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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green

What follows is the English translation of the introduction I wrote for the book.

Since the early 2010s — that is, since the so-called euro crisis and the economic and social upheavals that followed — an extensive critical literature on the European Union, and in particular on monetary union, has emerged, especially in Italy, to which I can claim to have made my modest contribution. Yet almost all of this analysis has focused on the institutional characteristics and the economic, political and social implications of the European integration process (and of monetary unification in particular): on the way in which the progressive transfer of ever-larger shares of sovereignty — up to and including monetary sovereignty, the cornerstone of state independence — from the national to the supranational level, combined with the adherence to a structurally technocratic and anti-democratic political-institutional order and a radically neoliberal European economic constitution, has negatively affected economic and social development, democratic health and class equilibria in member states, with particularly significant effects in the Italian case.

This body of analysis has, in other words, privileged the hard power dimension of European integration: the ensemble of legal, economic and institutional constraints formally codified in the treaties, in the fiscal rules, in the macroeconomic surveillance mechanisms and in the architecture of the euro, and more broadly the economic and social policies promoted by European institutions. In recent years, attention has increasingly turned to the reckless warmongering policies promoted by Brussels. In short, the critical literature has so far focused, understandably, on the substantive content of European policies and architecture: on the most visible, concrete — and most overtly coercive — aspects of the European external constraint.

Little or no attention has been paid, however, to the soft power dimension of European integration: that is, to the ensemble of cultural, communicative, educational and symbolic instruments through which the European order is legitimised, internalised and “naturalised” in the public debate and in the collective imagination. And yet this is a terrain where a less visible but equally decisive contest is being waged. No regime or political-institutional order, after all, can sustain itself solely through coercive instruments or technical-administrative mechanisms, and the European Union is no exception: like any other political regime, it too requires symbolic frameworks and narratives capable of conferring meaning, justification and legitimacy upon its exercise of power.

From this perspective, the EU has progressively supplemented, over the years, its traditional instruments of functional integration (single market, common currency, technical regulation) with an elaborate discursive apparatus aimed at symbolically legitimising its own project: at constructing a European “common sense” that presents the current configuration of the Union not as a historically determined and politically contestable arrangement, but as the inevitable horizon of political and economic modernity. In essence, while hard power operates through explicit rules and constraints, soft power works through the manufacturing of consent, the definition of interpretive frameworks and the selection of paradigms deemed scientifically and morally legitimate.

Yet if it is true that the Union has progressively intensified its symbolic and narrative production, it is equally true that — especially in recent years — this effort has not translated into open engagement with European public opinion. What we have witnessed is not a genuine deliberative politicisation of the European project, grounded in transparent and equal dialogue with civil society, but rather a more indirect, structurally asymmetric and ultimately authoritarian mode of consent-building.

Rather than openly submitting its strategic choices and institutional architecture to challenge, the EU has tended to channel its narratives through instruments of diffuse legitimation, often largely invisible to the broader public. This has occurred primarily through the systematic use of funding programmes directed at NGOs, think tanks, media outlets, local authorities, academic networks and cultural institutions. Formally, such funding is public and traceable; in substance, however, it remains opaque in the collective perception, since the public is rarely aware of the financial link between certain ostensibly “independent” positions and European funding.

What takes shape is a mode of influence that does not take the classical form of direct propaganda — declaredly institutional and easily identifiable — but rather that of a networked dissemination of interpretive frameworks, “values” and political priorities through formally autonomous actors. European narratives are not merely communicated from the top down; they are “grafted” into the social fabric through a multiplicity of intermediaries operating in the fields of education, information, culture and civic activism.

In this respect, the EU is not exceptional within the contemporary landscape. The forms of legitimation and political influence in the twenty-first century have evolved well beyond the twentieth-century model of propaganda conveyed exclusively through mainstream media or state apparatuses. Increasingly, a “whole-of-society” approach is adopted, in which the production and circulation of particular narrative frames involves multiple levels simultaneously: public institutions, organised civil society, universities, digital platforms, cultural influencers, territorial bodies and transnational networks.

In this model, political communication becomes intertwined with governance and the distribution of resources. Funding becomes an instrument for structurally orienting public debate: not necessarily through censorship or the repression of dissent — which does nevertheless occur — but through the selective promotion of particular themes, perspectives and sensibilities. The boundary between support for civil society and indirect co-optation tends to blur, often to the point of vanishing altogether.

The result is a discursive ecosystem in which the European agenda frequently appears as the spontaneous product of a plurality of actors, when in reality it is sustained — and sometimes made possible — by a financial and institutional infrastructure that favours its reproduction. This contributes to reducing the visibility of real political conflict: consensus is not constructed through an explicit confrontation between alternatives, but through the progressive normalisation of a particular normative and strategic horizon.

In greater detail, the text critically examines the evolution of the European Union’s budget and its growing deployment not merely as an economic or cohesion instrument, but as a political and cultural tool aimed at promoting Brussels’s policy agenda. In recent years, European programmes and funds have been progressively oriented towards the diffusion of so-called “European values” — and very often towards the promotion of the EU and the integrationist project as such — through the direct funding of NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, media outlets and educational projects, with the effect of blurring the boundary between support for civil society, institutional communication and outright political propaganda.

The text shows how budgetary instruments such as the CERV programme, Erasmus+, and other funding lines are used to reinforce narratives favourable to European integration, while simultaneously marginalising critical or Eurosceptic positions. The result is that many formally independent organisations end up functioning as transmission belts for the European Commission’s priorities, transforming civil society from a space of mediation between citizens and institutions into a vehicle for legitimising Brussels’s policies. What emerges is a veritable EU-NGO-media-academia propaganda complex: a self-referential ecosystem in which funding, cultural production and advocacy mutually reinforce one another. This is, in certain respects, the hidden face of external constraint: if hard power narrows the space of decisions, soft power tends to narrow the space of imaginable alternatives.

A central element of the book’s argument concerns the democratic risk inherent in such practices: the way in which the use of public funds to selectively support particular political visions distorts the pluralism of public debate and may constitute — especially in countries governed by Eurosceptic forces — a form of “foreign interference” in the internal affairs of member states.

In sum, the text argues that the progressive politicisation of the European budget has transformed instruments formally aimed at promoting cooperation, rights and civic participation into levers of ideological influence and consolidation of the integrationist project, raising crucial questions about democratic legitimacy, transparency and the very role of European institutions in the public sphere.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green

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This is the third and final part of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

In part one, I examined the theoretical and historical foundations of the EU’s legitimacy problem and showed how the peace narrative — the EU’s original legitimising frame — was never founded on genuine popular mobilisation but on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics, and how it has now been definitively exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In part two, I traced the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.

In this third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.

6. The Late 2000s-Late 2010s: The End of Implicit Consent and the Values Revival

The eurozone crisis that followed the global financial crisis marked the definitive exhaustion of the permissive consensus that had long underpinned European integration. Adjustment programmes, fiscal surveillance mechanisms and structural reforms imposed direct and uneven social costs on broad segments of the population, particularly in southern Europe. Integration ceased to be a distant or largely technocratic process and became an everyday experience of constraint, discipline and loss of policy autonomy.

This was not merely a crisis of economic outcomes but of political authority. The widespread and accurate perception that key decisions were taken without democratic input and often in direct contradiction to popular preferences fundamentally undermined the normative foundations of the EU project. National parliaments were marginalised, technocratic governments were installed and social rights were subordinated to fiscal targets. The eurozone crisis thus constituted a watershed moment: the point at which European integration began to be experienced less as cooperation among states and more as a system of rule.

The euro thus functioned simultaneously as sacred object and disciplinary instrument. Its preservation justified the suspension of democratic norms, including the marginalisation of parliaments, the imposition of technocratic governments and the subordination of social rights to fiscal targets. Emergency became the dominant grammar of governance. Debtor countries were cast as irresponsible, profligate or insufficiently disciplined, while creditor countries were associated with virtue, prudence and credibility. Economic imbalance was recoded as moral failure.

The Revival of the “Europe of Values” Narrative

Confronted with mounting contestation in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis, EU institutions revived and significantly intensified the “Europe of values” narrative. Democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and pluralism were increasingly foregrounded as defining features of European identity. This renewed emphasis served a dual function. Internally, it was presented as a moral counterweight to the social dislocation and political alienation produced by crisis management. Externally, it reaffirmed the EU’s self-image as a normative power committed to upholding universal principles in an unstable world.

Yet this revival also had a distinctly disciplinary dimension. Values were no longer invoked merely as aspirational ideals but increasingly mobilised to draw boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate political positions. Dissent from EU policies risked being reframed as opposition to European values themselves. In 2018, the European Council adopted a recommendation on common values, inclusive education and the European dimension of teaching, which called for educational strategies designed to ensure that young people “understand the importance of and adhere to” the values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. The promotion of values was explicitly linked to combating populism, xenophobia, divisive nationalism and the spread of “fake news”, thereby framing political dissent and alternative interpretations of democracy as threats to be managed through pedagogical and normative intervention.

This approach, however, further exposed structural contradictions. While European values were selectively mobilised to criticise “illiberal” developments in certain member states, they remained conspicuously absent from debates about the governance of the monetary union itself, where social rights, democratic participation and political choice were subordinated to fiscal discipline and technocratic imperatives. The asymmetry between proclaimed values and practised governance undermined the credibility of the narrative. Rather than resolving the EU’s legitimacy crisis, the intensified mobilisation of values further highlighted the gap between moral discourse and political reality, reinforcing perceptions of double standards and deepening existing conflicts.

Heritage, Culture and Memory: The Endless Quest for Moral Legitimation

Alongside the revival of values discourse, EU institutions intensified efforts to construct a shared European memory and identity as sources of legitimation. Whereas early integration had been oriented primarily towards the future, the erosion of faith in economic growth and the exhaustion of forward-looking narratives prompted a gradual shift towards the past. European institutions began to act as “memory entrepreneurs”, seeking to construct a common European memory as a substitute for the weakening mobilising power of functional and economic integration. This approach increasingly emphasised a negative identity: Europe as a space defined by the rejection of past horrors — war, totalitarianism, genocide — and by a commitment to never repeat them.

A telling illustration of the persistent belief among EU elites that legitimacy deficits could be addressed through narrative engineering was the A New Narrative for Europe project, implemented by the European Commission between 2013 and 2014. The initiative epitomised the conviction that culture, memory and values could be mobilised to compensate for the absence of a shared demos. Yet this ambition immediately ran into a structural impasse. While EU leaders acknowledged that passive acquiescence could no longer be assumed, they proved unable to specify what substantive values or historical references could plausibly serve as the foundation of a renewed political narrative. Values capable of sustaining authority cannot simply be manufactured on demand.

The mobilisation of civil society and academic institutions as vectors of values promotion must also be understood as a response to the EU’s weakened legitimacy. The transformation of the Erasmus programme is particularly illustrative. Originally conceived as a modest student exchange scheme, Erasmus+ was progressively expanded into an instrument for the active promotion of EU values, policy priorities and political alignment. The Jean Monnet Programme, incorporated into Erasmus+ and significantly expanded, evolved into a dense network of professorial chairs, modules and centres of excellence functioning as the EU’s academic outreach arm (for a detailed analysis of the Jean Monnet Programme see here). Faced with governments that openly contested the EU’s normative authority, EU institutions increasingly relied on indirect governance mechanisms to bypass national political arenas and shape societal norms from above. This strategy can be understood as a form of “propaganda by proxy”: rather than directly mobilising institutional communication, the Commission relies on ostensibly independent civil society actors to disseminate pro-EU narratives, shape public debate and marginalise dissenting perspectives.

The Backlash Against Value-Based Legitimation

The highly polarised political context of the early-to-late 2010s exposed the structural limits of value-based narratives as instruments of legitimation. Rather than unifying Europeans around a shared moral horizon, the “Europe of rights” and “Europe of values” increasingly became sites of division and contestation. Far from generating a sense of common belonging, these narratives accentuated national differences, cultural anxieties and competing interpretations of universalism.

In this context, rights discourse operated simultaneously as a resource and as a weapon in struggles over sovereignty and identity. Progressive actors mobilised human rights language to defend migrants, minorities and supranational authority, while populist actors reframed the same discourse as evidence of elite moralism, cultural relativism and democratic overreach. This dynamic was particularly visible in the politicisation of LGBTIQ+ rights, which came to be presented as emblematic of European modernity and emancipation, while generating strong antagonism in more conservative societies where the association of the EU with sexual liberalisation was perceived as a form of cultural imperialism.

The backlash against value-based legitimation was also expressed through the populist reappropriation of “Christian Europe”. Whereas postwar Christian democrats had conceived Christianity as a transnational moral horizon compatible with supranational integration, contemporary conservative actors increasingly framed it as a cultural marker of national identity. Christianity was stripped of its universalist theological content and reinterpreted in secular and cultural terms. This shift exemplifies a broader process of counter-sacralisation: as EU institutions elevated abstract values to justify authority, populist actors sacralised alternative referents — nation, culture, religion — to challenge supranational legitimacy.

These tensions came sharply into focus during debates in the European Parliament on developments in Hungary. EU institutions framed Hungary’s constitutional choices as threats to the secular, liberal values of the Union, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán responded by explicitly reclaiming the language of European values, insisting that his government’s reforms were grounded in them. The controversy thus revealed two competing conceptions of nationhood and legitimacy: one grounded in procedural rule-following and expert authority, the other in tradition, collective memory and popular sovereignty. The paradox of the EU’s position was striking: while the EU frequently celebrated diversity, tolerance for divergent moral orientations across national contexts appeared sharply limited.

In this sense, the backlash against the EU’s value-based legitimation revealed the limits of moralised authority. Rather than closing the legitimacy gap, the elevation of values intensified conflict by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity, history and the sources of authority. The result was not the emergence of a shared European moral community, but a polarised landscape in which competing sacralisations confronted one another — supranational values versus national traditions — each claiming exclusive legitimacy.

7. Polycrisis Europe: Permanent Emergency and the Sacralisation of Post-Democratic Governance

From 2020 onwards, European integration entered what has widely been described as an era of polycrisis. The COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to global supply chains, energy crises and escalating geopolitical tensions followed one another in rapid succession, producing a condition of permanent instability. Rather than constituting discrete shocks, these crises overlapped and reinforced each other, consolidating emergency as a normal mode of governance.

