What, then, is the package that the Commission is so keen to sign into law? It is a framework totalling almost €2 trillion, equivalent to around 1.26% of EU gross national income (GNI) over the seven-year period. The European Parliament, never shy about spending other people’s money, wants to push that to 1.38% of GNI. But neither institution really admits the structural tensions buried in the figures. The EU must service roughly €750 billion in bloc pandemic debt, the repayment of which is now being permanently integrated into the regular EU budget. The Commission’s own proposal earmarks €149.3 billion for repaying the so-called “NextGenerationEU Recovery” and “Resilience Facility” funds — a sum that amounts to nearly 10% of total MFF commitments.

This matters because of what it reveals about the true nature of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). What was sold to European publics as an exceptional, one-off response to the Covid crisis is now the fiscal template for the Union’s future. The pandemic fund set the precedent: the EU can borrow on capital markets, distribute grants to member states, and then embed the repayment into the general budget for decades to come — all without anything resembling a proper democratic mandate. This is arguably what the “unprecedented” EU fiscal response to the pandemic was always about: normalising common debt as a mechanism for tilting the institutional balance of power decisively in favour of the Commission, downgrading member states and locking in a structural shift in European integration. Indeed, the EU has since repeated the trick with a €90 billion package for Ukraine, again funded through joint debt backed by the common budget. The “historical exception” has quietly become the norm.

To repay its vast debts, the Commission has proposed a package of new levies on companies. But if the new taxes fall short, as is likely, the fallback is a compulsory levy on member states. The existing “Own Resources Decision” — another wonderful piece of EU lexicon — already empowers the Commission to call on national governments for additional GNI-based contributions to cover NGEU repayments, on top of regular programme spending. In other words, if the new revenue streams underperform, the bill lands automatically on national treasuries, decided not by sovereign parliaments, but by the remorseless logic of the EU’s debt repayment. At any rate, EU debt now functions as a de facto tax on member states, bypassing the normal channels of democratic budgetary control.

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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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)

In short, three key ministries in the new Peter Magyar government — energy, foreign affairs and finance — are now led by people who built their careers inside Western multinational corporations, all of them linked to two of the most powerful actors in the global economy, BlackRock and Vanguard, and in one case with strong ties to the US security state as well. This means that Western corporate interests in general, and American energy interests in particular, now have direct representation at the highest levels of the Hungarian state.

There is truth in the charge that Orbán’s government cultivated a domestic class of “oligarchs” and concentrated economic power in loyal hands. But Hungary’s domestic capitalist class pales next to what is poised to replace it. Whereas the corruption of local strongmen is visible, nameable, prosecutable in principle, the institutionalised influence of global capital is none of these things.

Companies like Shell (from which the new energy minister hails), along with the asset management funds that own them, have hijacked democratic decision-making across the Western world. They call it lobbying rather than corruption — but the distinction, in terms of outcomes for ordinary people, is largely cosmetic.

As former MP and Green Party co-founder (which he has since left) András Schiffer has asked, will the feudal power of domestically controlled capitalism simply be replaced by the more anonymous, more pervasive and far less accountable power of global big capital — with a liberal gloss applied over the transfer?

In light of the above, the trajectory of the Magyar government is not difficult to predict: energy diversification towards US LNG, financial opening towards Western institutions and corporate interests, and a foreign policy recalibrated towards Brussels and the Atlanticist establishment.

Read my deep dive into the new Hungarian power elite 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)

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The risk of an all-out conflict between NATO and Russia is higher than it’s ever been — even at the height of the Cold War — given how deeply the two sides are now entangled in what is, in every operational sense, an increasingly direct military confrontation, even if the fiction of non-belligerence is still formally maintained. Unlike during the Cold War, when the superpowers maintained elaborate protocols designed to prevent direct confrontation, the lines today are blurred to the point of near-invisibility. A war that was supposed to be contained within Ukraine’s borders has steadily metastasised into something far more dangerous: a proxy conflict in which NATO’s role has become so operationally central that the distinction between proxy and principal has largely collapsed, and in which each week brings fresh evidence that the escalatory logic is running well ahead of any political capacity to control it.

The events of recent weeks have made this unmistakably clear.

Last week, a Ukrainian drone in the Donbas struck a college in Donbas, killing 21 people, most of them students.

This represents a very serious escalation in Ukraine’s intensifying drone offensive against Russia in recent months — including a growing number of deep-strike attacks carried out on Russian territory. Just a few weeks ago, at least three people were killed and several more injured in a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters, by March Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s three main export terminals on its western coasts — Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic — had knocked out around 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity. According to a New York Times estimate, by early April Ukrainian strikes had also damaged or destroyed around 20% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have struck two dozen Russian oil refineries, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

Some of the more recently targeted sites were located as far as 1,500-1,700 km from the Ukrainian border, signalling a significant improvement in Ukraine’s long-range drone capabilities.

As John Mearsheimer noted in a recent interview with Glenn Diesen, Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian territory, including Moscow, represent a significant step up the escalation ladder. Though unimpressed by their immediate military effect, the trajectory concerns him deeply:

The amount of damage that those drones can do is not that great... it’s certainly not going to affect the outcome of the war in any meaningful way. That’s not going to happen. But I think the great danger moving forward here is that the Ukrainians working with the Europeans who remain determined to defeat Russia will increase the number of strikes and the kind of strikes on Russia.

Russia has already responded to the drone attack on the Donbas college with a massive assault on Kyiv, one of the largest since the start of the war, including the use of nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles. And it has already threatened to launch a fresh wave of “systematic strikes” against the capital. The new strikes will target “decision-making centres and command posts”, alongside drone manufacturing facilities in the city, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Moscow has called for foreign nationals and diplomats to leave Kyiv “as soon as possible” and warned citizens to stay away from administrative and military buildings.

