize They’ve Put Themselves In A Vise

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On January 20, 2026

26 Comments

It seems that EU leaders have realized that the US can squeeze them, not just with tariffs, but with natural gas supplies. It used to be that Europe got most of its natural gas from Russia, till the pipelines were blown up, probably by the US. Now they pay much more to get shipped LNG from America.

Trump has hit European countries who oppose him annexing Greenland with increased tariffs. That’s not a big deal, but an LNG squeeze would be. It’s not that Europe wouldn’t be able to get enough LNG, if it wasn’t sold to them directly, they’d get it indirectly, just as they have continued to get a lot of Russian hydcrocarbons, but they’d pay more and energy prices are squeezing European (German) industry to death.

At the end of the day Ukraine is not a member of NATO or the EU. Denmark belongs to both. For Ukraine and the US, the Euros submitted to de-industrialization. They also sent almost all their weapons and ammo to Ukraine, and are damn near disarmed.

This policy is essentially hysterical, based on cold War trauma and driven hard by various Eastern Europeans and the Baltics.

But the situation the EU finds itself in is fundamentally simple. They’re de-industrializing. France is losing its overseas vassals, and with them cheap resources. They can’t get cheap resources from Russia and the expensive resources from America are controlled by a hostile and untrustworthy power whom it is impossible to cut a deal with. Say what you will about Russia, but they keep their deals and even after everything has happened if they were to agree to sell to Europe, they’d keep the deal.

Now I want to be very clear about the stakes here. Europe has no resources at scale other than farm goods to sell to the world. It has a very high population for its land mass, and its industry is legacy industry. When you look at tech lead lists, the EU as a whole is not even in the top four. (China, America, Japan, South Korea.)

To put it simply if they mishandle this the European standard of living is likely to crash by half in twenty years. 

A deal must be cut with both China and Russia. Of the two Russia is more important. This is currently impossible because the Eastern EU nations will not allow it and the way the EU system is set up they have enough power to stop it from happening.

At the same time they are essentially welfare recipients, receiving stipends from Germany and France, who are the two real EU powers. Most of them should never have been allowed into the EU in the first place, especially the Baltics, who are undefendable and offer nothing.

Germany and France need to decide what to do to save themselves. If that means changing the EU or leaving it and forming a new association that’s what they need to do. They need to re-arm with their own weapon stack, not American weapons, and in the meantime they should probably buy Chinese weapons, but to do so they’d have to leave NATO or kick the US out of it, which, again, they’re going to need to do anyway, because, as the line goes, “the threat is inside the house.”

If they don’t sort this out and soon, they will suffer a catastrophic loss of standard of living. If that happens they face internal revolution.

The current EU leadership is some of the most pathetic in the world. Trained and raised as American vassals they just cannot understand that the world has changed. It’s not just Trump, Biden was draining them dry too, his administration was just smart enough to, as it were, “boil the frog.”

While the EU still has an industrial base it needs to act to save that base.

As for current tactics, what should be done is simple enough. Counter-tariffs make no sense. Break the DMCA and go after American internet and tech companies which make vast amounts of money in the EU. Force Ireland to cooperate. Let people break the digital locks on American tech, and give them right of repair. If it goes far enough break patents and start producing in the EU. (The US broke Germany’s chemical patents in WWI and basically US chemical industry is based on those broken patents.)

The other step is to stop EU money from flowing into America and force EU wealth to be used inside the EU to create industry and improve tech. The EU sends vast amounts of investment money to the US. Stop that, repatriate as much as possible and get to work with real industrial policy. This will hurt Trump’s real base, the oligarchs, and help Europe.

Europe must end its US vassalage and cut deals with its “enemies” because the US is a greater threat than China or Russia. And if the Eastern EU states aren’t willing to go along with this, cut them loose. They offer very little and are a drain on the actual productive parts of Europe. (Not just Germany and France, but Italy, the Nordics and the low countries.)

The Euros don’t have a lot of time to deal with this, there in severe decline that will end in, not just disaster, but catastrophe.

(And no, I don’t think they’ll do most of this, but there’s value in laying it out.)

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The Tiny Dictate to the Large

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On October 12, 2025

4 Comments

After reading this article at @RStatecraft by @connor_echols I am more convinced than ever that admitting the Baltic States into NATO was the biggest mistake NATO ever made: three miniscule states with three tiny militaries dominate policy yet contribute nothing but acrimony and accusations towards Russia. 

Just read the stridency of their claims towards Russia. Former Latvian PM: “Putin acts the way he acts, and the only options for the West are either to submit or to resist.” Or the present Estonia FM: “Russia’s war against Ukraine is driven by one thing and one thing only: its refusal to accept the Soviet Union’s collapse and its unrelenting imperialist ambitions.”

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Look, I get the Baltics are paranoid about chimerical Russian irredentism towards the three republics. NATO can’t and shouldn’t allow alliance policy to be dictated by its three smallest members, who are tiny, paranoid and are lead by some critically undereducated fools, like Kaja Kallas, who said, “Chinese are very good at technology but they are not that good in social sciences . . . . The Russians… are not good at technology at all, but super good in social sciences.”

I’ll let that one go without comment. The bottom line is tiny states are dictating the policy of huge institutions and nations, just take a look at how the Israeli tail wags the American dog.

We’re supposed to make peace with enemies, folks, not friends.

Dialogue is essential more than ever. Not paranoia.

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