In this context, the narrative grammar forged during the eurozone crisis was generalised and intensified. Exceptional measures were again justified as necessary, temporary and value-driven. Yet the exception proved durable. Emergency ceased to be an episodic deviation from normal politics and became its organising principle. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the most explicit manifestation of the state of exception as a form of sacralisation: the imperative to “protect life” functioned as an absolute value, limiting the space for democratic contestation. In the EU context, the pandemic reinforced sacralised beliefs about the necessity of supranational coordination, technocratic expertise and regulatory uniformity.

A defining feature of the polycrisis era is the convergence between securitisation and supranationalisation. Socio-economic issues — public health, supply chains, energy — are increasingly framed as security matters, justifying both extraordinary measures and the transfer of authority to the European level. The EU is consecrated as the default solution to crisis management. Emergency thus reinforces integration not through consent, but through necessity. The sacralisation of Europe becomes less about inspiring collective identification and more about establishing non-negotiable limits to political action.

“Europe of Values” Redux: The CERV Programme

The polycrisis era has been marked by an intensified reliance on the “Europe of values” narrative. Concepts such as resilience, solidarity, democracy and fundamental rights are increasingly presented as defining features of European identity and as guiding principles of crisis management. Rather than counterbalancing emergency governance, however, this renewed normative emphasis has become deeply entangled with it. Values no longer operate primarily as limits on power, but as justificatory resources within a broader architecture of exception.

This shift is visible in the growing institutional centrality of values discourse. The assignment of the portfolio “Values and Transparency” to a Vice-President of the European Commission during the 2019-2024 term symbolised the elevation of values from rhetorical reference to an organising principle of EU governance. At the same time, “European values” have acquired a self-performative role in judicial and regulatory politics, functioning as axiomatic reference points that narrow the scope of legitimate contestation.

A key institutional expression of this development is the increasing use of budgetary instruments to promote compliance with EU-defined values. While mechanisms such as rule-of-law conditionality have attracted public attention, a less scrutinised but equally significant trend concerns the proactive deployment of values-oriented funding programmes. Chief among these is the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme, launched in 2021 (see my paper on this here). Through CERV and similar instruments, the European Commission channels substantial public funding to civil society organisations, NGOs, think tanks, municipalities and academic institutions tasked with promoting “EU values” and fostering identification with the European project. Since its inception, thousands of organisations have received support under the programme, with funding concentrated among large transnational advocacy networks active in areas such as anti-discrimination, gender equality, racial justice and minority rights.

At first glance, many of the programme’s objectives appear unobjectionable. Combating discrimination, opposing racism and protecting individuals from violence and exclusion are goals that command broad support. Yet the political significance of these initiatives lies not simply in their stated aims, but in how they blur the line between protecting individuals from harm and promoting — often enforcing — specific cultural norms and ideological frameworks. The promotion of equality and dignity increasingly extends beyond the prevention of discrimination into the active reshaping of language, institutional practices and social norms in ways that frequently collide with prevailing cultural understandings within member states.

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This is part two (link to part one) of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

In part one, I examined the theoretical and historical foundations of the EU’s legitimacy problem and showed how the peace narrative — the EU’s original legitimising frame — was never founded on genuine popular mobilisation but on elite-managed integration deliberately insulated from democratic politics, and how it has now been definitively exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In this second part, I will trace the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.

In the third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.

3. Market Europe and Global Europe: The Rise of Economic Legitimation

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the peace narrative had lost much of its mobilising force. European integration entered a new phase, increasingly legitimised through economic narratives centred on markets, competitiveness and globalisation. The completion of the internal market, the removal of barriers to capital and labour mobility, and the promise of efficiency gains became central justifications for deeper integration. This shift must be understood in the context of the crisis of the postwar Keynesian compromise. The economic turbulence of the 1970s — stagflation, declining profitability and intensified global competition — undermined the material foundations of social-democratic governance. In this context, European integration was progressively rearticulated as a solution to the perceived limits of national economic management.

Crucially, however, many of the constraints that were later invoked to justify further integration were not external or inevitable, but were themselves the product of earlier integration choices. The European Monetary System (EMS), established in 1979, introduced rigid exchange-rate constraints that sharply limited national monetary autonomy while exposing weaker economies to speculative pressures. Rather than revealing the intrinsic failure of sovereignty, these dynamics reflected the contradictions of an incomplete and asymmetric monetary regime that constrained states without providing compensatory democratic or fiscal mechanisms. Yet these pressures were consistently reinterpreted through a supranationalist lens: if supranational integration wasn’t delivering the expected results it was because there wasn’t enough of it. Under Jacques Delors’s leadership, supranationalism increasingly assumed an ideological character: national sovereignty was redefined as anachronistic, while supranational institutions were portrayed as guarantors of stability, efficiency and openness.

This ideological shift was reinforced by political developments on the left, particularly following the failure of François Mitterrand’s initial redistributive programme in the early 1980s. Confronted with currency pressures exacerbated by the EMS, the French government abandoned its domestic socialist agenda and embraced European integration as a constraint-based strategy. From this moment onwards, European integration was increasingly presented as the only realistic path for progressive politics. Supranational constraints — many of them self-imposed — were reinterpreted as protective shields against market forces rather than as instruments of depoliticisation and elite-oligarchic power. In this way, supranationalism ceased to be a means and became an end in itself, sustained by a narrative in which the problems produced by integration were continuously invoked to justify its further deepening.

4. The 1990s, Maastricht and the Sacralisation of the Euro

The Maastricht Treaty formalised a shift from market-building integration to functional integration, embedding monetary union, fiscal discipline and institutional constraints at the core of the European project. Monetary policy would be delegated to an independent central bank, fiscal policy constrained by convergence criteria and economic coordination framed as a matter of technical necessity. Integration was no longer justified primarily by peace or prosperity, but by credibility, stability and confidence.

At the same time, the 1990s saw the emergence of “Social Europe” as a legitimising counter-narrative. Social Europe functioned as a progressive alternative to Market Europe, promising that integration could be reconciled with social protection, labour rights and cohesion. It allowed centre-left parties and trade unions to support Maastricht while maintaining a rhetorical commitment to social justice. Yet Social Europe remained structurally subordinate to Market Europe. Social policies were weakly institutionalised, largely dependent on national implementation and systematically overridden by economic imperatives. The asymmetry between hard economic constraints and soft social coordination was not accidental but constitutive of the integration model.

The creation of the euro represents the most far-reaching and politically consequential step in the history of European integration. More than any previous integration step, the euro institutionalised depoliticisation. From the outset, the euro was not merely justified as an economic tool, but framed as an irreversible political achievement. By framing the euro as both necessary and irreversible, political elites pre-emptively delegitimised opposition and insulated the project from democratic contestation.

Italy: A Laboratory of Anticipatory Sacralisation

Italy provides a paradigmatic case of the early sacralisation of the euro. There, long before its material effects could be fully measured, the euro had already assumed a symbolic and political function far more ambitious: it became a substitute for politics itself. In the crisis-ridden Italy of the 1990s, the euro was elevated from an economic instrument to a theologico-political device, a secular faith meant to discipline society, absolve elites of responsibility and promise redemption through sacrifice.

Italian political elites mobilised the euro through the idea of the vincolo esterno, the external constraint. By binding the country to irreversible European rules, political leaders claimed they could finally impose reforms that Italy was allegedly incapable of choosing for itself. Decisions would no longer be political; they would be technical. Responsibility would no longer lie with elected governments; it would be outsourced to treaties, markets and supranational institutions.

The debate around the euro rapidly took on characteristics that are unmistakably religious. The euro became undiscussable — criticism was answered not with counterarguments, but with moral disqualification. Italy’s economic problems were reframed in terms of guilt: public debt was no longer treated as a historical and political outcome, but as a moral failing; austerity became penance and suffering became purification. A millenarian promise surrounded the currency: prosperity was always said to be just around the corner — once reforms were completed, once rules were fully internalised. This structure mirrors classic political theology: a doctrine placed above politics, immune to falsification and sustained by faith rather than evidence. Italy was not an exception but a precursor: a laboratory in which the logic of euro sacralisation was tested and refined.

Beyond Italy, with the formal introduction of the euro, sacralisation intensified and generalised across the Union. Monetary stability, price discipline and fiscal orthodoxy were elevated to quasi-moral principles. The euro thus functioned as a powerful boundary object. Membership signified inclusion within a community of discipline, credibility and virtue; exclusion or deviation carried moral stigma. This moralisation of economic governance reinforced existing power asymmetries, particularly between core and peripheral economies, while simultaneously obscuring their political origins.

5. The Early 2000s: The Rise of the “Europe of Rights” and “Europe of Values”

At the turn of the millennium, European integration entered what many political leaders and institutional actors interpreted as a constitutional moment. With the launch of the euro imminent or already underway and the prospect of eastern enlargement raising fundamental questions about cohesion and identity, the European Union faced an increasingly visible legitimacy problem. Economic integration had deepened substantially, yet political identification and democratic attachment lagged far behind. In this context, EU institutions and supportive elites began turning to normative narratives centred on rights, values and constitutionalism as a means of compensating for the growing democratic deficit.

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This is part one of a paper in which I argue that the EU has historically compensated for its lack of democratic legitimacy by cycling through a series of (self-)legitimising narratives — from postwar peace to market integration to “European values” — and reflect on how these have systematically failed to resolve the core tension between technocratic governance and democratic self-rule, and indeed have actually exacerbated this tension, leading both to an intensification of the EU’s imperial project but also to a growing backlash against it.

In part two, I trace the EU’s successive attempts to legitimise deepening integration through economic and normative narratives — from the shift to market-based justifications in the 1980s, through the sacralisation of the euro and the rise of “Social Europe” as a rhetorical fig leaf, to the emergence of a “Europe of values” in the early 2000s.

In the third and final part, I trace the accelerating decomposition of EU legitimacy from the eurozone crisis through the polycrisis era and the war in Ukraine. I show how the “Europe of values” narrative — revived in the aftermath of the financial crisis as a moral counterweight to the social devastation wrought by austerity — in fact deepened rather than resolved the legitimacy deficit, by transforming political disagreement into a struggle over identity and moral standing. I further examine how, in the polycrisis era, emergency governance and value-based legitimation fused into a single architecture of permanent exception, with instruments like the CERV programme operationalising “European values” as tools of narrative consolidation and proxy propaganda. And finally I argue that the war in Ukraine has accomplished the definitive and irreversible exposure of the values discourse as a selective political instrument: the same Union that framed its response to Russia’s invasion as a civilisational struggle has maintained silence or active complicity in the face of genocide in Gaza, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that “European values” were never universal principles but directional instruments of Western geopolitical interest.

Abstract

The European Union has never possessed a democratic foundation in any meaningful sense of the term. In the absence of a European demos, a shared public sphere or any founding act of collective self-determination, the EU has historically compensated for its structural legitimacy deficit through the continuous production and rotation of legitimising narratives. This paper traces that evolution from the postwar peace project through market integration, monetary union and rights-based constitutionalism, to the emergence of an explicitly moral and geopolitical register centred on “European values”. It argues that this succession of narratives has never represented a maturing political identity but rather a series of compensatory symbolic adjustments — each one emerging from the exhaustion of the previous, none capable of resolving the underlying contradiction between technocratic supranational governance and democratic self-rule.

The paper further argues that the EU’s values discourse, far from reflecting a genuine normative commitment, has always functioned as an instrument of depoliticisation and elite power: a means of sacralising the integration project, narrowing the space of legitimate democratic contestation and externalising blame for domestically unpopular policies onto supranational necessity. Rather than opening politics, EU value narratives have consistently closed it, reframing fundamental political choices as moral imperatives, technical requirements or existential obligations beyond legitimate challenge.

This structural hypocrisy has now been definitively exposed. The EU’s loudly proclaimed commitments to the so-called rules-based international order, human rights, democratic sovereignty and the prohibition of aggression have been revealed as entirely conditional on geopolitical alignment. The contrast between the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — framed as a civilisational struggle requiring unlimited solidarity and sacrifice — and its silence or active complicity in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the strangling of Venezuelan sovereignty and US-Israeli military aggression against Iran lays bare what the values discourse has always concealed: that “European values” are not universal principles but instruments of Western geopolitical interest, deployed selectively and abandoned without embarrassment the moment they become inconvenient.

What emerges from this analysis is a portrait of the EU not as a community of shared values, but as a technocratic, anti-democratic juggernaut whose moral language has always served a dual imperial purpose: justifying the subordination of member-state democracies to supranational elite governance — a form of internal or “auto-colonisation” — while simultaneously providing ideological cover for the projection of Western power abroad. The paper concludes that the EU’s legitimacy crisis cannot be resolved through better narratives or more coherent values communication, but rather lies in the very model of supranational integration itself.

Introduction: political legitimacy, narrative and the European Union’s structural problem

The problem of political legitimacy is inseparable from the production of meaning. All political orders, whether democratic or authoritarian, depend on symbolic frameworks through which power presents itself as necessary, natural and justified. From founding myths and constitutional moments to everyday routines of governance, political authority is never sustained by coercion or performance alone. It requires narratives that define who belongs, what is at stake, which conflicts are legitimate and which horizons of action are conceivable. These meaning-making practices can be described as processes of legitimisation: symbolic, cultural and institutional operations through which political power seeks to justify both its policies and its very existence. Even in secularised societies, politics cannot function without such narratives. As the legal scholar Harold Berman observed, “in all societies” the law “derives its authority from something outside itself”. That “something” — logically prior to rules and procedures — constitutes the foundation of authority itself.

Historically, that foundation was located in religion, tradition and custom. From the eighteenth century onwards, new sources of legitimacy emerged: popular sovereignty, nationalism, science, ideology and charismatic leadership. In the decades following the Second World War, Western liberal-democratic regimes could still rely on powerful forms of what might be called “secularised religion” — encompassing mass ideologies, national narratives and, in many contexts, a customs-based version of Christianity itself. Over the past half century, however, Western societies have experienced a sustained erosion of these traditional “grand narratives”. Religion, nation and ideology have all lost much of their binding force. Yet this erosion has not eliminated the need for political legitimation; it has merely altered its form, temporality and stability.

In the post-1989 neoliberal era in particular, Western political elites sought to govern while simultaneously depoliticising decision-making. Legitimacy was increasingly grounded in expertise, legal rules, technocratic procedures and allegedly “natural” economic laws. Politics was reframed as administration, conflict as inefficiency and alternatives as irrational or irresponsible. This transformation was famously captured by Francis Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy and market capitalism represented the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. Yet this consensus has now shattered. Since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, politics — and political conflict — has forcefully returned, increasingly crystallising, however, not primarily around socio-economic ideological divisions, as in the past, but around values: identity, history, religion, sexuality, nationhood and sovereignty.