So far Moscow has refrained from targeting Ukrainian headquarters — a rather remarkable fact given that the Ukrainian armed forces have repeatedly targeted Russian headquarters, as Anatol Lieven noted. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian General Staff claimed that it had destroyed a major Russian command and control centre in Lugansk with British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. The effective use of these missiles — which Ukraine has been firing for the past two years — requires US targeting data.

Despite this, Moscow has not targeted Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv precisely because of the likelihood that US and other NATO soldiers and intelligence officers would be killed, risking drastic escalation in response by the West. Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency and reopened diplomatic negotiations, the Russian government has also been restrained by a desire not to either anger or weaken him. However, last week US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the peace talks are at a standstill, and that “there are no such talks occurring at this time”.

This points not merely to a dangerous escalation in the war — but also to its potential expansion beyond Ukraine’s borders.

After all, though these attacks are formally being carried out by Ukraine, the reality is that Ukraine could never carry out these drone attacks on Russian territory without intelligence and satellite support from NATO — and from the US specifically. Despite Trump’s peace overtures, his administration has continued providing Ukraine with intelligence to carry out long-range drone attacks against Russian energy infrastructure, according to multiple US and Ukrainian officials. The intelligence helps Ukraine “shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defenses”. One source described Ukraine’s drone force as the “instrument” the US is using to achieve the goal of undermining the Russian economy and pushing Putin toward a settlement. The CIA has also been involved in building up Ukraine’s drone programme.

The degree of US involvement goes further than mere intelligence-sharing. While one US official said Ukraine selects the target and the US provides information on its vulnerabilities, other officials said the US has actually been setting target priorities for the Ukrainian military — meaning the US is in effect choosing what to strike.

The US also provides satellite support — both in the form of real-time GPS guidance (particularly over Ukrainian and Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory via Elon Musk’s Starlink) and through the provision of geospatial data that allows drones to operate without a real-time GPS signal, such as in areas where the signal is jammed: pre-loaded terrain maps, route data, target coordinates and air-defence evasion profiles, all of which depend on American satellite reconnaissance and intelligence.

This means that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations against Russia are functionally a US-NATO operation wearing Ukrainian colours. But NATO isn’t just providing the intelligence and satellite support for these attacks — and of course the money for the drones. Increasingly, it is providing the drones themselves as well.

Even though the overwhelming majority of drones used by Ukrainian forces are produced inside Ukraine itself, a newer and strategically significant development is the deliberate expansion of drone manufacturing into European countries, partly to reduce vulnerability to Russian strikes on Ukrainian facilities. Zelensky announced plans to open ten joint enterprises for drone production in Europe in 2026.

The country at the centre of this development is Germany. The Merz government is deepening its military cooperation with Kyiv, becoming increasingly a co-belligerent in the conflict with Russia. With American disengagement, Germany has long been Ukraine’s primary financial backer. But in mid-April, for the first time the German government entered into a strategic partnership with the defence sector of a country at war. The agreement paves the way for the co-production of weapons systems, drones with a range of up to 1,500 km and long-range missiles, together with Kyiv. One of the most visible examples is Quantum Frontline Industries in Germany — a joint venture between Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics — where the first drone rolled off the production line less than two months after the partnership was announced.

With a stroke of the pen, the German government has swept away the entire domestic debate of recent years over supplying German weapons to Ukraine for strikes on targets inside Russian territory. As former German MP Sevim Dagdelen has written, with the integration of Berlin’s and Kyiv’s defence industries we are witnessing the emergence of a German-Ukrainian military-industrial complex under Berlin’s hegemony. Indeed, it is likely that German-made long-range drones were used in the recent attacks on Moscow and the Moscow region.

Other European countries are involved as well. Since the end of 2024, Finnish group Summa Defence has set up several joint ventures with Ukrainian firms to produce drones in Finland. British firm Prevail Partners and Ukraine’s Skyeton joined forces in July 2025 to produce the Raybird surveillance drone in the UK. Skyeton has also opened a Raybird production line in Slovakia and is negotiating additional European partnerships, while Ukrainian drone consortiums are building assembly and component plants in Finland and Denmark.

This means that European nations — first and foremost Germany — are becoming ever more directly involved in the conflict. This seriously increases the risk of Russian retaliatory strikes on European territory. Indeed, in mid-April, the Russian Defence Ministry published the names and addresses of European companies — including several Italian firms — involved in the production of Ukrainian drones, stating that “the European public should both clearly understand the true reasons of threats to their security and know the addresses and locations of ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘joint’ enterprises producing UAVs and components for Ukraine on the territory of their countries”.

To make matters worse, there is growing evidence that Ukrainian drones are passing through the airspace of Baltic NATO countries to attack Russian targets — such as the drones that hit the Russian oil terminals in Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have triggered repeated airspace alerts over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, prompting NATO fighter jet scrambles on multiple occasions, with at least one Ukrainian drone being shot down by a NATO jet over Estonia on May 19. Just days before, another Ukrainian drone struck an empty oil storage facility in Latvia. The political fallout has been significant, causing the collapse of the Latvian government over its handling of the crisis.

Russia has accused the Baltic states and NATO of actively allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace for strikes on Russia, framing it as NATO aggression. Presidential adviser Nikolai Patrushev stressed that this constitutes direct NATO country participation in attacks on Russian territory. For their part, Ukraine and the Baltic countries have rejected claims of deliberate collusion, accusing Russia of using electronic warfare and jamming to redirect Ukrainian drones into Baltic airspace — though this does not explain why Russia has proven unable to prevent drone attacks on sensitive and civilian targets, including in Moscow. European Commission President von der Leyen went as far as saying that “Russia and Belarus bear direct responsibility” for the Ukrainian drone incursions.

