By Yasha Levine, website, 12/6/25
A lot of people out there (myself included) have been scratching their heads wondering why European countries are so intent on waging war on Russia — not just through Ukraine on the battlefield but through sanctions and embargoes in the economic realm. Why would Germany point the gun at its own economy in this way, cutting itself off from the cheap Russian gas that underwrote its industrial base? Why would it turn a blind eye while the United States blew up its Nord Stream pipeline — an act of terrorism coming from its own ally — and pretend it didn’t happen? What’s the ideology driving it? What’s the game plan? What’s the thinking? Is there any? What do the technocrats running policy in Germany (the most powerful state in the EU) think they are doing? It seems so irrational and pointless.
Well, I think I have an easy explanation: These technocrats have no choice. They are not really in control. See, the collapse of the USSR didn’t just take out the Soviet block. It also sent Europe and the entire European project into a tailspin. The entire reason for a post-WWII unified, socialism-lite Europe to exist was to counter the Soviet Union — all under protective imperial wing of the United States. When the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and broke apart and started reverting back to the 19th century, a unified Europe had no reason to exist. There was no external counter-ideology holding it together anymore. No external foe that you could lean your entire structure on. So the more that the unified European project wobbled, the shakier it got, the more cracks developed (I’m thinking here of the Greek austerity crisis of 2009, where a Europe unified to completely fuck the Greek people, their European brothers and sisters), the more that Europe had to turn to the only thing that had unified it in the past: militarism and the Cold War. It had to recreate the enemy and it tried and tried so hard that ultimately it succeeded in actually creating one.
That’s why the seemly baffling attachment to Ukraine. That’s why European technocrats have bet everything on that conflict…why it’s so important to them. They have no positive post-Cold War vision for their beloved European Union anymore beyond a washed [out] neoliberalism that their own people hate. They have nothing. Ukraine is their answer. Their prayer. Their hope. It’s the only that’s keeping them together. But it’s not enough. It can’t stop the collapse. In fact, it’s speeding up the collapse.
PS: This process is similar to something that Evgenia and I talk about all the time with respect to America. The collapse of the Soviet Union also caused a crisis in the United States. As I wrote before, “Americans think they won the Cold War, and that they defeated communism. That’s true. But it’s not clear that Americans have come out as on top of that conflict as they were led to believe. See the truth is that the USA and the USSR were connected — and the USSR and its people propped up America in ways that Americans did not understand. Now that the USSR has been replaced by a pre-revolutionary Russian society, both the former USSR and the USA are going through similar reversions to the 19th century. The processes are linked…they’re mutually reinforcing.”
The only reason why we all Europeans with full energy defend and assist a fraternal neighbour country is its people and security. The European project is based upon solidarity and cooperation. As the people of Ukraine has since long turned to us, we of course help and assist them as a member of the large European family and its brotherhood. This is because of the basic international law in the Helsinki Security accords of 1975 and the judgement from the International Court in February 2022 in the Russian-Ukrainian war which has judged this war attack and occupation as illegal. This is the worst violence we all have seen these war years 2014-2025 since the violence from Fascism ended in 1945.
Since the Greek crisis Europe has really assisted our Greek brothers as good as we could, and the economical situation in Greece is in fact in very good situation of today,
So the replies on your questions are: European brotherhood, humanism and solidarity. That’s why we help each other. And we are proud of it.
“Since the Greek crisis Europe has really assisted our Greek brothers as good as we could, and the economical situation in Greece is in fact in very good situation of today”
The above comment is laughable. As Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out, the EU threat to Greece was pure blackmail. The only “assist” was to the central banks and the neoliberal project. EU actions were made to keep the debt bubble inflating while imposing severe austerity on their “Greek brothers”. Brussels cancelled the democratic attempt by Greeks to determine an economic path out of debt servitude and the privatization of everything in Greece. This debt bubble will eventually pop — as Michael Hudson points out: “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid.” The only question is how much pain will be suffered before the people revolt against neoliberal austerity project to enrich the investor class.
If you count the treatment towards Greece as “help” then you must be using a different dictionary to the rest of us. Talk of solidarity and brotherhood is risible, frankly.
Yasha Levine, your article is very insightful as I cannot for the life of me understand why Europe doesn’t united with Russia and help bring down “The Rules Based Order”? Mind boggling!
The people are sheeple, and the leadership that shepherds them, down to the local PTA, has thoroughly captured by American soft power control of who gets promoted. It is a non-virtuous self-reinforcing cycle ala Chomsky/Media.
They, Wall Street, have done an American two party dictatorship style process of exerting control over all the political, media, and economic processes. Even when a grass root organization somehow gains traction, the USA will have it taken behind the shed and shot dead.
For nearly 25 years I’ve often stated or written that the worst thing to happen to the American Working Class was the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block. The 2nd worse thing was the divorce between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
Levine’s analysis is spot-on — the fake Russian threat to Europe is the only thing keeping the EU project together. The three blind mice (Merz, Macron, Starmer) will be voted out as soon, and the EU’s neoliberal “make banking great again” domination of Europe will collapse as new leaders put their country’s sovereignty, autonomy and social welfare ahead of banking profits and profits to the US military industrial complex. The string of perfidious European leaders, whose loyalty is clearly to the US empire, has been engineered by groups like the World Economic Forum (see Ernest Wolff’s book) which trains the “Young Global Leaders” to be loyal to the investor class which relies on the US empire to maintain the capitalist economic bubble that is pillaging the planet.
BTW – To understand the role of tech billionaires, and their CIA backers, in the struggle to keep the US empire in place, including their at-home efforts to create a surveillance state in order to keep the Western public line, I suggest Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley”. By the end of the book one is only left contemplating whether these tech billionaires are sociopaths or psychopaths — the difference being rather small.
Two world wars were fought to keep Germany and Russia down and to prevent them becoming allies. With Germany’s technical know how and Russia’s vast resources, the thought of Germany and Russia teaming up was too much to bear for certain people (eg Mackinder, Brezinski). Judging by Nordsteam it evidently still is!
That has been my thinking over the past five years. Especially the Anglo-American involvement. And yet in this day and age I see think tanks acting as if e.g. the current energy crisis in Germany were self-inflicted.
I make it a point that these “leaders” who make these apparently suicidal decisions were groomed by the USA to carry them out on purpose – whether those think tanks and their followers even listen is another matter.