It is within this broader condition of late or hypermodern politics — characterised by individualisation, fragmented public spheres, declining institutional trust, permanent crisis and the return of value-based conflict — that the European Union must be situated. The EU is often portrayed as a technocratic, post-political and output-oriented polity that historically has relied on performance rather than symbolism. Yet over the past decades, and with increasing intensity since the early 2000s, the EU has become hyperactive in narrative production, largely as an attempt to compensate for the absence of a shared demos, strong collective identity and any deep-seated form of pre-political attachment to the Union. Far from signalling strength, this narrative proliferation is symptomatic of the EU’s structural legitimacy deficit.

The European Union constitutes a particularly revealing case for the study of political legitimation. Unlike modern nation-states, it lacks many of the classic foundations of democratic authority: a unified people, a common language, a shared public sphere and a single moment of constituent power. Its authority does not derive from an act of collective self-determination, but from a dense web of treaties negotiated largely by national elites and ratified with limited popular involvement. As a result, the EU has historically relied on indirect forms of legitimacy: technocratic expertise, legal authority, economic performance and elite mediation.

In recent years, scholars have addressed the issue of the EU’s (self-)legitimising narratives from various angles. A particularly noteworthy contribution to the debate is François Foret’s The European Union in Search of Narratives. The core problem Foret addresses is simple: how does a polity that lacks a shared people, a common language, a unified public sphere and a strong emotional bond seek legitimacy? Foret does not treat narratives as superficial communication strategies, but as structuring frameworks of domination, belonging and meaning.

His work highlights how the EU increasingly relies on symbolic, moral and cultural narratives to justify authority in a context of disenchantment and permanent crisis. This paper builds on Foret’s insights, but shifts the analytical centre of gravity: instead of asking whether the EU can eventually succeed in finding a unifying narrative, it asks whether narrative legitimation can ever compensate for the EU’s structural democratic deficits.

It does so by advancing a critical argument: the European Union is not merely a polity struggling to find the “right” narrative; it is an intrinsically elite-driven, top-down and structurally anti-democratic project whose legitimacy problem cannot be resolved through narrative innovation alone. EU narratives do not fail because they are poorly communicated, insufficiently emotional or inadequately participatory — though they generally tend to be all of the above. They fail because they attempt to compensate symbolically for a political system that systematically displaces popular sovereignty, narrows democratic choice and externalises decision-making away from citizens.

The EU’s reliance on constantly shifting legitimising narratives — from peace and prosperity to values, rights, emergency and geopolitics — should therefore be read not as a learning process or narrative maturation, but as a series of ad hoc symbolic adjustments designed to stabilise an elite-driven, and increasingly contested, governance structure. These narratives are reactive rather than constitutive: they emerge in response to crises of authority, politicisation and popular dissent, and they are abandoned or reconfigured once they lose persuasive power. Rather than generating durable legitimacy, they expose the underlying contradiction between supranational technocratic governance and democratic self-rule.

This paper offers a comprehensive account of this trajectory. The analysis proceeds chronologically, tracing the evolution from the postwar peace project through market integration, monetary union, rights and values discourse, emergency governance and the current era of geopolitical moralisation. But it also advances a structural argument: that the values turn represents not a deepening of European normative identity, but its instrumentalisation — and that the mounting hypocrisy of that instrumentalisation has now rendered the crisis of legitimacy irreversible.

1. Theoretical framework: EU narratives as top-down legitimation

Supranationalism, depoliticisation and elite power

A recurring theme in EU narratives is the celebration of supranationalism as an intrinsic good. Integration is framed as a rational, progressive response to globalisation, interdependence and complexity. National sovereignty is depicted as obsolete, while supranational governance is presented as the only viable horizon of effective action. This narrative transforms a contingent political choice into an apparent necessity.

Critical political-economy approaches have shown that supranationalisation does not simply weaken nation-states; it reconfigures them. Throughout the decades-long process of European integration, national governments have not been passive victims of European integration, but rather have often been active participants in a process that has allowed them to externalise responsibility, discipline domestic actors and implement policies that would otherwise have been difficult to justify democratically. The EU has thus acted — and continues to act — as a powerful tool of depoliticisation, where decisions are presented as the outcome of external constraints, rules or market imperatives rather than political choice.

From this perspective, EU narratives function as legitimising devices for both supranational and national elites. By invoking “Europe” as an external authority — whether in the name of markets, rules, values or security — national political leaders can shift blame, neutralise opposition and reduce the scope of democratic contestation. The paradox of supranationalism is therefore that it simultaneously weakens popular sovereignty and national democracy while strengthening executive power, not just at the supranational level but at the national one as well. Yet this process does not produce corresponding affective ties to supranational institutions. On the contrary, supranationalisation repeatedly collides with the fact that the regulation of identities, loyalties and political belonging remains firmly anchored at the level of the nation-state.

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We covered a lot of ground. I begin by tracing the historical transformation of the left — from a class-based, anti-imperialist movement into a liberal-progressive politics compatible with capitalism — arguing that this shift was not organic but was actively engineered by transatlantic elites and intelligence agencies. Second, I analyse NATO’s original and ongoing purpose: not to defend Europe from an external threat but to keep Europe geopolitically subordinated to Washington and separated from Russia. Third, I examine how propaganda and manufactured consent have historically maintained elite hegemony, and how a growing crisis of that hegemony is driving increasingly overt authoritarian and censorship measures across the West, particularly in Europe. Fourth, I discuss the Greenland episode and Europe’s vassalised political class, arguing that European leaders’ rhetoric about strategic autonomy is purely theatrical given their structural subordination to the transatlantic order. Finally, I reflect on the US-Israel relationship, the Epstein files as a window into how elite power networks actually operate, and the broader erosion of substantive (and increasingly even formal) democracy under capitalism.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Steve Grumbine: I want to start with something that I take deep issue with: the conflation of the liberal-progressive establishment with the left. What happened to the left as a political tradition, and how did we end up here?

Thomas Fazi: I think this shift was by design rather than by accident — the result of a long historical process aimed at fundamentally transforming what the left used to be throughout most of the twentieth century. The old left was rooted in working-class and socialist politics. It was grounded in a class-based understanding of society and an anti-imperialist understanding of international relations, and it represented a genuine threat to the capitalist ruling classes. That was the grand ideological struggle that defined much of the twentieth century, especially during the Cold War.

Enormous efforts and resources went into destroying the old left. In Italy during those years, you could say that roughly half the population identified in one way or another as communist or socialist. The situation in France and other countries was quite similar. This was a genuinely powerful force, and it was rightly seen by US planners as a key obstacle to entrenching Europe’s subordinate role within the American-led imperial order. Violence and coercion were therefore deployed — through, for example, Operation Gladio, the clandestine NATO paramilitary network that carried out false-flag terrorist attacks then blamed on far-left groups. But US planners also recognised they had to go on an ideological and cultural counter-offensive.

The CIA and other intelligence bodies poured significant money into what we might call the new left beginning in the 1970s — a very different creature from the old one. It was increasingly less focused on class, on labour-capital relations, and increasingly more focused on questions of discourse, identity and individual liberation. This postmodern left replaced the primary contradiction of capitalism — the conflict between labour and capital — with an ever-expanding range of secondary contradictions: gender politics, identity politics and so on. What passes as the left today is largely the product of this decades-long process of social re-engineering. It has produced a left that is entirely compatible with capitalism, with existing power structures, and ultimately with empire.

Steve Grumbine: Let’s talk about NATO. Where did it actually come from, and what is its real function?

Thomas Fazi: NATO’s real function was summarised perfectly by its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, who described it as keeping “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. That tells you everything. The alliance’s original purpose was to prevent the emergence of an independent, autonomous Europe — to ensure the continent’s strategic subordination to the United States and to impede any geopolitical rapprochement between Europe and Russia.

It had very little to do with defending Europe from the Soviet Union. In fact, that threat was largely a byproduct of NATO’s own existence. And far from defending Europe during the Cold War, NATO systematically exaggerated the Russian threat in order to justify a permanent US military presence on the continent — a presence that functioned as de facto control over the foreign policies of its European “allies”. But NATO was also directed inward: Operation Gladio, the clandestine paramilitary network I mentioned, was used to delegitimise the democratic left in countries where class conflict was particularly intense.

The most telling proof of NATO’s true purpose is what happened in 1991. When the Soviet Union dissolved — when NATO’s stated reason for existing disappeared — it was not dissolved. On the contrary, it expanded. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw an effective merger between NATO and the European Union: accession to the EU was made contingent on prior entry into NATO. It was an extraordinarily self-defeating move on Europe’s part, because it ensured that the Union would never achieve genuine geopolitical autonomy.

The war in Ukraine illustrates all of this perfectly. The historical record is unequivocal: NATO’s eastward expansion toward Russia’s borders, and the progressive de facto integration of Ukraine into NATO following the 2014 US-backed coup, is what ultimately provoked Russia into invading. From a great-power perspective, Russia’s response was entirely rational. The United States would have reacted in exactly the same way had Canada or Mexico entered into a military alliance and begun deploying missiles on their territory.

I would go further and say that this war was not merely provoked but deliberately provoked. US planners wanted it. The aim was to draw Russia into a protracted conflict, weaken it economically and militarily, and ultimately bring about regime change in Moscow — which has been a long-term objective of Western planners since at least the nineteenth century. But there was a second, equally important aim: to drive a permanent wedge between Europe and Russia, and above all between Germany and Russia. Germany’s growing energy ties with Moscow were seen in Washington as a primary threat to US hegemony — hence the relentless campaign against Nord Stream and its eventual destruction. The war served to replace Europe’s dependence on cheap and reliable Russian gas with a dependence on far more expensive — and far more politically volatile — US liquefied natural gas. This goal was openly stated by American politicians on multiple occasions, and it is exactly what was achieved.

Steve Grumbine: You’ve written and spoken a great deal about propaganda and what Gramsci called hegemony. How does that framework help us understand what’s happening today?

Thomas Fazi: Gramsci’s insight was that the state does not maintain power solely through its monopoly on violence — through police and military force. It also maintains power by shaping the ideas, values and “common sense” of a society. When the worldview of the ruling class becomes internalised and accepted as natural and normal by everyone, that is what Gramsci called hegemony. And in Western liberal-democratic societies, this has historically been achieved primarily through propaganda — through control of the media.

There’s a vast literature on this, from Chomsky’s work on manufacturing consent to the earlier post-war theorists like Edward Bernays. The mainstream media in the West is formally independent of the state, but it has always functioned as a tool of the corporate oligarchy. The old joke captures it well: a Russian and an American are sitting on a plane to Washington. The American asks, “Why are you going to America?”. The Russian says, “To study propaganda”. The American replies, “What propaganda?” — and the Russian says, “Exactly”. Western propaganda historically worked precisely because it was invisible.

What’s changed is the rise of social media, which has weakened the stranglehold that corporations and the state have historically had over the flow of information. This is broadly positive, but the response from elites has been a sustained crackdown: an alliance between big tech and the security state to control the flow of information online. This escalated significantly in the mid-2010s when the financial crisis and its social fallout — Brexit, Trump’s first term, the Yellow Vests in France — convinced the establishment that social media was a primary vector of political instability. The result was the emergence of what might be called a censorship-security complex, in which intelligence agencies played a central role.

What we are witnessing now is the consequence of a deeper crisis: a crisis of hegemony. Political leaders across the West enjoy record-low levels of public trust. When propaganda begins to collapse, regimes become increasingly authoritarian. In Europe, this is very visible: we have seen elections cancelled — as in Romania, where an independent candidate who came first was subsequently barred from running altogether — and we have seen financial sanctions, originally developed for foreign entities, used against European journalists and analysts on the grounds of spreading “Russian propaganda”. These are not procedural excesses. They are signs of a system that can no longer maintain control through consent and is increasingly resorting to coercion.

Steve Grumbine: I want to bring Trotsky into this briefly, because he framed fascism in a way I find compelling — as a temporary tactic of the ruling elite rather than a permanent condition of the state. You can see it in the scapegoating, the demonisation, the divisive rhetoric, the police-state tactics. And these tactics tend to be married with extreme austerity measures, while a left that has already bought into the austerity message offers no meaningful counter. I want to connect that to what’s happening with Greenland — naked empire, plain and simple. And yet rather than treating it as a red line, European leaders are tripping over themselves to find excuses for it. The same goes for Gaza. Neither was a red line. What’s your take?

Fazi: Before we get to Greenland, I just want to briefly push back on the term “fascism” — because I think it has become just as unhelpful as the terms “left” and “right.” It has been entirely emptied of any reference to its original historical meaning. If you believe the liberal establishment, fascism is essentially anyone on the right, anyone who doesn’t subscribe to liberal orthodoxy. But historically, fascism meant something fairly specific: it was the fusion of corporate and state power; the neutralisation of democracy by an oligarchy taking direct control of the state; the widespread use of censorship and the repression of dissent; and imperialism and colonialism.

If we hold to that definition, I cannot think of anything more fascist than the liberal-centrist transatlantic establishment. They are the ones who have been dismantling democracy for years. They are the ones who have been accruing ever more power to the oligarchy. They are the ones who have been resorting to censorship. They are the ones who have been waging imperialist and colonialist wars across the world. And if you look at the European Union — a supranational, anti-democratic, oligarchically controlled, war-mongering proto-empire — that is about as close to a contemporary embodiment of fascism as one can find. Those who claim to be defending us from fascism are, in this reading, the real fascists.

Steve Grumbine: Trump’s posture toward Greenland seems like naked imperialism — threatening to seize the territory of an ally. Yet European leaders have barely reacted. What does that tell us about the European political class?

Thomas Fazi: I am not in the least surprised by the pitiful reaction of European leaders. The current European establishment stopped thinking in terms of the national interests of their own citizens, or of Europe as a whole, a very long time ago. What we are looking at is what Marxists used to call a comprador elite — a ruling class that serves foreign interests. These are the same leaders who oversaw Europe’s progressive re-vassalisation to the United States, who aligned with Washington’s strategic agenda on virtually every major issue, who had nothing to say about the terrorist attack on Nord Stream — an act carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknown by several European governments — and who have brought Europe to the brink of a catastrophic war with Russia.

The idea that this political class is now suddenly capable of championing European sovereignty is laughable. All the rhetoric from Macron, von der Leyen and others about the need for strategic autonomy is theatre. Their actual response to Trump’s demands over Greenland was: “You can have exactly what you want — more troops, full militarisation — but let’s do it within the framework of NATO”. That is not autonomy. That is deeper subordination dressed in the language of independence.