What is clear is that tensions in the Baltic are higher than they have ever been. The risk of a conflict between NATO and Moscow breaking out there is heightened further by the recent announcement of the creation of a joint naval force, dubbed the Northern Navies Initiative, comprising the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands. This force appears to have the explicit aim of containing Russia between the Arctic and the Baltic, potentially by obstructing Moscow’s commercial traffic — and in particular its so-called “shadow fleet”. Provocations such as the boarding of Russian vessels, or even a naval blockade, would constitute an obvious casus belli. To this must be added the militarisation of Finland, which recently joined NATO, and the espionage and aerial surveillance operations being conducted from its territory against Moscow — factors that are transforming the Scandinavian country into a new strategic threat in Russia’s eyes.

It is not an exaggeration to say that we are one incident — real or engineered — away from the situation rapidly escalating into a direct NATO-Russia war. This is particularly concerning given the fact that Western provocations are emboldening the hardliners in Moscow.

Among the more radical approaches, that of Sergey Karaganov stands out — a long-standing political scientist, formerly an adviser to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and currently among Putin’s advisers. Since the beginning of the conflict, Karaganov has advocated the possible use of nuclear weapons in Europe. His argument is that European elites are entirely discredited and lack the legitimacy to remain in power. But above all, they are incapable of reaching a compromise with Russia. They must be stopped by force of arms to prevent the conflict from spreading across Europe — first and foremost by striking strategic and highly symbolic military targets on European territory with conventional weapons.

According to Karaganov, if this were not sufficient to “persuade” European elites to come to terms with Russia, it would be necessary to resort to a “demonstrative” nuclear strike, or even one aimed at eliminating the European elites themselves. Such ideas, largely marginal at the outset of the conflict, are progressively gaining ground in both Russian military and political circles. In parallel, pressure on Putin for a change of strategy is mounting.

Mearsheimer takes seriously the argument advanced by Karaganov — that Russia should strike European targets with conventional weapons, escalating to nuclear if necessary — noting that what was once a minority view has gained wide acceptance inside Russia:

He argues now and I take him at his word because he is an honest person that the overwhelming majority of people that he talks to agree with him. The Russians in a sense are fed up.

On the nuclear dimension, Mearsheimer explains why the mere prospect of nuclear use gives Karaganov’s strategy its coercive logic:

Once you begin to go up the escalation ladder, everybody understands that at some point up there... somewhere up that ladder is nuclear use. On one of the rungs is the use of nuclear weapons... the mere threat of nuclear weapons will have huge deterrent value.

He also makes a striking historical comparison regarding Western red-line violations:

It’s truly amazing that the United States and Britain aided Ukraine when it invaded the Russian homeland in the summer of 2024. This is the Kursk offensive... the idea that we would help an ally invade the Soviet Union, that would never happen... or that we would help an ally attack one leg of the strategic nuclear triad. This is just unthinkable. It was just so dangerous.

His conclusion on the Russian strategic dilemma is the following:

If you’re playing Russia’s hand... you’re going to have to put your foot down, as my mother used to say. And you’re going to have to send a very clear signal that this is just unacceptable.

The risk of war is not some distant abstraction — it is dangerously, imminently real. The mechanisms of escalation that have brought us to this point are well understood: each step up the ladder, taken with the confident assumption that the other side will back down, makes the next step more likely and the space for de-escalation narrower. Western leaders have convinced themselves, through a combination of wishful thinking and institutional inertia, that Russia will continue to absorb provocations without responding in kind. But every week that passes without a diplomatic off-ramp brings us closer to the moment when that assumption is tested to destruction.

What makes the current situation uniquely perilous is not just the military escalation but the complete collapse of the political imagination that might arrest it. There are no Cold War realists, no back-channel, no serious European leader with the standing and the will to propose a negotiated settlement. There is only the momentum of the war machine, now distributed across a dozen countries and thousands of companies, producing weapons in Finnish factories, German joint ventures and British workshops — all of them feeding a conflict that, in the absence of urgent political intervention, has no logical terminus short of catastrophe.

The responsibility lies, ultimately, with European citizens. Our governments are not acting in our name or in our interests. It falls to us — before the next incident, the next miscalculation, the next drone that crosses into the wrong airspace — to demand that they step back from the brink.

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 English version of an interview that appeared in the May-June edition of the German magazine Hintergrund.

1. The Illusion of Multipolarity and “Engineered Chaos”

It is widely observed that a multipolar order is emerging, yet you have described US foreign policy — particularly under Trump — not as aimless, but as “engineered chaos”. How does Washington successfully use this strategy to obstruct a stable new international order, and who are the primary victims: the declared adversaries like China or the European “partners”?

Yes, I believe that Washington’s strategy is not aimless, but is rather the deliberate engineering of permanent chaos and disorder. Unable to defeat its rivals head-on, the US seeks to prevent any stable alternative order from consolidating. The logic is straightforward: a multipolar world requires, by definition, some degree of international order and predictability. By systematically dismantling that order — discarding treaties, weaponising sanctions, launching illegal wars, destabilising peripheral states — Washington ensures that no stable, coherent alternative international system can take root.

Both China and Europe are targets of this globalised proxy-war strategy, which targets the weaker links of the rival system, though they face it very differently. China is the US’s principal long-term adversary whose rise must be slowed at all costs, but China is also large, nuclear-armed and too economically integrated into the global system to attack directly. Europe is far more vulnerable, and in many ways a more immediately useful target. Keeping Europe destabilised, dependent and tied to Washington through NATO and energy prevents the emergence of the one geopolitical bloc that, if it ever achieved genuine autonomy, could decisively tip the global balance: a Eurasian economic space fully integrated within a new multipolar or polycentric global framework.