Meanwhile, Europe is buying more and more US liquefied natural gas and more and more American weapons to send to Ukraine — thereby deepening its dependence on the very country from which it claims to want independence. And if you track the flight paths of US military aircraft deploying to the Middle East in preparation for operations against Iran, they pass through European bases. Europe today is, in concrete material terms, a launching pad for US military aggression around the world.

Steve Grumbine: Where does Israel fit into all of this? And what do the Epstein files tell us about how power actually operates?

Thomas Fazi: The debate about whether Israel controls the United States or whether Israel is simply a tool of US power in the Middle East will never be fully resolved — because both things are true. The Israel lobby exercises enormous influence over the American political and economic establishment, as it does in Europe and other Western states. At the same time, Israel has historically served as a key instrument for the projection of US power in the Middle East. It is most useful to think of the US and Israel as co-equal components of a single imperial system. Israel’s rise coincided with the rise of the American imperial state after the Second World War, and it is declining along with Western hegemony more broadly.

The increasingly inconceivable levels of violence we are witnessing — a live-streamed genocide that has been ongoing for two and a half years — are, I think, a sign of desperation rather than strength. Israel and the US establishment under Trump appear to understand that they have a closing window of opportunity, that empire’s days are numbered, and they are using it while they still can, without even bothering to present a humanitarian or legal justification.

As for the Epstein files: beyond the gruesome details of sexual criminality and the moral degeneracy of the Western ruling class they reveal, they offer a genuinely useful glimpse into how power actually operates in the West today. Real power does not lie in parliaments or elected governments. It lies in an interlocking web of financial, corporate and military-industrial interests — synthesised and administered by the apparatuses of the permanent state, above all the intelligence agencies. Epstein was a middleman within this network, connecting powerful actors to maximise the political and economic interests of a transnational superclass at everyone else’s expense. The formal procedures of democracy — universal suffrage, multi-party elections, constitutional guarantees — increasingly function as a facade over what is, in structural terms, a dictatorship of capital. That has arguably always been the case under capitalism, but the neoliberal era’s historically unprecedented concentration of wealth has produced a correspondingly unprecedented concentration of political power. The Epstein class is, in large part, a product of that development.

To listen to the podcast, in which we dissect these issues in much greater detail, click here or below.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green

I asked the artificial intelligence on the European Democracy Shield, and this answer came back: “The European Democracy Shield (EDS) is a comprehensive initiative proposed by the European Commission in 2025–2026 to defend democratic processes against foreign information manipulation, interference (FIMI), and hybrid threats. It aims to safeguard electoral integrity, free media, and boost societal resilience against digital threats like deepfakes and misinformation”. It means that they defend us in the age of digital disinformation. But in one of your articles, you didn’t welcome this. Why?

Well, I think the AI has been a bit optimistic there, or maybe it should check its sources again, because the problem is that we’re living in a really Orwellian world where the language that is used by the political establishment, the political leaders, does not reflect reality. So in this case, the European Commission claims that they are defending democracy from foreign interference, from disinformation, but the paradox is that in order to allegedly defend democracy, they have to effectively destroy it. Because what they’re saying is effectively: “We need more censorship, we need the ability to intervene more directly in elections”.

But in the age of Russian cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns, doesn’t Europe need a shield against them?

What is the evidence for these alleged cases?

Don’t you have experience with this as a journalist?

I looked at these alleged cases of supposed Russian drone incursions, Russian hacking, Russian disinformation schemes, and it’s hard to uncover any actual evidence that Russia or any other foreign actor is behind these events. In fact, those who claim to be protecting us from Russian disinformation are themselves engaging in this information war by spreading unfounded allegations about this supposed massive hybrid war waged against Europe.

At the 2016 US presidential election, there were allegations that they managed to penetrate into the servers of the Democratic National Committee.

There were allegations, which were subsequently completely disproven. Russiagate was a hoax. It’s now been admitted even by the FBI and the American intelligence services. And what we are seeing today in Europe is a European version of Russiagate. In that case, the objective was to stop Trump from getting into the White House. And today, the kind of Euro Russiagate is aimed at all populist or anti-establishment parties that threaten the status quo and the establishment. Let’s not forget that just over a year ago in Romania, an entire election was annulled on grounds of alleged Russian interference, of Russia allegedly running some kind of disinformation scheme on TikTok that supposedly had convinced voters to vote for the independent populist candidate who ended up winning that first round of the elections. Well, they provided no evidence whatsoever for that alleged disinformation scheme. And even TikTok claimed that there was no evidence of this manipulation.

So you claim that the EU itself interfered in the election process in Romania. What’s the proof?

Well, I’ve read hundreds of pages of reports about this, and I tracked all the EU funding, all the EU money that goes to NGOs, media and universities across Europe to essentially promote pro-EU narratives and the Brussels agenda. What the EU is running here is a scheme very similar to what USAID has done for many years around the world, essentially sending money to NGOs and alleged independent media outlets in third countries to promote America’s economic and geopolitical interests. Now the European Union does exactly the same thing. It uses these funds to manipulate civil society in countries to promote its own interests and agenda. And the EU runs these schemes in member states, especially in countries that are ruled by Eurosceptic governments. In Hungary and Poland, the EU has channelled huge amounts of funds.

How much money is involved in this process annually?

The EU programme that is the key tool for what I would consider EU propaganda is the CERV programme, launched in 2021 with the explicit aim of promoting “European values”. But it’s promoting Brussels’s own very unique interpretation of those values, the idea of European integration and its intrinsic benefits. In the case of Hungary, through the CERV programme, around 40 million euros have been channelled to Hungary just over the course of the past few years.

In all 27 member states, what is the total amount?

The 2021–2027 budget allocated two billion euros for that. That’s quite a bit of money. We’re talking hundreds of millions of euros every year that are effectively channelled into what can only be described as propaganda programmes. I’m not saying that some of the projects that they’re funding aren’t actual work. Some are probably genuine NGO projects.

What percentage of it is considered propaganda, and how much of it is real work?

The propaganda aspect is by far where most of the money goes. I’ve looked at hundreds of projects, and most of them are really simply aimed at promoting the Brussels agenda.

What is the agenda? Can you name values that you consider part of that ideology?

I mean, the EU claims to promote “European values”, but on paper those values are very vague. Democracy, human rights, the struggle against discrimination — these are all concepts that most people support. The question is, how does one interpret these values? For example, when it comes to the struggle against discrimination, no one should be discriminated for the colour of their skin, or for their sexual orientation or whatever. But a very different thing is trying to impose norms and languages and behavioural attitudes on an entire society that don’t reflect what the prevailing social consensus is. And we’ve seen this, for example, with the attempt to impose a very maximalist interpretation of LGBT rights across Europe. We see it with the approach towards immigration. A lot of people are concerned about immigration, not necessarily for racist reasons, right? But the European Union conflates these two issues. It uses the struggle against discrimination to then promote these very liberal immigrationist values.

And when you’re trying to impose these values in a country where people clearly have a different set of them — where they have elected governments that reflect those values — and you’re trying to impose your own by channelling money to organizations that are largely dependent on that funding for their existence, and using them to promote your ideology while pretending that these are independent actors, well, in that case we’re faced with something very similar to what USAID was doing, which many would claim is a clear form of foreign interference, where you’re trying to change the political course in that country. So when you channel millions of euros to NGOs and media that are opposed to the elected government in a certain country, well, you’re effectively engaging in an attempt to destabilize or even to implement regime change.

How many NGOs, think tanks, or media outlets receive this financing from the European Commission annually?

We know that there are thousands of “NGOs” across Europe who receive money from the European Commission. It’s impossible to track the exact number, also because the definition of what exactly is an NGO isn’t clear, even in the EU’s own databases. But through the CERV programme alone the EU has supported, since 2021, more than 3,000 projects and thousands of NGOs. So it’s a very vast ecosystem. What has happened over the past decade is that, essentially, the political establishment has cultivated a fake civil society. How can you claim to be an NGO when most of your money comes from the political establishment, the political institutions, and in many cases, the European Union itself? You can’t claim to really be conveying the aspirations of civil society to the political institutions. What you’re doing, inevitably, is the opposite. You become a tool for the political establishment to convey their ideas and their ideology to public opinion. So it’s a literal inversion of what NGOs and civil society should do. The problem is that most of the NGOs that are operating today are not independent, but are simply extensions of the political establishment.

I would add that civil society should be heterogeneous, as the political life of the European Union is highly complex. What percentage of the financed NGOs or think tanks are conservative, liberal, or socialist? Is it a proportionate or a disproportionate scene?

I cannot find a single case when a conservative or Eurosceptic think tank received EU funding to promote Eurosceptic ideas. And I think this is a perfect example of just how profoundly anti-democratic this whole practice is. It completely skews the public debate because it artificially boosts certain ideas at the expense of others, at the expense of maybe other ideas that actually enjoy a genuine, organic support in civil society. A lot of people have issues with the EU, but these voices are often suppressed, marginalised, and increasingly censored, while others — often representing minority views — are artificially boosted. This is a profoundly anti-democratic practice because you’re trying to essentially superimpose an artificial civil society onto the real one. Then you’ve got all these NGOs demanding these policies that no one really wants, creating the illusion of an organic movement. I mean, a lot of what’s happening at the level of supposedly civil society is really completely fake.

In Hungary, we hear the voice of think tanks and NGOs financed from Brussels and the voice of the Hungarian government, because it finances its tools, too. But do you have a similar balanced set of opinions in Western Europe, for example, about the Ukrainian war?

No, not at all. We know from polls that have been carried out in a number of countries that the support for the EU-NATO strategy of this never-ending war is declining across all of Europe for obvious reasons. Ordinary people can see that this war isn’t going anywhere. And this is something that is damaging not just Ukraine, obviously, but also European societies and economies themselves. A great number of people oppose this war, but this isn’t reflected at all in the public debate, precisely because you’ve got these media institutions, you’ve got these NGOs, you’ve got also academia, and you’ve got universities, all of which receive on some level or another EU money, which are constantly promoting the pro-war narrative and the pro-NATO narrative at the expense of a diplomatic solution.

We’re not talking about Green Deal or whatever anymore, we’re talking about a war that has been raging on for four years, which the Brussels elite is intent on continuing to the last Ukrainian, even at the risk of dragging all of Europe into a potentially catastrophic war with Russia. Unfortunately, many security or defence think tanks or their members present themselves as being neutral experts. They’re always peddling the Brussels line, the EU line, the NATO line, but they are presented in the media as neutral, independent observers. But in most cases, these think tanks are funded by EU governments, by the European Commission and by the arms industry.

I quote you: “The Democracy Shield is just the latest vision in unfreedom: suppressing dissent speech under the pretext of defending democracy from foreign interference and fake news”. I suppose you fear that fact-checkers of the EU will become censors of free speech. Why are you afraid of this?

Because they will become censors.

We still use TikTok and Facebook freely, even if they employ fact-checkers and monitoring units.

We have several examples of people who have been de-platformed, or whose posts have been taken down as a result of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which is really an online censorship tool. We know that the big social media companies receive thousands of requests every month from the EU, from European governments, to take down this or that post. And the DSA itself has a tool which allows it to implement even faster censorship policies under elections. It’s called a rapid response system, and we know that they’ve used this in previous elections. They used this in Romania and in other elections, where a huge number of posts were taken down as a result of the DSA. And the idea is that any kind of opinion that they don’t like, they will claim that it is Russian disinformation, and that in order to “protect democracy” they have to take that information down. So, what we’re seeing is that the EU is escalating from simple propaganda and censorship to direct electoral interference.

These tools are first tested out on smaller countries, and then they tend to be applied across the board. And we know how desperate the elites are to cling to power and protect the status quo from these challenges that are arising from different parts. So, I think we can expect them to try to manipulate the outcome of the Hungarian elections. This is why, with the help of the think tank MCC Brussels, we have set up the Democracy Interference Observatory, through which we are monitoring the EU’s potential interference in the Hungarian elections and in other elections in the future. I think they’ve realised that overt forms of interference tend to backfire. But they have a lot of covert ways to try to influence public opinion, and I think they will try to use them. They will try to use the local NGOs. They will try to use foreign-funded media to influence the outcome. So we can expect them to try to pull off the same dirty tricks in Hungary as well.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Subscribe now

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

A few weeks before pivotal elections in Hungary, a familiar narrative is emerging. As reported by the Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda, journalists at the Warsaw-based nonprofit VSquare claim to have uncovered evidence that “Vladimir Putin has instructed a group of political strategists and Russian military intelligence to interfere in the parliamentary elections in Hungary in April in order to ensure that incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wins”. The claim is now being echoed in the Western media as well.

It is a familiar script by now. In the run-up to every significant election in which populist candidates stand a chance of winning, the EU establishment begins raising the specter of Russian “disinformation” and social media manipulation. Recent examples include the 2024 elections in Romania and the 2025 elections in Moldova. In both cases, a media campaign about Russian interference preceded the vote; in both cases, little or no verifiable evidence was produced.

These accusations carry real consequences. They allow Brussels to engage in its own forms of electoral interference, weaponizing locally embedded, EU-funded NGOs and media outlets to amplify establishment narratives while using the Digital Services Act (DSA) to silence critical voices and steer outcomes towards “their” candidate. As I have noted previously, since the DSA came into force in 2023, the Commission has pressed platforms to adopt heightened content moderation measures ahead of elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, and during the 2024 European Parliament elections.

The “Russiagate” narrative also serves to pre-emptively delegitimize the “wrong” candidate, seeding a story of “stolen” or “unfair” elections that can later be invoked to challenge inconvenient results. This is what happened in Romania just over a year ago. The first round of voting, in which independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu finished first, was annulled after authorities alleged coordinated Russian online influence. Georgescu was subsequently barred from candidacy in the rerun. No publicly verifiable evidence substantiating the interference claim was ever produced. Internal documents would later reveal that TikTok informed the European Commission that it had found “no evidence” of a coordinated network. No matter: “Russian interference” has become a catch-all justification for the suppression or delegitimization of political dissent—and for actual electoral interference by Brussels.

None of this is to say that Russian interference in other countries’ elections never occurs. But such allegations demand scrutiny. What is the evidence? And might those advancing these narratives have their own agenda? On both counts, the latest allegations concerning Orbán fall short. The evidentiary basis for the purported plot reduces to this: “Multiple European national security sources have told me”. In other words, no evidence whatsoever is provided. We are simply asked to trust the “investigative journalists” in question. One might be inclined to extend that trust if the outlet in question were genuinely independent. Regrettably, it is not.

Read the rest of the article here.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

But this is a dangerous illusion. The reality is that destroying Iran’s navy and air force — or carpet-bombing Tehran, for that matter — is militarily straightforward but strategically meaningless. The US can indeed cause a lot of destruction and carnage in Iran — and indeed it already is, including by targeting civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospital, oil depots and desalinisation plants, i.e., reserving Iran the Gaza treatment — but beyond that the Trump administration has no achievable definition of victory, let alone a coherent strategy for getting there.

The stated objectives — dismantling Iran’s ballistic missile programme, ending nuclear enrichment and cutting support for the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas — are unachievable through military force alone. If the regime survives, it will simply rebuild. The only path to permanently solving those three “problems”, from the US-Israeli perspective, is regime change. That means not just replacing the government, but replacing it with one that is completely subservient to the US and Israel — a puppet regime. It would effectively mean transforming Iran into a US-Israeli colony.

However, even putting aside the absurdity of the US claiming the right to decide who runs Iran, nobody has explained how to achieve that. The emptiness of the administration’s thinking was exposed by Trump himself, who acknowledged in a press briefing that most of the opposition figures identified as potential replacement leaders were already dead — killed in some cases by American and Israeli strikes. He spoke of exhausting a first wave of replacements, then a second, and expressed uncertainty about the third.

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute explained in the New York Times, it is virtually impossible to imagine a credible leader who would ever accept the 180-degree shift in Iran’s orientation demanded by the US and Israel — not to mention be able sell it to the Iranian public. But more fundamentally, the reality is that the Republic is proving much more resilient than Trump anticipated. As Parsi noted, as the massive US-Israeli shock-and-awe bombing campaign continues to cause civilian deaths and widespread destruction, “nationalist sentiments on the ground are growing stronger”.

The historical record doesn’t bode well for the US and Israel: air power alone almost never produces regime change. Germany and Japan in World War II endured devastating bombing campaigns, with hundreds of thousands killed, and neither regime collapsed until ground forces arrived. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, which cost Iran up to half a million lives, offers a further caution: Iranians regarded that conflict as existential, just as they regard this one.

Hegseth’s claim that Iranian missile launches had dropped 80% from their opening-day peak is equally misleading. The most rational thing for Iran to do would be to conserve missiles for a protracted war, not expend them up front. Video footage showing missiles firing directly from concealed positions beneath the desert floor underscores the point: there is no visible infrastructure and therefore no way to target them.

More fundamentally, Iran has time on its side: by targeting energy infrastructure in the Gulf states — and more crucially, blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of all globally traded petroleum products and liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes — Iran has already caused a huge spike in energy prices. If the war continues even just for a few weeks, it “will bring down the economies of the world”, as Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister, told the Financial Times.

With decapitation having failed and air power unlikely to reach the goal, the US will probably be tempted to turn to covert and proxy options — arming Kurdish and Azerbaijani minorities to foment internal insurrection. Trump has already reportedly contacted Kurdish leaders inside Iran. But Iran’s Kurds represent roughly 10% of the population, its Azerbaijanis perhaps 16-18%, both concentrated in the northwest. Neither is positioned to march on Tehran, and Turkey — deeply opposed to any Kurdish independence movement — would be up in arms (quite literally) at the attempt. Most damningly, US and Israeli strikes have reportedly struck Kurdish areas even as officials planned to arm them. The broader pattern points to improvised escalation in search of a strategy that doesn’t exist.

There is, of course, the possibility that chaos itself the “strategy”: collapsing Iran into ethnic balkanisation and a failed state, by fuelling ethnic tensions and secessionist movements, and leaving Iran deeply divided and marred by civil war and sectarian violence — leading effectively to the Syrianisation of Iran. This certainly appears to be Israel’s goal. Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, candidly summarised the Israeli government’s position: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future… [or] the stability of Iran”. It goes without saying that the regional, and indeed, global consequences of this would be catastrophic.

On a broader scale, the war must be understood in the context of American overextension across four simultaneous theatres: Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan. The US has spent the post-Cold War era running down its industrial base and can no longer regenerate precision munitions at the pace sustained conflict demands. Indeed, the US has already been forced to begin relocating parts of its THAAD missile defence systems from South Korea to the Middle East. Trump’s claim that the US can fight this war “forever” without running out of ammunition is simply delusional.

Then there is the wider geopolitical dimension. China and Russia were already supporting Iran before the war and will continue to do so, and indeed will probably intensify their support. They both have a deep-seated interested in seeing Iran prevail, which is why, the longer the war drags on, the higher the chances are of this spiralling into all-out global war.

Ultimately, almost two weeks into the war, the fundamental problem is unchanged: not only did the US and Israel start an illegal and criminal war that has already brought much death and destruction to Iran and to the wider Middle Eastern region — but it looks like they did so with the idea that causing widespread death and destruction would in itself deliver results, or even worse with death and destruction as a strategic goal in itself.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

I’d start by saying that the current geopolitical tensions and shifts that we are witnessing are clearly not a crisis like others the world has experienced over the past century or centuries. We’re living through what is arguably the greatest geopolitical transition in human history. What we are witnessing is effectively the end of 500 years of Western economic political, and military global hegemony, which for the past thirty years following the Cold War has manifested itself in the form of absolute and unchallenged US-Western global hegemony. That world is clearly over, and I think the mega-trends concerning multipolarity are quite clear to all of us. So I won’t get too much into detail about that.

I think that, all things being equal, the likely trajectory of the global rebalancing of power would be fairly easy to predict. We would continue to see the rise of the non-Western world and the relative weakening of the power and global influence of the US and the wider Western bloc. This mega-trend would not be a problem for the average Western citizen. Quality of life is not connected to the relative global power of a country. Life in, say, Austria, is better than life in the US by every metric, even though Austria’s GDP is a fraction of America’s. Of course, one cannot deny that in the early post-war decades, the spoils of empire clearly trickled down to average Western citizens in many ways. But that hasn’t been the case for a long time now.

Especially if we look at the US, it’s obvious that for a long time the spoils of empire have been accruing essentially only to the very top of the social and economic pyramid — to the oligarchy. Nowadays I would argue that it’s almost exclusively Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and the corporatocracy that benefit from the US’s endless wars and the dollar-centric system. Ordinary Americans have not benefited from it for a long time. In fact, I would say that the average American would only benefit from the US’s transformation into a “normal” country — indeed, this would be the precondition for the democratisation of the US.

Luckily for us Western citizens, China doesn’t want to replace the US as a global dominus. It subscribes to a genuinely non-hegemonic worldview, and there are centuries of Chinese practice and literature to confirm that. So this is good news — though not for the US and Western oligarchy more broadly. They would definitely lose out from a decline of US and Western hegemony. And this brings us to the major problem we face today: the US and broader Western elites’ unwillingness to accept this transition to multipolarity — for the aforementioned material reasons, but also for entrenched ideological reasons, for a deeply ingrained supremacist worldview that is, I believe, literally making them go crazy in the clinical sense of the word. This is particularly apparent here in Europe.

From their point of view, multipolarity — or even simply non-Western development — is viewed as an existential threat, reframed as a security threat. We see this constantly in the way they talk about it. And from the perspective of their own narrow class interests, that’s not entirely wrong. Much of the chaos and violence we’re witnessing in the world today boils down to this.

So, I prefaced my talk by saying “all things being equal, the mega-trend is quite easy to predict” — but what does “all things equal” even mean in the current context, especially when the change is global and involves constant feedback loops? This is why the future is so hard to predict. We live in a world where we can’t really predict anything, not even the trajectory of these mega-trends, because what we see is the US and Western powers doing everything they can to slow down, stall and if possible reverse this transition to multipolarity — despite what leaders like Mark Carney might now be saying in public.

Up until Trump, the strategy was quite clear: direct military containment of mainly Russia and China, which is of course what led to the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. Under Trump, the empire is changing its tactics — it’s adapting. Even talking of strategy in Trump’s case might seem like an exaggeration, because his actions often appear totally erratic. And to some extent that’s true. But I also think it’s partly by design. Chaos, in Trump’s mind, seems to be part of the strategy itself — to keep other countries permanently second-guessing his next move. There’s a constant contradiction between rhetoric and action; he often says multiple contradictory things at the same time.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Trump, but I think this is partly a deliberate strategy of engineered permanent chaos and destabilisation. It’s not much of a strategy, but I think that’s roughly what they’re aiming for. The goal, from my point of view, is clearly to slow down multipolarity, to slow this transition. So — to use a technical term — “messing things up” is kind of part of the strategy.

If we analyse Trump’s actions, a certain coherence does emerge — there is a logic. He’s not attacking random countries; he’s attacking weak links in the adversary’s system. Some people went through the latest US National Security Strategy and rather optimistically concluded that Trump was embracing multipolarity, given that he was stepping back from direct engagement with China — and obviously he’s engaged in negotiations with Russia. But I think this is merely a tactical shift. The US establishment knows it doesn’t currently have the means to engage militarily with China. But the aim remains to slow China’s rise by targeting the weak links in the China-led system: Venezuela, Iran — these are all Chinese allies — and of course Russia.

There is an even more coherent strategy visible if we look a bit deeper, at the full range of countries Trump is targeting. I would include European countries in that list — not just because of Greenland, but because of the long-term push to entrench Europe’s dependence on American gas, substituting its reliance on Russian gas with a complete dependence on American supply. This has been a long-standing US strategic aim, now fully achieved. And we can see a pattern: these focal points all have to do with energy.

We understand that the wars of the early 21st century were all about energy — but there’s now a tendency to think energy is no longer a major driver of US foreign policy, despite Trump being quite explicit about it: “We’re just going to go and take Venezuela’s oil”.

And it’s not just Venezuela. Much of the entire US post-war foreign policy was about controlling oil markets — physically and financially. That wasn’t only about procuring oil for the US itself, though that was part of it; perhaps even more importantly, it was about bolstering dollar hegemony through the petrodollar system, and about controlling other countries by controlling the physical and financial choke points of the oil market. This allowed the US to cut countries off from the bloodline of the modern economy through sanctions and other means.

In recent years, this system has begun unravelling. Countries outside US control — Venezuela, Iran, Russia — have been increasingly supplying the world with oil and gas outside American diktats, and doing so increasingly outside the dollar-centric financial system. In doing so, they have also fuelled China’s meteoric rise. This represents a threat to US hegemony on several levels: it weakens dollar hegemony, but perhaps even more importantly, it deprives the US of the ability to use energy as a tool of economic and political coercion — which is what it has always done.

So I think that in the minds of US planners, well before Trump, a decision was made to re-establish control over the physical and financial flows of energy — which today means not only oil but also gas and other resources. If we look at the various US attacks and US-led or instigated conflicts — Venezuela, Iran, the proxy war in Ukraine, the push to decouple Europe from Russian gas, which I think was one of the goals of the Ukraine proxy war all along — we see a common thread: re-establishing control over energy flows. In this sense, official adversaries are targets, but so-called allies are targets too. Europe is a target in this strategy, and we can see how Trump is explicitly weaponising Europe’s dependence on American energy exports to achieve political ends.

To conclude: the big question is whether this strategy will work. I don’t know. So far the US has been quite successful. Getting Europe to do a complete reversal in its energy policy — from cheap, reliable gas from a neighbouring country to much more expensive, less reliable and politically weaponisable gas from America — is a remarkable achievement for a country supposedly defined by erraticism and lack of strategy. And then there’s the kidnapping of Maduro and effective seizure of Venezuela’s oil, and the threats against Iran [note: this talk was given before the start of the attack].

I’ll conclude by noting that I often see a great deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles — the assumption that the mega-trend is ultimately unstoppable, that there’s nothing the US can really do beyond slowing it down slightly. I take a less deterministic view. Because if we’re talking about a new international order — whether you want to call it multipolar or polycentric — by definition it requires some level of order. Therefore, simply by engineering permanent disorder and destabilisation, the US and its vassals can create serious problems for the BRICS, and indeed already are. So I’m not convinced that China’s approach of avoiding confrontation with the US at all costs will necessarily pay off in the long run. But I suppose time will tell.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

In your opinion, what are the real issues behind the militarisation of Greenland by Western powers? And why does Donald Trump want to annex Greenland?

I think that, when it comes to imperial powers such as the United States, it is unhelpful to over-subjectivise politics — that is, to ascribe excessive importance to individual presidents. As powerful as an American president may appear on paper (“commander-in-chief” and all that), the reality is that he ultimately remains a temporary torch-bearer whose ability to steer the imperial machinery in one direction or another — let alone drastically alter its course — is rather limited. What Trump “wants”, even assuming that a coherent strategy truly underlies his actions, is therefore of secondary importance. It is far more useful to focus on the long-term strategy of the US imperial system itself: a structure encompassing entrenched financial, military-industrial, corporate and intelligence interests, synthesised through the apparatus of the permanent state. Unlike the personalities who momentarily preside over it, this system exhibits striking continuity across years and even decades.

In this sense, Trump’s policies fit comfortably within the broader US strategy of hindering the rise of alternative centres of power and, more specifically, of maintaining leverage over global energy markets — even if his tactical approach and rhetoric differ from those of the Biden presidency. For a long time, US planners have regarded as a key threat to American hegemony the growing role of energy suppliers operating outside Washington’s control — most notably Venezuela, Iran, and Russia — whose oil and gas exports have fuelled not only China’s rapid ascent but also Europe’s industrial base. A central element of the American response, therefore, was the conclusion that Europe had to be decoupled from Russian gas and redirected toward American LNG.

Successive administrations, beginning in the early 2000s, pursued policies aimed at destabilising Ukraine as a means of driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. This objective was ultimately realised under the Biden administration, which succeeded in pushing Europe toward near-total energy dependence on the United States by drawing the continent into a proxy war with Russia, culminating in Europe’s decision to sever its energy ties with Moscow. Trump is now continuing along this trajectory — not only by consolidating and deepening Europe’s dependency on US energy supplies and maintaining sanctions on Russian oil, but also by seeking to reassert American control over physical choke points in the global oil trade that had slipped from its grasp. The seizure of Venezuelan oil assets and the escalating pressure on Iran [note: this interview took place before the US-Israeli attack on Iran] form part of this wider strategy. The ultimate aim is to gain leverage over rival powers — above all China — by re-establishing the United States as an indispensable “middleman” between them and global energy flows.