Europe is therefore a primary victim of this strategy, arguably more so than China. The war in Ukraine, the sabotage of Nord Stream, the forced switch to expensive American LNG in place of Russian pipeline gas, the war on Iran and its devastating energy consequences for the continent: none of these are accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a strategy designed to keep Europe weak, divided and subordinate.

2. Energy as a Geopolitical Lever and the Ukrainian Factor

You argue that Washington has deliberately replaced European reliance on Russian gas with a dependence on USA liquefied natural gas (LNG). Given the massive tensions in March 2026 over blocked pipelines in Ukraine (e.g., Druzhba), has energy infrastructure become a tool for the US to exert pressure via Kyiv on “disobedient” EU states like Hungary or Slovakia?

That energy infrastructure has become a tool of geopolitical pressure is no longer a hypothesis, it is documented fact. The US National Security Strategy explicitly frames “American energy dominance” as a strategic priority, and the Trump administration has made no secret of using LNG exports as leverage to extract political and economic concessions from European governments.

The Druzhba situation, however, requires more careful reading. The attacks on Hungarian and Slovak energy infrastructure are most plausibly the work of the EU-NATO establishment, which includes liberal-Atlanticist factions within the US state apparatus but should not be simply equated with the White House. The timing is particularly telling: these moves were clearly aimed at destabilising the Orbán government ahead of the Hungarian elections. Given that Orbán is one of Trump’s closest European allies, it would be strange to lay this at the White House’s door. What we are seeing is the permanent transatlantic state — the Brussels-NATO apparatus — pursuing its own institutional interest in eliminating a disruptive element, even at the cost of working against a sitting US president’s ally.

The broader point stands regardless: energy has become the primary lever through which both Washington and the Brussels apparatus discipline member states that pursue independent policies. Hungary and Slovakia are being punished not for violating EU rules but for refusing to subordinate their national interests to the Atlanticist consensus.

3. The Brussels “Silent Coup” and Strategic Self-Destruction

In one of your reports for MCC Brussels, you speak of a “silent coup” by the EU Commission. Why does the Brussels bureaucracy engage in an economically self-destructive game that serves Washington’s interests, and to what extent is the current crisis being used to seize powers that rightfully belong to sovereign nation-states?

Washington has long supported European integration on the reasonable calculation that one supranational government is easier to manage than dozens of national ones. The EU has therefore always functioned partly as an instrument of US influence. But reducing it to that alone would miss something important. The EU’s deeper function is the transfer of power from democratic nation-states to elite oligarchic interests — financial, corporate and bureaucratic — whose power grows precisely when governance is moved to institutions insulated from popular accountability. The Brussels apparatus serves a transnational superclass, and the American connection is one dimension of that, not the whole story.

What has changed under von der Leyen is the pace and brazenness of centralisation. The Iran war has provided a fresh opportunity. The Commission has used the crisis to assert control over foreign policy domains that formally belong to the High Representative, which is supposed to reflect the position of member states, establishing parallel structures, including an intelligence cell under direct Commission supervision and a new Directorate-General for the Middle East. The pattern is consistent: each new crisis becomes a pretext for another transfer of sovereignty upward, away from member states and away from institutions with at least some democratic anchor towards the structurally undemocratic supranational institutions of the EU.

4. Hungary’s “Strategic Autonomy” and Technological Bridges

While the EU demands an almost complete decoupling from the East, Budapest [under the previous government] maintained projects like the Paks II nuclear plant. Can such technological and energy-related cooperations serve as essential anchor points for a multipolar integration of Europe, and why was Hungary seemingly the only EU country taking the concept of “strategic autonomy” seriously?

Hungary’s insistence on completing Paks II, maintaining energy ties with Russia and preserving trade relations with China reflected a coherent understanding of what strategic autonomy actually requires in practice, as opposed to the rhetorical version Brussels peddles. Projects like Paks II matter not only for their energy output but as long-term anchors: they create technical and economic ties that are far harder to sever than political alignments, and they signalled to partners that Budapest intended to remain a serious interlocutor whatever institutional pressure it faces.

As for why Hungary stood largely alone, part of the answer is Orbán himself, a genuinely exceptional statesman by the dismal standards of contemporary European politics, one who has proven willing to absorb sustained financial and institutional punishment in defence of what he sees as Hungary’s national interests. But there is also a structural explanation. Until the 1990s, Central and Eastern European countries were largely shielded from the cultural and ideological colonisation that decades of US soft power, media dominance and Atlanticist institution-building imposed on Western Europe. The result is a more robust and unselfconscious sense of national identity. These societies were never fully “reprogrammed”, and Hungary under Orbán has been the country most willing to act on that historical difference.

5. The Weaponisation of “European Solidarity”

When Hungary temporarily halted diesel deliveries to Ukraine in response to pipeline blockades, it was condemned in Brussels as “unsolidary”. Is the term “European solidarity” today merely an ideological weapon used to suppress national interests and stigmatise any diplomatic path — such as the one favoured by the Global South (BRICS)?

The selective application of “European solidarity” tells you everything you need to know about what the concept actually means in practice. EU member states Hungary and Slovakia, whose populations are suffering measurable economic harm from pipeline disruptions carried out by Ukraine, are lectured about their obligations to the bloc. Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is not even a member state, is treated as though it commands unconditional loyalty from every European government. When Hungary suspended diesel deliveries in direct response to attacks on its own infrastructure, it was condemned. When Ukraine attacks the infrastructure of EU members, Brussels finds nothing to say.

The concept has in effect become an ideological enforcement tool, a way of delegitimising any government that deviates from the Atlanticist consensus rather than a genuine principle of mutual support. Countries that pursue diplomatic engagement with Russia, China or the Global South are framed as threats to European unity. Solidarity, in this usage, means alignment with EU-NATO and liberal-Atlanticist strategic priorities, and those who question that alignment are cast as enemies of Europe rather than defenders of European interests.

6. Germany: The Loyal Vassal and its Deindustrialisation

Germany follows the line from Washington most faithfully, yet it suffers the most from deindustrialisation. Why does the German political elite — in stark contrast to the previous leadership in Budapest — offer no significant resistance to the systematic weakening of its own economic foundation?

Germany’s incapacity to resist its own economic degradation makes sense once you appreciate how thoroughly the country was reoriented after 1945. The post-war Atlanticist reprogramming went far deeper in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, reshaping not only political institutions but universities, media, think tanks and the formation of several successive generations of professionals whose entire worldview was built within transatlantic frameworks. The Atlanticist power bloc in Germany is hegemonic in a way that has no real parallel in other countries, and any politician who strays from the Washington consensus faces immediate pathologisation, usually framed as a dangerous echo of the country’s worst historical chapters.

Nonetheless, despite this, up to a certain point, Germany was able to conduct a semi-autonomous policy. Under Schröder (and partly under Merkel), Germany managed to carve out a degree of strategic semi-autonomy vis-à-vis Russia, of which Nord Stream was the most tangible expression. That experiment proved threatening enough to provoke a sustained effort to re-establish full control: the gradual marginalisation of politicians willing to defend German economic interests, and the careful cultivation of those who would not. Friedrich Merz is the outcome of that selection process, a leader who combines assertive language with total strategic subordination and who presides over the managed decline of German industry without seriously contesting it.

7. Vulnerabilities of the BRICS and the Risk of Collapse

You have warned against “excessive confidence” in the success of multipolarity. What is the greatest structural or political vulnerability within the BRICS alliance that the US might exploit to cause the emergence of this new world order to collapse?

Yes, I think there is a good deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles, a tendency to treat the transition to a new international order as essentially inevitable and the US as capable of slowing it only marginally. I take a less deterministic view. As said already, a new international order requires, by definition, some degree of order and stability. By engineering permanent destabilisation, the US can create serious structural problems for the BRICS project without needing to win any direct confrontation.

The vulnerability the US is best placed to exploit is the strategic incoherence of the Global Majority’s collective response. Russia is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with NATO. Meanwhile, China continues to avoid direct conflict at virtually any cost, and Iran has largely been left to rely on its own military means to respond to the US-Israeli aggression (albeit with indirect support from China and Russia). The BRICS has no unified security doctrine, no shared deterrent framework and its members continue appealing to UN mechanisms and a rules-based order whose fictional character the situation in Gaza has made impossible to deny. Continued reliance on frameworks that demonstrably do not function risks signalling to the Western bloc that escalation carries no serious cost.

For all its waning power, the Western imperial bloc remains remarkably united. Developing a comparable strategic coherence among the countries of the Global Majority is probably the single most important task facing those who want to see the multipolar transition succeed.

8. The Middle East Conflict and the Iran Crisis

How does the current war involving the US, Israel and the “decapitated” Iranian leadership fit into this broader struggle for global dominance? Is this an attempt to reassert unipolar control over a key region of the multipolar world?

The war on Iran follows the same logic I described earlier: rather than direct confrontation with great powers, the US targets the weaker nodes of the rival system. Iran fits this role precisely. It supplies roughly 13 to 15 percent of China’s oil imports, forms a key part of the emerging Russia-China-Iran strategic axis, and has long represented the main obstacle to uncontested Western military primacy in the most energy-rich region on earth. Removing it simultaneously advances US energy dominance objectives and serves Israeli regional interests, and those two agendas have now fully converged around a single operation.

What makes the current war qualitatively different from earlier episodes of US-Iranian confrontation is the recklessness with which it has been launched. Previous administrations understood, at least partially, why attacking Iran directly would be catastrophic, which is why they held back despite decades of Israeli pressure. That institutional caution is now gone. Europe is already absorbing the consequences: a severe energy shock, the risk of massive refugee flows and mounting demands for direct military involvement. Two devastating wars now run simultaneously on the continent’s doorsteps, one to the east that Washington stoked, and one to the south that Washington is actively waging. The first pushed Europe deeper into vassalage. The second carries the real risk of pushing it toward economic and social collapse.

9. The Future of European Sovereignty

As we look toward the remainder of 2026, do you see a path for a “sovereigntist” turn within Europe, or has the structural dependence on Washington and the Brussels bureaucracy already reached a point of no return for most EU member states?

Two structural problems make a genuine sovereigntist turn in Europe very difficult to foresee in the near term. The first is the absence of any major party willing to confront the EU as an institution rather than simply complain about it, which is actually a retreat from where the debate stood a decade ago. The second, and in some ways more fundamental, problem is that virtually no right-populist or sovereigntist party has grappled seriously with Europe’s structural subordination to the United States, of which the EU is partly an instrument. Attacking Brussels while embracing Washington is not a coherent sovereigntism. Indeed, it avoids the very question on which everything else turns: who ultimately controls Europe’s foreign policy, energy supply and military posture.

We are thus facing a paradox. The objective conditions for a break with the Atlanticist order are more favourable than they have been in decades. US power is visibly declining, the Trump administration is generating fractures with European publics that no previous administration has managed and the EU’s institutional legitimacy is in deep crisis. Yet the political forces best positioned to exploit this opening are instead either asleep, co-opted or lacking the geopolitical literacy to understand what is happening. The one piece of genuine good news is that awareness of the need for a radical break is spreading among ordinary Europeans. On this question, it is the so-called anti-establishment parties that have fallen furthest behind their own voters.