This is where Greenland enters the picture. The island occupies a strategic position at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean, a region of immense geopolitical value. Not only does the Arctic hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but the melting of polar ice caps is opening previously inaccessible maritime routes that could significantly reshape global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s coastline and through the Bering Strait, which could reduce transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40% while bypassing traditional corridors such as the Panama and Suez Canals. By re-militarising Greenland, the United States aims to secure influence over what is poised to become a critical supply artery — particularly for oil — linking Russia and China to global markets. In this sense, Greenland is set to emerge as a key flashpoint in the broader rivalry between the United States and the Sino-Russian axis. There are, of course, more prosaic motives behind Trump’s interest in the island — such as granting his billionaire allies access to its mineral wealth — but these are ultimately of secondary significance.

In your opinion, what is NATO’s real function?

NATO’s real function was candidly summarised by its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, as that of “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. In other words, the alliance’s original purpose was to prevent the emergence of an autonomous Europe, ensure the continent’s strategic subordination to the United States and forestall any geopolitical rapprochement between Europe and Russia. Far from being an alliance of equals, as it presents itself, NATO has always been an organisation structurally dominated by Washington. During the Cold War it played a central role in systematically exaggerating the Russian threat: by locking Europe into a permanent militarised standoff with the Soviet Union, the United States could justify a permanent military presence on the continent while exerting de facto control over the foreign policies of its European allies through NATO and, above all, keeping Germany politically and economically distant from Russia.

NATO’s orientation, however, was not only outward, toward the Soviet bloc, but also inward, toward European societies themselves. The most striking example is Operation Gladio: a clandestine, NATO-run “stay-behind” paramilitary network that became involved in acts of terrorism and political violence across Europe, often blamed at the time on far-left groups. Its function was to curb the strength of left-wing parties and movements and to serve as a latent threat against any political force that might contemplate breaking away from the Atlantic framework. In this light, NATO’s true purpose was never really the defence of Europe from an external enemy (a threat that was, to a significant extent, a by-product of NATO’s very existence); it was rather a mechanism for disciplining Europe internally and fixing its strategic orientation within a US-led order.

This logic explains why NATO was not dissolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but instead expanded. Enlargement allowed the United States not merely to preserve but to tighten its grip on the continent. A key instrument in this process was the effective merger of EU and NATO expansion: by making eastern accession to the European Union contingent in practice upon prior entry into NATO, Washington ensured the alignment of Europe’s political and security structures under American leadership. Lord Ismay’s formula therefore remained accurate even after the Cold War — and remains so today.

The war in Ukraine represents the culmination of this trajectory. By dragging Europe into a proxy conflict with Russia through NATO, the United States has reasserted its waning hegemony over the continent, driven a deep wedge between Europe and Russia and pushed Germany toward deindustrialisation. Far from providing security, NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion, coupled with the systematic dismissal of Russia’s repeated warnings over many years, unravelled Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and created the conditions for the largest armed conflict on the continent since the Second World War. The alliance thus presents itself as a guarantor of peace while in practice generating the very instability it claims to prevent.

In this context, claims that the United States under Trump is “abandoning NATO” amount to little more than political theatre. What Trump seeks is not the dissolution of the alliance but a renegotiation of its financial terms — compelling European states to pay a larger share for their own subordination. NATO, as the institutional framework of American influence in Europe, is not going anywhere.

Do you think we can talk about democracy in a Western world ruled by a degenerate oligarchic elite?

The idea that the West is meaningfully democratic — that political direction is determined by “the people” through elections — is perhaps the most successful achievement of Western propaganda. Beyond the gruesome details of sexual abuse and criminality, the Epstein Files offer a glimpse into the elite power networks that actually govern Western societies behind the façade of democratic procedure: an interlocking web of financial, corporate and military-industrial interests — in short, the Western oligarchy — whose collective priorities are synthesised and administered by the apparatuses of the permanent state, above all the intelligence agencies, commonly referred to as the “deep state”. This structure extends beyond the nation-state into a permanent suprastate: international and supranational bodies — most notably the EU and NATO, but also forums such as the World Economic Forum — that harmonise and coordinate policy across borders while remaining insulated from popular pressure.

Aside from his likely role as an intelligence asset, the Epstein Files portray him as a middleman within this network, a broker connecting powerful actors in ways that maximised the political and economic interests of a transnational superclass. This superclass is not an anomaly but a structural feature of capitalism itself, a system in which wealth — and therefore power — inevitably concentrates in the hands of a small minority that comes to exercise disproportionate economic and political influence regardless of formal electoral mechanisms. Capitalism is thus intrinsically oligarchic or plutocratic: a dictatorship of capital operating beneath a veneer of democratic ritual. This has always been the core insight of Marxist critiques of capitalism. But recent decades have significantly intensified this pattern. The neoliberal era has produced a historically unprecedented concentration of wealth, extensively documented in economic data, and with it an equally unprecedented concentration of political leverage. Epstein — or what might be called the “Epstein class” — is a direct product of this development.

In such a context, democracy becomes largely illusory even as its technical procedures —universal suffrage, multi-party elections constitutional formalities — remain in place (though even these procedural norms are increasingly challenged, as demonstrated by episodes such as the annulment of elections in Romania). The public’s capacity to challenge entrenched power through the ballot box is systematically neutralised through a wide array of mechanisms: electoral systems designed to marginalise smaller parties; consensus-manufacturing propaganda and censorship enabled by compliant, elite-aligned mass media and social-media platforms; character assassination campaigns against unwelcome candidates; virtually unlimited financial resources deployed to purchase political loyalty; and the steady transfer of sovereignty from national governments to supranational institutions structurally shielded from democratic accountability. And this is not even considering the willingness of elites to bend or break the law outright in order to suppress dissent, as the prolonged legal persecution of Julian Assange, or the sanctioning of critical journalists in the EU, starkly illustrate.

Public awareness of this condition is growing, reflected in the steady erosion of citizens’ trust in democratic institutions across the West. Yet most diagnoses of today’s “post-democratic” order rest on the mistaken premise that it represents a deviation from a once-genuine democratic norm. But the post-war social-democratic period was never true popular rule. It is accurate that, roughly from the 1940s to the 1970s, Western societies experienced a more substantive form of democracy than exists today, marked by the partial integration of the masses into political life. But even then democracy remained constrained by concentrated economic power and by permanent state structures — military, intelligence and security establishments — operating largely beyond public oversight and often under US strategic direction. What distinguished that era was not the absence of oligarchic control but the temporary ability of organised labour and mass politics to limit the power of capital to an unprecedented degree.

That balance was the product of a unique historical convergence: the geopolitical pressure of the Soviet challenge, the widespread appeal of socialist ideologies, Keynesian economic frameworks that mediated between wages and profits, and the structural strength of industrial working classes embedded in Fordist production systems. As these conditions disintegrated from the mid-1970s onward, the brief and relative “marriage” between capitalism and democracy unravelled. What followed was not a sudden corruption of an otherwise healthy system but a reversion to the more typical state of affairs: the naked rule of capital, now concealed behind a sophisticated democratic façade. The central question, therefore, is not whether democracy can be “restored” — it cannot — but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism.

Does the Epstein case, in which President Trump is implicated, not reflect the degeneration of the Western ruling class?

Absolutely. Many people struggle to believe what has surfaced in the Epstein Files — the widespread practice of paedophilia and sexual abuse of minors among the elites, and even possibly the practice of ritualistic torture or worse — partly because, in our secular and post-religious societies, the very concept of evil has become intellectually unfashionable. The term is dismissed as archaic or superstitious, a relic of primitive moral frameworks. As a result, practices that can only be described as profoundly evil and anti-human are often met with disbelief or minimised as exaggerations. Yet the reality is that we did not need the Epstein Files to recognise the moral bankruptcy of those who dominate Western power structures. Their conduct in full public view already provides more than enough evidence.

These are people who routinely make decisions that consign hundreds of thousands of young men to death in wars pursued for geopolitical or economic advantage — the ongoing NATO proxy war in Ukraine obviously springs to mind — and who support or enable the industrial-scale killing of civilians, including children, as they have done (and continue to do) in Gaza. Ultimately, whatever emerges (or may emerge in the future) from the Epstein Files, I fail to see how it could match the moral depravity of what these people regularly do in plain sight.

So yes, there is no doubt that the Western ruling classes are morally degenerate. The good news is that their centuries-long global dominance is visibly eroding as new centres of economic and political power rise and Western hegemony enters a phase of irreversible decline. The danger, however, lies in the refusal of entrenched elites to accept this loss of primacy. A class that has grown accustomed to unquestioned supremacy is more likely to escalate conflict than relinquish control voluntarily, which is precisely what we are seeing. This is why the times we are living through are so bloody — and so dangerous.

It is said that Epstein was a Mossad spy and was carrying out a mission. What is your analysis of this?

I can’t say for certain if he was a “Mossad spy” or not but there is no doubt that he was an Israeli asset in the wider sense of the term given his well-documented ties to very powerful Israeli and Zionist political and financial actors, as well as his own strong support for Israel and Zionist causes. Indeed, the fact that the Western media tried to paint him as a Russian agent — a new low for the Western propaganda establishment — appears to be a deliberate attempt to shift the attention away from his Israeli ties.

In your opinion, are there any real divergences between Trump and the Europeans, and if so, what are they?

Since Trump’s return to power there has been constant talk of a supposed “rift” between Europe and the United States, sometimes dramatised as a full-blown “revolt of the vassals” against Washington. A closer look, however, paints a different picture. The current European political establishment has spent years hollowing out European sovereignty by consistently acting against both national and collective European interests while aligning itself with Washington’s strategic agenda on virtually every major issue — trade, energy, defence, foreign policy, etc. The outcome is that Europe today is more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to the United States than at any moment since the Second World War. One might say that what we are witnessing is in fact a case of hyper-vassalisation reminiscent of the dynamics of traditional colonial rule.

This is most evident in Europe’s alignment with Washington’s long-term strategy towards Ukraine and, since 2022, its full embrace of NATO’s proxy war with Russia, including the self-inflicted decision to sever access to inexpensive Russian gas — thereby sacrificing Europe’s core economic and security interests to US geopolitical priorities. Even more revealing is the passive acceptance of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, an act carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge among certain European governments. It’s thus important to understand that Europe’s current leaders don’t operate in terms of national or even “European” interests; they function instead as managers of vassal states within a broader transatlantic imperial framework. Once this is understood, their otherwise seemingly irrational policies become entirely coherent.

The notion that this same political class is suddenly capable — politically, psychologically or intellectually — of championing genuine European autonomy is laughable. What is actually taking place is an adjustment to a change in tone at the imperial centre. Trump operates with a blunt, overt style of power, openly berating allies and floating ideas such as the annexation of Greenland. Yet even within hierarchical systems, appearances matter. When the imperial centre dispenses with diplomatic niceties and publicly humiliates its European vassals, these are compelled to respond rhetorically — not to defend European interests, but to preserve domestic credibility. Hence the sudden proliferation of language about European “independence” and “strategic autonomy”. But this is purely performative.

There is no genuine fracture between “Europe” and “the United States”, only friction between factions of a single transnational Atlantic elite over how best to manage Western decline. The faction associated with Trump favours an openly unilateral, “mask-off” approach to power; the liberal-globalist faction prefers a multilateral façade and softer rhetoric. But neither camp has any intention of granting Europe real autonomy.

This becomes apparent when we consider that European leaders continue to reaffirm their commitment to NATO and to the proxy war in Ukraine. How can one credibly claim to seek “independence” from the United States while remaining firmly embedded in NATO — the primary instrument through which Washington has long militarily subordinated its Western “allies” — and while actively supporting a proxy war that has been the central driver of Europe’s economic degradation and geopolitical hyper-vassalisation? There is much discussion today of a so-called “European NATO” — a NATO without the United States. But this is a fantasy. NATO is structurally subordinated to the US. Thus, the Europeans’ NATO rearmament programme, far from signifying a break with the existing order, simply reinforces the Atlanticist apparatus, consolidating the structural subordination of the European continent to North American power. This should dispel any lingering illusion of European strategic autonomy or sovereignty. In short, what we are witnessing is a European posture that speaks the language of autonomy while fully accepting the material fact of subordination through integrated NATO command structures, US-controlled critical infrastructure and Western financial architectures.

What is Trump playing at in the Persian Gulf, and what does he really want in Iran?

I return to the point made earlier: it is extremely difficult to assess what Trump “wants”, not only because he himself does not appear to operate with a coherent strategy, but because, at a deeper structural level, it is unclear who actually exercises power in the United States. It is evident that it is not the president. The Biden years made this unmistakable: for four years the country was formally led by a president displaying obvious cognitive decline, yet the machinery of state continued to function and major strategic decisions were still taken. This alone demonstrates that real power in the US extends far beyond the elected executive.

The American system is characterised by multiple overlapping centres of power operating behind and alongside official institutions, making it exceedingly difficult to determine who is truly calling the shots. There is the military-industrial complex, with enormous economic weight and direct influence over foreign and defence policy; the intelligence agencies and broader permanent-state apparatus; the major financial institutions and banking interests; the new generation of tech oligarchs — figures such as Musk and Thiel — who exert substantial personal and ideological influence over political leadership; and, crucially, the Israel lobby, whose weight is particularly visible in Middle Eastern policy and especially in relation to Iran. These factions compete, align, and clash in constantly shifting configurations, rendering policy direction opaque and long-term prediction highly unreliable.

This opacity is inherently dangerous because effective conflict management depends on predictability and clearly understood chains of command. In the cases of China and Russia, external observers can generally read strategic signals and identify decision-making hierarchies with relative clarity. In the American case, by contrast, the diffusion of power produces ambiguity and mixed signals. Trump compounds this instability by treating unpredictability itself as a tactical asset, deliberately cultivating confusion in order to keep both allies and adversaries off balance.

Despite this structural uncertainty, however, two fundamental drivers I think underpin US attempts at regime change (or regime destabilisation) in Iran. The first is Israel and the Israel lobby, for whom Iran represents the principal obstacle to Israeli military supremacy in the region. The second is Washington’s broader objective of reasserting “American energy dominance”, explicitly articulated in official US strategic doctrine. Targeting Iran simultaneously advances both aims: it removes a regional challenger to Israeli power while also striking indirectly at China, which imports a significant share of its oil from Iran. These objectives converge around a single underlying factor — Iran’s refusal to submit to US-Israeli geopolitical dominance.