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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Tucker Carlson’s interview with Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel has been making waves on social media. And rightly so: it’s an incredibly important testimony, from someone who used to be very close to Zelensky, which confirms much of what war critics like myself have been saying for years — about the missed opportunities for peace and how these were sabotaged by Western intervention; the totalitarian and hyper-repressive nature of the Zelensky regime and its commitment to permanent war, even at the cost of Ukraine’s extinction; the mind-boggling corruption surrounding Western aid to the country, and much more. Many of my readers are likely to have seen the interview already. But for those too lazy to do so — or who, like me, can only absorb information in written form — I’ve decided to summarise the interview’s main points. You’re welcome.

Who is Iuliia Mendel?

Mendel was born in 1986 in the Ukrainian city of Henichesk, in the Kherson Oblast, in what was then still the Soviet Union. As she explains in her 2022 book Each of Us Is President, her intellectual formation was influenced substantially by Western ideas and culture, “attending dozens of courses and programs in Europe and the United States”. She then worked as a freelance journalist in Ukraine for several years, also writing for several Western outlets, including the New York Times, Politico Europe, the Atlantic Council, Vice, Spiegel Online and Forbes.

In May 2019, shortly before becoming Zelensky’s press secretary, she co-authored an important piece in the New York Times piece on the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal. For those who don’t the story, while Joe Biden was Vice President under the Obama administration, and leading US “anti-corruption” efforts in Ukraine, his son Hunter sat on the board of Burisma Holdings — a Ukrainian energy company owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was himself under multiple criminal investigations for tax evasion, money laundering and abuse of office. Hunter was paid up to $50,000 per month despite having no experience in Ukraine and having recently been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. In December 2015, Biden publicly threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees unless Ukraine fired prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had active investigations into Burisma and Zlochevsky. Shokin was subsequently removed. The article led the Biden administration to to cut off interviews with the Times.

Anyway, in June 2019, right after Zelensky’s election, Mendel started working as his press officer. As she explains in the interview, she was hired through an open application process from 4,000 candidates, worked directly with Zelensky for two years and describes herself as genuinely loyal to him initially. She worked with him until July 2021. She supported him when Russia launched its invasion in 2022, and was grateful he stayed in the country. But since then, her views about the Ukrainian president have shifted radically. She emphasises she has no personal vendetta but believes Zelensky is “one of the biggest obstacles towards peace today”.

Zelensky’s personality and leadership style

She describes a man utterly unlike his public image. He is “emotionally uncontrollable”, frequently hysterical, treats people as disposable and lacks genuine empathy. His extraordinary acting ability generated enormous Western support in 2022, but she insists “his acting doesn’t have any substance”. Two phrases he reportedly repeated constantly reveal his worldview: “Ukraine is not ready for democracy” and “dictatorship is an order”.

The communications operation was chaotic. Zelensky and his then-chief of staff Andriy Yermak — removed by Zelensky in 2025 following a corruption investigation — constantly contradicted each other, changed strategies and moods without warning, and created an atmosphere of perpetual frantic activity that produced nothing. She describes them both as “malignant and paranoid narcissists”, with Yermak the more paranoid of the two. Zelensky had the visions; Yermak found ways to implement them — almost never through legitimate policy.

When ratings began dropping and her team argued there were simply no positive results to communicate, Zelensky rejected the premise entirely: “It doesn’t matter what’s happening. The most important thing — we need 1,000 talking heads, and if 1,000 talking heads tell positive things, then positive things are happening”. When a colleague pushed back with a specific example of broken promises to displaced families from Donbas, he reportedly slammed the table and said: “I need Goebbels propaganda. I need thousands of talking heads of Goebbels propaganda”.

Zelensky’s pre-war record and relationship with Russia

She describes Zelensky’s background as deeply intertwined with Russia. He built his career and his first significant wealth performing for Russian audiences and media. When Russia annexed Crimea and war broke out in Donbas in 2014, he was in Russia completing a film — a fact he later publicly acknowledged. More damningly, she claims he owned properties in Crimea and was vacationing there under Russian control in May 2014, enjoying time with friends from his production company 95th Quartile, apparently indifferent to the annexation. A person who worked for him at the time, helping renovate the property, is cited as her source.

He ran for president in 2019 explicitly as a peace candidate, promising to “stand on his knees in front of Putin” to stop the war, defending the right of Ukrainians to speak Russian and advocating friendship with Russia. She says this is why people voted for him — nobody wanted war.

The NATO question

She was present at a December 2019 meeting in Paris where Zelensky had a private conversation with Putin and, according to her, personally promised Putin that Ukraine would never join NATO, on the grounds that Ukraine was not economically or institutionally ready and there was no domestic consensus for it. She stresses this was not a political or personal position unique to any Western leader — it was simply the reality.

The pivot came later when Zelensky, watching his domestic ratings fall, gave a TV interview in which he spontaneously asked why Ukraine wasn’t in NATO. The nationalist audience applauded and he followed the applause. From there he escalated the rhetoric continuously, presenting NATO membership as a non-negotiable condition for peace, knowing — she insists — that it was impossible. She describes his October 2024 “victory plan”, which listed NATO membership as the central demand, as “ridiculous” and a deliberate strategy: by attaching conditions he knows cannot be met, he creates a permanent justification for continuing the war and maintaining his heroic image. He even offered to step down if Ukraine was admitted to NATO, “knowing that Ukraine is not going to be taken to NATO. So it’s very easy to promise something under the condition of impossible things”.

Peace negotiations and missed opportunities

Mendel identifies at least two concrete moments when the war could have ended:

Istanbul, April 2022: she spoke with people who represented Ukraine at those negotiations and was told the two sides had agreed on virtually everything. Zelensky himself had privately consented to territorial concessions — something he now publicly insists is unthinkable. Then Boris Johnson arrived. He promised Zelensky weapons, influence, fame and a place in history as the man who defeated Russia. Zelensky chose the war. She notes that just days before Johnson’s visit, Zelensky was on camera saying he would continue negotiations. “It is said that this is Putin’s lies but this this story was told by Ukrainians”, she adds.

Late 2022: a second opportunity for peace was foreclosed when the Biden administration, as per a New York Times account that Mendel says confirmed her own information, decided to back Zelensky’s plan to continue fighting despite all evidence that Ukraine could not win.

She has tracked around seven attempts to end the war through various mediators and countries, in which Zelensky made promises to each and lied to all of them. His positions shift constantly — on ceasefire, on territory, on NATO, on elections — creating the appearance of engagement while ensuring that nothing is ever resolved. As an example she cites the contradiction between his June 2024 peace summit and the simultaneous planning of the Kursk incursion into Russian territory.

Corruption

She makes several specific allegations:

• A friend of hers was shortlisted for Minister of Social Policy and was told during the interview process that candidates would need to propose money-laundering schemes to be financed through the ministry — the body responsible for pensioners’ payments.

• A minister she declines to name was offered a bag of cash by Zelensky and Yermak — $5,000 a month in unofficial salary — because an official salary of that amount had caused a scandal.

• Another minister told her that close associates of Zelensky were demanding illegal percentage cuts from government programs, and when informed they were taking “too much,” Zelensky smiled and said “good job, guys” — and was not joking.

• The current energy ministry scandal: the former Minister of Energy helped launder around $100 million through offshore companies connected to Russian mafia figures. The minister himself got $12 million for his role in the deal. Mendel notes that this is roughly 10% — the standard fixer’s cut — raising the question of where the other 90% went.

• The dismantling of the independent supervisory board at Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, and its replacement with loyalists, enabling what she describes as a scheme to turn it into a corruption vehicle modelled on Gazprom.

• On the IMF deal: Zelensky pushed through two difficult reforms to unlock a $5.5 billion package, demonstrating he was capable of doing it. Within days of receiving the first $2.1 billion tranche, he fired the head of the National Bank for political reasons, telling IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva the replacement would be “independent, but he will be coming from us”. Georgieva, who is Bulgarian and would speak to Zelensky in Russian, said that she stopped speaking Russian to him after that.

Demographics and the human cost of the war

Ukraine’s last census was in 2000-2001. Pre-war, government officials estimated 34-37 million people actually living in the country. With 10+ million refugees abroad and significant population in Russian-occupied territory, she estimates around 25 million remain — of whom 11 million are pensioners living on $75-200 per month. That leaves perhaps 10 million working-age people to sustain a country at war. She describes a recent case of a retired film director dying of cold and hunger at home with no one to help him, and wonders how many similar deaths will never be counted.

She describes soldiers sent to the front in inadequate winter uniforms, losing fingers and limbs to frostbite, while ordinary Ukrainian women cook food and crowdfund equipment for them. She frames this against the backdrop of hundreds of billions in Western aid, the destination of which she says needs to be tracked.

Her conclusion is stark: “I believe we are on the verge of extinction”. Ukraine cannot sustain a war of attrition against a country of 140 million that has not even borrowed to finance the conflict, while Ukraine carries debt at 100% of GDP.

Repression and political control

She describes a system of comprehensive political control:

• A member of parliament who publicly called for peace negotiations was jailed within three days on treason charges, despite security service insiders confirming he had had no contact with Russia since 2021.

• Cases of treason have multiplied many times over during the war.

• Critics are publicly smeared as Kremlin agents — a label she says will now be applied to her.

• Bloggers who questioned the war were summoned by the security service and threatened with treason charges; at least one had to flee the country.

• Zelensky uses the front line as a punishment, including for political critics. She was told by insiders that he explicitly ordered action against critical bloggers in late 2023.

• Zelensky sanctions his own citizens — an unconstitutional measure — freezing accounts and shutting businesses of opponents.

• Former president Poroshenko is sanctioned and unable to access his own money.

• A pervasive culture of cancellation targets artists, writers, churches and historical figures on the grounds of any connection, however tenuous, to Russia.

She describes Ukraine as feeling like the USSR — and says a government official told her the Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant described exactly what was happening in the country, even before Russia’s invasion.

Suspected drug use

Mendel is careful to say she never personally witnessed Zelensky taking drugs. However, she says multiple people over many years — including doctors, people who knew him for 20-25 years and people who spent time with him in clubs — have described cocaine use. During her time working for him, she noticed a consistent pattern: before interviews, after she had briefed him, he would disappear into the bathroom for 15 minutes and emerge “a completely different person — energised, full of action, ready to say everything”. She also met, inside the presidential office, a man she later learned was described as his supplier. She also references a scandal during his 2019 campaign when he challenged his opponent to drug testing, went to a clinic owned by a friend and the results were dated differently from when the samples were given.

Yermak

As noted above, Andriy Yermak was Zelensky chief of staff from 2020 to 2025 — when he was removed by Zelensky himself following a corruption investigation Mendel traces Yermak’s background from a 1990s strip club where he worked as a lawyer and met future pro-Russian politicians, through work at a luxury goods store that smuggled branded merchandise, into film production (including films about smuggling) and eventual proximity to organised crime at a local level. She says a first employee described him as someone with enormous ambitions and no talent for them. She describes the Zelensky-Yermak dynamic as a symbiosis of two paranoid malignant narcissists — Zelensky providing chaotic vision, Yermak providing the tools to implement it — operating not around policy but around personal ambition and self-preservation.