Why does Israel continue to massacre Palestinians with impunity? Where are international law, the UN and international institutions? Are we not living in an era of the law of the jungle?

Many people are shocked by the fact that no international body — first and foremost the UN — has been able to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has been ongoing for more than two years now. But this is a very naïve view. The reality is that Gaza has simply revealed in the starkest possible terms what has always been true: international law is a fiction. In practical terms, it has never existed. And it couldn’t be otherwise, given that international law — unlike national law — lacks an independent enforcement mechanism: simply put, there is no “global police force” capable of enforcing compliance. This is why international law has always been applied very selectively, especially since the US’s rise to “hyperpower” status in the aftermath of the Cold War, which effectively bestowed upon Washington an international monopoly of violence: in practice, international law has only has only ever targeted, through the ICC, the leaders of weak states, or more generally states that are not part of the US-led Western bloc.

Meanwhile, Western leaders have faced no consequence whatsoever for their repeated violations of international law: from covert coups to bombing campaigns to outright invasions, Washington has long disregarded the very rules it claimed to uphold. The same can be said for Israel, which has faced no consequence whatsoever for its decades-long occupation of Palestine and brutalisation of Palestinians. In short, the international legal order — just like the post-Cold War “rules-based order” — has always been a chimera, a vicar for undisputed US-Western global power. The genocide in Gaza has simply brought this reality into stark relief.

In this sense, the endless appeals to the UN and to international law that we have heard over the past two years aren’t just naïve; by continuing to uphold the comforting myth of international law, they have actually contributed to obscure the reality of the international order: that ultimately the only powers that exist are individual states, and they are the only ones who can act. Appealing to a non-existent international legal framework is just an excuse not to act.

That said, it is also easy to understand why no state has stepped up to defend the Palestinians, including those in the Global South who have formally and rhetorically sided with the Palestinians, as this would effectively mean standing up not only to Israel but to the entire Western/NATO military-industrial complex. There are very few states that have the means to do that — e.g., China — but doing so would immediately escalate into a global war. This is why, for the time being, the US and Israel are able to continue to act with impunity.

My country, Algeria, supports the just causes of the Palestinian and Sahrawi peoples and is considered the Mecca of revolutionaries. Algeria is one of the few countries to have principles and positions of principle from which it never deviates. Because of its positions, my country is the target of plots hatched by secret circles linked to Israel. Why, in your opinion, is it so important to resist in this world that increasingly resembles a jungle?

Resisting empire is crucial for the reasons outlined above. Indeed, I think one of the biggest challenges facing the transition to a multipolar or polycentric order is precisely whether simply challenging empire through the development of an alternative international economic order without directly challenging the West’s increasingly unrestrained use of violence — which is essentially the China-BRICS approach — will suffice, or whether the Global Majority will at some point be compelled to stand up to the West in military terms as well, as Russia was ultimately forced to do in Ukraine. Of course, no one wants the current “piecemeal global war” between the West and the Rest to escalate into all-out conflict. Yet one has to ask oneself whether signalling to the West that it can continue to resort to violence with impunity isn’t in fact creating the conditions that will make conflict inevitable further down the road.

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Excellencies,
Distinguished colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
السلام علیکم

It is a privilege to address you at this distinguished forum and discuss the profound question of our region: Palestine.

Let me begin with a fact that the region has learned through decades of painful experience, and that the world is learning again at a terrible human cost: “Palestine is not one issue among many”.

Palestine is the defining question of justice in West Asia and beyond. It is the strategic and moral compass of our region. It is a test of whether international law has meaning, whether human rights have universal value, and whether global institutions exist to protect the weak — or merely to rationalise the power of the strong.

For generations, the Palestinian crisis was understood primarily as the consequence of an illegal occupation and the denial of an inalienable right: the right of a people to self-determination. But today, we must recognise that the crisis has moved far beyond the parameters of occupation alone. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not merely war. It is not a “conflict” between equal parties. It is not an unfortunate byproduct of security measures. It is the deliberate destruction of civilian life on a massive scale. It is genocide.

The human cost of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza has wounded the conscience of humanity. It has torn open the heart of the Muslim world — and it has also shaken millions beyond it: Christians, Jews, and people of all faiths, who still believe that the life of a child is not a bargaining chip, that starvation is not a weapon, that hospitals are not battlefields, and that the killing of families is not self-defense.

Palestine today is not simply a tragedy; it is a mirror held up to the world. It reflects not only the suffering of Palestinians, but also the moral failure of those who had the power to stop this catastrophe — and chose instead to justify it, enable it, or normalise it.

But Palestine and Gaza is not only a humanitarian crisis. It has become the platform for something larger and more dangerous: an expansionist project pursued under the banner of “security”.

This project has three consequences — each of them profound, each of them alarming:

The first consequence is global. The Israeli regime’s conduct in Palestine, and the impunity granted to it, have deeply damaged the international legal order. We must say this clearly: the world is moving toward a condition where international law no longer is respected and governs international relations.

What is perhaps most dangerous is the precedent being established: that if a state has sufficient political cover and protection, it may bomb civilians, besiege populations, target infrastructure, assassinate individuals across borders, and still demand to be regarded as lawful.

This is not merely a Palestinian problem. It is a global problem.

We are witnessing not only the tragedy of Palestine, but the transformation of the world into a place where the law is replaced by force.

The second consequence is regional. Israel’s expansionist project has had a direct and destabilising impact on the security of all countries in the region.

The Israeli regime now openly violates borders. It breaches sovereignties. It assassinates official dignitaries. It conducts terrorist operations. It expands its reach in multiple theatres. And it does so, not discreetly, but with a sense of entitlement — because it has learned that international accountability will not come.

Let us be candid: if the Gaza issue is “settled” through destruction and forced displacement — if that becomes the model — then the West Bank will be next. Annexation will become policy.

This is the essence of what has long been called the “Greater Israel” project.

The question therefore is not whether Israel’s actions threaten Palestinians alone. The question is whether the region will accept a future in which borders are temporary, sovereignty is conditional, and security is determined not by law or diplomacy, but by the ambitions of a militarised occupier.

The third consequence is structural — and perhaps the most dangerous.

Israel’s expansionist project requires that neighboring countries be weakened — militarily, technologically, economically, and socially — so that the Israeli regime permanently enjoys the upper hand.

Under this project, Israel is free to expand its military arsenal without limits, including weapons of mass destruction that remain outside any inspection regime. Yet other countries are demanded to disarm. Others are pressured to reduce defensive capacity. Others are punished for scientific progress. Others are sanctioned for building resilience.

Nobody should be confused: this is not arms control, it is not non-proliferation, it is not security.

It is the enforcement of permanent inequality: Israel must have a “military, intelligence and strategic edge”, and others must remain vulnerable. This is a doctrine of domination.

Ladies and gentlemen,

This is why the Palestinian question is not only a humanitarian issue. It is a strategic issue. It is not only about Gaza and the West Bank. It is about the future of our region and the rules of the world.

So what must be done?

It is not enough to express concern. It is not enough to issue statements. It is not enough to mourn. We need a coordinated strategy of action — legal, diplomatic, economic, and security-based — rooted in the principles of international law and collective responsibility.

First, the international community must support legal mechanisms without hesitation.

Second, there must be consequences for violations.

We call for comprehensive and targeted sanctions against Israel, including: an immediate arms embargo,
the suspension of military and intelligence cooperation,
restrictions on officials, and banning trade.

Third, we need a credible political horizon grounded in law. The international community must affirm: the end of occupation, the right of return and compensation in accordance with international law, and the establishment of a unified and independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital.

Fourth, the humanitarian crisis must be treated as a matter of urgent international responsibility. Collective punishment must never be normalised.

Fifth, regional states must coordinate to protect sovereignty and deter aggression. The principle must be clear: security cannot be built on the insecurity of others.

And finally, the Islamic world, the Arab world, and the nations of the Global South must build a united diplomatic front.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League, and regional organisations must move beyond symbolism toward coordinated action: legal support, diplomatic initiatives, economic measures, and strategic messaging.

This is not about confrontation. It is about preventing the region from being reshaped by force.

Dear colleagues,

Let no one miscalculate: a region cannot be kept stable by allowing one actor to act above the law. The doctrine of impunity will not produce peace; it will produce wider conflict.

The path to stability is clear: justice for Palestine, accountability for crimes, an end to occupation and apartheid, and a regional order built on sovereignty, equality, and cooperation.

If the world wants peace, it must stop rewarding aggression.

If the world wants stability, it must stop enabling expansionism.

If the world believes in international law, it must enforce it — consistently and without double standards.

And if the nations of this region seek a future free from perpetual war, they must recognise this fundamental truth: Palestine is not merely a cause for solidarity; it is the indispensable cornerstone of regional security.

Thank you.

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Since last August’s meeting in Alaska between Putin and Trump, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

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The critics should feel vindicated following the release of an interim staff report by the US House Judiciary Committee titled The Foreign Censorship Threat. Based on thousands of internal Big Tech documents and communications with European regulators, the report confirms in granular detail that Brussels has been engaged in what House Judiciary Republicans describe as “a decade-long campaign to achieve global online narrative control”.

These efforts—culminating in the 2022 implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the most sweeping internet regulation regime ever introduced in the Western world—began as early as 2015, when the European Commission established a series of “codes” and “forums” through which it could pressure platforms to censor speech. These were not isolated initiatives but part of a deliberate strategy designed, in the words of the committee, to “silence political opposition and suppress online narratives that criticize the political establishment”.

Indeed, the release of internal communications from major technology platforms shows how Europe’s regulatory architecture—made up of an interlocking network of unelected EU institutions, Big Tech firms, and NGOs (most of them state- or EU-funded)—has narrowed the boundaries of permissible speech.

The EU leadership’s principal defense has been that its various “codes of practice” are voluntary. Yet the internal correspondence cited in the report challenges this claim. Emails from Google and other technology companies suggest that platforms felt they had to comply with Commission expectations. Companies deemed non-compliant may face fines of up to 6 percent of global annual revenue and, in extreme cases, suspension from the EU market. Such penalties create powerful incentives for companies to adopt stricter, globally applied moderation rules—even when those rules affect users far beyond Europe’s borders.

Internal files further indicate that the supposedly consensus-based forums often operated under “strong impetus from the EU Commission”. Debates on contentious political topics, from migration policy to gender issues, were focal points of regulatory attention.

The degree of interference described is striking, often resembling a granular, real-time supervision of political discourse. As the report highlights, for instance, the EU Internet Forum (EUIF)—officially a voluntary initiative—evolved from a narrow focus on counter-terrorism into a broader remit that included scrutiny of “political satire,” “populist rhetoric,” and even “meme subculture”. In other words, the emphasis slowly shifted from removing illegal content to discouraging politically inconvenient viewpoints. […]

Perhaps the most damning claim in the report is that the EU’s censorship-industrial complex has extended well beyond mere narrative control into direct electoral influence. Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the report shows, the Commission has pressed platforms to take heightened moderation measures ahead of elections in several EU member states, including Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, as well as during the 2024 European Parliament elections. […]

The most damning case is that of the 2024 Romanian presidential election. The first round of voting—in which independent populist candidate Călin Georgescu finished ahead—was annulled after authorities raised allegations of coordinated Russian online influence, and Georgescu was later barred from participating in the rerun. However, no publicly verifiable evidence substantiating the interference claim was produced at the time and an internal document from TikTok explicitly informed the European Commission that it found “no evidence” of such a coordinated network. The annulment makes clear that the “Russian interference” narrative has become a catch-all justification for the suppression or delegitimization of political dissent and for straightforward electoral interference by Brussels.

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The annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is not known as a hotbed of anti-imperialist resistance, let alone anti-US rhetoric. Yet this was unmistakably the tone of many speeches delivered this year.

The most striking and widely discussed intervention came from Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney [which I analysed in detail here]. Carney openly declared the so-called “rules-based international order” dead — and even questioned whether it had ever truly existed. He conceded that this order was always, at least in part, a fiction: one in which rules were applied selectively by the hegemon to advance its interests, while subordinate powers went along with the charade because they benefited from it.

But this bargain, Carney argued, has collapsed now that the United States the has turned its coercive tools against Western allies themselves. “This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination”, he said, clearly alluding to Trump’s threats against Greenland — and Canada itself.

Carney’s conclusion is that middle-ranking Western powers must break ranks with the hegemon and indeed coordinate to resist it.

Many European leaders in Davos appeared to echo this sentiment. “Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, remarked Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever. “This is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, declared French president Emmanuel Macron. Faced with Trump’s aggressive unilateralism, “it is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe”, argued European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Such statements have led some commentators to suggest that transatlantic tensions, simmering since Trump’s return to power, are escalating into an outright revolt against Washington. A closer look, however, points to a rather different reality.

A first clue lies in the fact that all European leaders in Davos — like Carney himself — reaffirmed their commitment to NATO and to the proxy war in Ukraine. How can one credibly claim to seek “independence” from the United States while remaining firmly embedded in NATO — the primary instrument through which Washington has long militarily subordinated its Western “allies” — and actively supporting a proxy war that has been the central driver of Europe’s economic degradation and geopolitical hyper-vassalisation?

There is much discussion today of a so-called “European NATO” — a NATO without the United States. But this is a fantasy. NATO is structurally anchored to US leadership, capabilities and command structures. Thus, European rearmament within NATO does not represent a break with the existing order; rather, it reinforces the Atlanticist system and deepens Europe’s structural reliance on North American power. This should dispel any illusion of European strategic autonomy or sovereignty.

Greenland is the most obvious illustration of the chasm between rhetoric and material reality. Publicly, European leaders are posturing as defenders of Denmark’s sovereignty, condemning Trump’s annexationist threats as violations of international law. In practice, however, they have already moved to militarise Greenland — and the Arctic more broadly — within the framework of NATO. This was made explicit by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at Davos: “President Trump and other leaders are right. We have to do more there. We have to protect the Arctic against Russian and Chinese influence”.

This stance is presented as an alternative response to Trump’s threats. In reality, it amounts to a capitulation to them: Greenland is effectively being placed under US control via NATO. Trump himself has boasted that ongoing negotiations grant the US “total access” without the US “paying anything”.

Ironically, this is a textbook example of the very “performative sovereignty” Carney himself decried — a posture that speaks the language of autonomy while fully accepting the material fact of subordination through integrated NATO command structures, US-controlled critical infrastructure and Western financial architectures.

Meanwhile, for all the talk of Greenland’s right to self-determination, Greenlanders’ own preferences are being sidelined. Many residents have expressed frustration at being treated as objects of geopolitical bargaining rather than as a people with agency. Though some Greenlanders see a need for increased surveillance and security in the Arctic given global tensions, they stress that this should not come at the expense of sovereignty or be used to justify external control. But the reality is that the decision has already been made irrespective of local consent.

One is therefore entitled to ask whether this episode amounts to a classic bad cop-good cop manoeuvre designed to achieve the long-standing goal of militarising Greenland. The logic is familiar: first, a worst-case scenario is introduced; then, an “alternative” solution — long-sought but previously politically untenable — is presented as the only viable means of averting disaster.

Ultimately, the Davos rhetoric of autonomy and resistance appears less like a geopolitical turning point than a rebranding of empire, where the language of sovereignty is increasingly invoked even as the structures of dependency remain or even intensify.

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

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The United Nations is facing the deepest crisis in its eighty-year history. Its legitimacy has been eroding for years, attracting criticism from across the political spectrum. Critics of US and Western foreign policy denounce the organisation as powerless in the face of mass slaughter in Gaza and repeated unilateral US military actions carried out without Security Council authorisation. Liberal Atlanticists fault it for its inability to halt Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or bring the war to an end. Meanwhile, the MAGA movement portrays the UN as an instrument of a “globalist elite” bent on eroding national sovereignty.

Today, however, the organisation confronts a more direct challenge: an open assault from the country that has long been its principal architect, sponsor and largest financial contributor — the United States. Donald Trump, a long-standing critic of the UN, has moved from rhetoric to action. Since returning to power, his administration has slashed voluntary contributions to UN agencies and withheld mandatory payments to both the regular and peacekeeping budgets. According to UN officials, the US currently owes billions of dollars in assessed contributions, prompting the Secretary-General to warn that the organisation faces the risk of “imminent financial collapse”.

The pressure is set to intensify. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would drastically reduce or eliminate funding for several UN bodies, including the regular budget and peacekeeping operations. At the same time, he has launched a parallel initiative — the so-called “Board of Peace” — explicitly framed as an alternative to the existing multilateral system and chaired by Trump himself. So far, only a limited number of countries, largely US-aligned governments in the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, have signalled participation. Notably, Western countries have declined or hesitated, while major powers such as China, Russia and India have refrained from formal commitment.

For these reasons, the initiative is unlikely to displace the UN in the near term, as it is rightly perceived as little more than a tool for projecting US power — and legitimising Trump’s cowboyish foreign policy. The UN system will thus probably endure, but in a weakened and increasingly contested form. This erosion of authority, however, cannot be attributed solely to institutional failure. The UN — like any international organisation — ultimately mirrors the global distribution of power.

This has always been the case. Despite the language of universal legality, international law has often been largely a myth, enforced selectively when it aligned with the interests of dominant powers and ignored when it did not. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq is a textbook example of this asymmetry. But it couldn’t otherwise: international law lacks an independent enforcement mechanism; there is no global police force capable of compelling compliance. Its force has therefore always been less coercive than normative — grounded more in legitimacy and shared expectations than anything else.

What distinguishes the current moment is not merely the persistence of power politics but the diminishing effort to cloak it in legal or moral justification. Previous US administrations at least sought the appearance of multilateral legitimacy; today, that veneer is gone. The UN has limited means to counter such unilateralism. Yet concluding that the organisation — or international law itself — is therefore obsolete would be a leap. Even without hard enforcement, international norms exert real influence. States, including powerful ones, remain dependent on alliances, trade and diplomatic recognition. Disregarding widely accepted norms carries reputational and political costs, as the global backlash against Israel and Trump illustrates.

A system in which states retain at least a normative incentive to respect shared rules is preferable to one governed openly by raw force. At the same time, it is unrealistic to expect the UN alone to resolve the world’s crises. The fate of conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine or any other region is ultimately shaped by the broader balance of power rather than by resolutions passed in New York.

Meaningful change therefore depends less on institutional reform than on geopolitical accommodation among major powers. Should they succeed in forging a new equilibrium — a kind of updated global Westphalian understanding — the UN could regain relevance. If they fail, its capacity to prevent escalation will remain limited. In this sense, the organisation reflects the fractures and alignments of the international system itself.

But we should be clear about who the outlier is. On a wide range of issues, the global majority frequently votes with remarkable consensus, leaving the US and its closest Western allies isolated. Far from being detached from reality, the UN often mirrors it — a “world minus one”, as some have put it, or perhaps more precisely, a world minus the West.

What is clear is that a more balanced, cooperative and genuinely multipolar framework is urgently needed. The hope is that that this systemic reconfiguration can occur through negotiated accommodation rather than the mass conflict that catalysed the UN’s formation.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

X: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Over the past four years, Europe’s shift from Russian to American has already translated into higher energy prices that have crippled industrial competitiveness and pushed major economies, above all Germany, towards deindustrialisation. But now, just as Brussels celebrates the final approval of a complete ban on Russian gas by the end of the year, things are about to get much worse.

This week, US gas prices surged around 70%, reaching their highest level in three years. Those price spikes will feed directly into higher gas and electricity costs in Europe — during one of the coldest winters in years, and at a time when millions of Europeans are already unable to afford adequate heating.

The episode encapsulates the self-destructive character of EU energy policy over the past four years. Yet the problem is not merely that cheap and reliable Russian gas has been replaced with costlier and more volatile American LNG. More troubling still is that the United States is far more likely to use its energy exports as an instrument of political pressure than Russia ever was, leaving the EU more dependent on its imperial master than ever.

For all the talk of Russia’s “weaponisation” of gas supplies, history tells a different story. For decades, first the Soviet Union and later Russia continued supplying energy to Germany and the rest of Europe through multiple geopolitical crises, including during the height of the Cold War. More recently, even after the delivery of German weapons to Ukraine, and then the attack on Nord Stream, Moscow repeatedly stated that it was up to Berlin whether to resume gas supplies or not.

The United States, by contrast, has a long and well-documented history of weaponising energy — using it as leverage to extract economic and geopolitical concessions. And under Donald Trump, this has become explicit policy. The US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. This is not mere rhetoric.

Even though Europe’s dependence on US energy was already a fait accompli by the time Trump returned to office, since then Trump has actively sought to further deepen and entrench that dependence. But even more worryingly, Washington has increasingly politicised these energy flows, with US officials openly linking continued LNG supplies to regulatory and political concessions — or even more disturbingly weaponising US energy exports to extract concessions not only over Greenland but across a wide range of issues.

Europe now effectively finds itself heavily dependent for its gas on a country whose President openly threatens the territorial integrity of a European state. Whatever risks were associated with dependence on Russian gas, they pale in comparison.

It is crucial to understand, however, that Trump’s weaponisation of European energy supplies is about far more than bluster or the ruthless pursuit of short-term gains. As the US National Security Strategy makes clear, these moves are part of a broader, long-term strategy aimed at securing American energy dominance for decades to come. This is about much more than just increasing revenues for American energy companies. It’s part and parcel of Trump’s desperate ditch to preserve US hegemony at all costs in a rapidly changing global order.

If we look at many US actions in recent years — from severing Europe’s access to Russian gas, to the seizure of Venezuelan oil assets, to escalating pressure on Iran — they are all, in one way or another, aimed at reasserting American physical and financial control over global energy flows, gaining leverage over adversaries and allies alike, and deterring countries from breaking with the unwritten rules of the US order.

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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The annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is not known as a hotbed of anti-imperialist resistance — let alone anti-US rhetoric. Yet that was unmistakably the tone of many speeches delivered this year.

“Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House”, Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever said, pointing to last year’s EU-US trade deal, widely criticised as tantamount to Brussels’s capitulation to Washington. “But now so many red lines are being crossed. Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else”.

“This is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, boldly proclaimed French president Emmanuel Macron.

Faced with Trump’s aggressive unilateralism, “it is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe”, said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

These remarks were largely prompted by Trump’s repeated threats against Greenland — threats he partially walked back at Davos by citing an unspecified NATO framework agreement supposedly in the works.

Yet the most striking and widely discussed speech was delivered by Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney.

The end of a “pleasant fiction”

“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality”, Carney declared, “where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints”.

Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

Most astonishingly, Carney openly declared the so-called “rules-based international order” dead — and indeed questioned whether it ever truly existed:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles and benefited from its predictability. We could pursue value-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Here, Carney is not merely saying that the “rules-based order” is dead. He is conceding that the said order was always, at least in part, a fiction — one in which rules were applied selectively by the hegemon to advance its interests, while subordinate powers went along with the charade because they, and particularly their subimperial elites, benefited from it.

However, Carney argued that this bargain has collapsed now that the hegemon has turned its coercive tools against Western allies themselves, Greenland being the most obvious example, alongside Trump’s threats against Canada and his aggressive use of tariffs.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Strikingly, Carney implicitly compared the current decline of US hegemony to the final days of the Soviet Union, invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the shopkeeper who sustains an exhausted system by continuing to display a communist slogan no one believes in. Then, as now, Carney argued, it is time to “stop living within a lie”:

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

The sign in question he is referring to is, of course, the myth of a mutually beneficial US-led Western alliance.

“What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?”, Carney asked.

First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is — a system of intensifying great-power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

Carney’s conclusion is that middle-ranking Western powers must break ranks with the hegemon, coordinate among themselves and bolster their sovereignty — their capacity to withstand external pressure.

When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

More broadly, Carney appeared to call for a new, more “honest” rules-based order grounded in what he termed “value-based realism”, citing Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb:

Other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

This, he argued, requires being “principled and pragmatic” and embracing “variable geometry” — different coalitions for different issues — citing new strategic partnerships with Qatar and China. Notably, these remarks came just days after Carney’s high-profile visit to Beijing, the first by a Canadian leader since 2017, during which he described China as “more predictable” than the United States and spoke of a “new world order”.

This was echoed in his conclusions at Davos:

We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.

What should we make of Carney’s speech, which according to the New York Times was greeted with standing ovations and approving references from other Western leaders?

Many critics of US imperialism hailed it as historic. Geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand wrote:

Make no mistake, Carney’s speech at Davos may prove to be one of the most important speeches made by any global leader over the past 30 years. This is the type of speech that will likely be remembered in history books centuries from now. I’m not exaggerating: it’s potentially this consequential.

Think about how extraordinary this is. One of America’s closest allies — a G7 country, a Five Eyes country, a NATO country, its next-door neighbour — directly and officially, on the global stage, compared American hegemony to the Soviet Union and explicitly called its end.

Such enthusiasm is understandable. A senior Western leader openly questioning American hegemony, exposing the “rules-based order” as a fiction and calling for coordinated resistance by middle powers — while being applauded by the Western establishment — is undeniably significant. Yet I believe a more sober and critical reading is required.

A rather selective criticism of the “rules-based order”

A first point to note is that, for all his calls for truth-telling, Carney’s speech was remarkably evasive. While he conceded that “international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”, this formulation is an extreme euphemism.

A genuinely honest account would have named the reality behind this asymmetry: decades of violence inflicted on the Global South through exploitation, coercion, subversion, regime change and war — violence actively supported by US vassals, including Canada.

Canada played a significant role in the US-led war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, deploying more than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces personnel to the country. Although it did not officially participate in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Canada provided extensive material and logistical support to the operation — which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — by maintaining naval vessels in the Persian Gulf and allowing Canadian military personnel to serve within coalition forces through exchange programmes.

Canada played a central role in the 2004 US-orchestrated overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a pivotal event that deepened foreign influence and contributed to Haiti’s ongoing instability. It also played an active role in NATO’s 2011 war on Libya, which destroyed the country’s central government and plunged it into lasting chaos and violence.

Furthermore, over the past two years, Canada has aided the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by continuing to supply weapons to Israel. And more recently, it offered implicit support for the United States’ blatantly illegal attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro.

One might therefore say that an honest appraisal of the US-led “rules-based order” would have to acknowledge not just its failures, but its truly criminal consequences — and Canada’s complicity in them. Yet Carney not only glossed over this, but indeed argued that this very order enabled Canada to “pursue value-based foreign policies”, the very policies he now claims Trump is obstructing and that Canada and other states must seek to pursue independently. In doing so, Carney appears to uphold the very fiction he claims to be demolishing.

The same applies to his claim that only now — under Trump — has the world entered a ruthless age of power politics in which “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”, or that only now has the United States begun using “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion”. This “Year Zero” narrative is deeply disingenuous.

In fact, the weaponisation of economic relations and the brutal consequences of sanctions have been a reality for decades. In the 1990s, the United Nations imposed sweeping sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait; these sanctions, backed and enforced by Western powers including Canada, were associated with severe deprivation, widespread malnutrition, shortages of medicine and clean water, and a dramatic collapse in living standards — so much so that estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, particularly among children.

Likewise, the United States’ unilateral sanctions against Venezuela have had profound human costs. Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that over 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of sanctions by early 2020, as shortages of food and medicine intensified under the pressure of economic blockade policies.

Canada has supported these sanction regimes politically and diplomatically, aligning with US policy on Venezuela and enforcing multilateral sanctions on Iraq. Notably, Mark Carney himself was governor of the Bank of England during the first Trump administration’s coup attempt against Venezuela in 2019, when he oversaw the illegal freezing — effectively the theft — of billions of dollars’ worth of gold belonging to the Venezuelan state.

To suggest that only recent US policy has turned economic instruments into weapons obscures the long history of Western coercive economic measures that have inflicted immense suffering on civilian populations, particularly in the Global South.

A rebranding of empire?

The same “Year Zero” narrative also underpins Carney’s comments on sovereignty. In his speech, he implies that integration with the United States has only now — under Trump — come to entail subordination for second-tier Western countries. In reality, this has always been the case. Since the end of the Second World War, Western states have been politically, economically and militarily subordinated to the United States.

It is often argued that these countries benefited from their subimperial role within the US-led system. But such benefits were never evenly distributed. Even within the West, alternative models of socioeconomic organisation — greater redistribution of wealth, resource nationalism or non-aligned foreign policies — were systematically foreclosed. This was achieved not only through economic pressure and political manipulation, but, at times, through covert and overt violence, including rogue operations carried out by Western military, intelligence and security services, typically under US direction, with the explicit aim of suppressing the left.

In this context, Western leaders aligned themselves with the US-managed order primarily in pursuit of their own class and personal interests, rather than those of their societies. Indeed, those who sought to deviate from Washington’s strategic dictates often faced severe political consequences, and in some cases violent ends. To suggest that Western subordination to the United States is a novelty introduced by Trump is therefore simply false.

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