Her situation and motivation

Mendel cannot return to Ukraine after this interview. She stayed in the country through most of the war, was shelled when Russians withdrew from her area and had a husband who served at the front. She left in early 2025. She says she is speaking now because Zelensky is at a weak point and she believes people within his own power vertical who want peace may not act against her as they once would have. She is writing a book about the real Zelensky. Her message, repeated throughout, is simple: the only way to support Ukraine today is to push for a peace deal, because the country is being destroyed and its people are not Zelensky’s priority — his survival in power is.

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)

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

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

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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)

On April 8, the day after a ceasefire with Iran (which was supposed to include Lebanon) came into effect, Beirut was hit by an extremely violent Israeli bombardment.

Within minutes, entire residential buildings had been reduced to rubble — smoking heaps of concrete and twisted metal. Dozens of Israeli aircraft dropped bombs and missiles on around a hundred targets in the capital and other parts of the small neighbouring country.

The initial toll announced by Lebanon’s Ministry of Health was devastating: more than 350 dead and over 1,200 wounded. In the capital, the strikes hit residential neighbourhoods and some of the most crowded commercial streets.

“Eternal Darkness” is the emblematic name Israel gave the operation, as if signalling an intent to bring about the total annihilation of its neighbour.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had unleashed a campaign of unprecedented violence against the Gaza Strip — supported by a massive flow of US weapons — pulverising residential areas and civilian infrastructure.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces have adopted the same tactics: massive air bombardments and sweeping, arbitrary evacuation orders that have forced hundreds of thousands of people into displacement.

Civilian infrastructure, villages, and border towns have been razed to the ground to make way for “buffer zones” occupied by Israeli forces. Hospitals, medical personnel, rescue workers and journalists have been targeted — all in an atmosphere of substantial international indifference and apathy.

A Ceasefire Never Respected

The fragile ceasefire reached with Hezbollah at the end of 2024 was violated repeatedly by Israel, which struck various parts of Lebanon on multiple occasions, killing at least 370 people.

In the meantime, the American administration had been pressing the Lebanese government to proceed with Hezbollah’s disarmament, while Israel continued to bomb the country. This only served to heighten tensions within Lebanon.

Although it did not respond to Israeli violations, Hezbollah carried out a gradual rearmament.

Only after the Israeli assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28 did Tehran’s allied group respond with a rocket launch against Israel — one that the BBC itself described as “largely symbolic”.

This gave Tel Aviv the pretext to launch the large-scale operation described above, which since early March has caused more than 2,500 deaths and nearly 8,000 injuries.

At the start of the campaign, senior Israeli officials declared that Lebanon would receive the same treatment as Gaza.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for his part, stated that Beirut’s southern suburbs would soon resemble Khan Younis — the city in southern Gaza utterly razed to the ground by more than two years of bombardment.

Verbal Violence and War Crimes

Similar scorched-earth tactics were adopted by the United States and Israel in their war of aggression against Iran, accompanied by official statements of equally stark violence.

At a Pentagon press conference on March 4, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the campaign against Iran had never been “meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”.

He added that the United States would be raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and that the war was being waged “devastatingly, decisively, and without mercy”.

A few days earlier, presiding over his first Pentagon worship service since the start of the war, Hegseth had prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.

For his part, President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to blow up Iran’s power plants, bridges and desalination facilities, to “decimate“ its infrastructure and to send Iran “back to the Stone Age”.

These threats culminated in the April 7 ultimatum, when he warned that “an entire civilization will die tonight, never to be revived”, if Iran did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Such violence is not merely rhetorical — it finds full expression in the military campaign waged against Iran.

The Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) has recently submitted to the International Criminal Court and other international bodies the evidence it has gathered on possible war crimes committed by the US and Israel since the start of the bombardments on February 28.

The IRCS estimates that the Israeli-American strikes destroyed more than 132,000 civilian structures, including residential homes, hospitals, schools, universities, research institutes and bridges.

On the first day of the conflict, the United States bombed the elementary school of Minab, in southern Iran. It was hit twice, forty minutes apart, maximising the number of victims — 155 children and 26 teachers.

The violence of the Israeli-American campaign was such that even the British Telegraph described Tehran as “an apocalypse of burning hospitals and children buried under rubble”.

The provisional toll stands at at least 3,375 dead and over 26,000 wounded. It is worth noting that Iran’s retaliatory action in the Gulf, though it caused considerable damage to military and energy infrastructure, resulted in only a few dozen deaths.

The Israeli campaign against Lebanon (which caused more than 2,500 deaths) was, proportionally, even more ferocious than the Israeli-American campaign in Iran.

More Permissive Rules of Engagement

It is equally important to stress that the overwhelming violence of these military operations cannot be attributed exclusively to the current governments in the United States and Israel — it must be understood in the context of a broader transformation in the military culture of the two countries.

Naz Modirzadeh, a professor at Harvard Law School and founder of the university’s program on international law and armed conflict, described it as reflective of a “deeper transformations within the US military and its legal apparatus”.

As I wrote in an article about a year ago:

In recent years, the Department of Defense has become increasingly focused on how the US might fight a large-scale conflict against an adversary capable of matching the American military in technology and force. In such a scenario — referred to in technical jargon as a “large-scale combat operation” (LSCO) — an extremely violent military confrontation would unfold across multiple domains (air, land, sea), air superiority would not be guaranteed, casualties would run into the hundreds of thousands and entire cities would be razed to the ground.

“In short”, Modirzadeh argues, the US military has begun “preparing for an all-out war with China”. With a conflagration of such magnitude in mind, military legal experts are reinterpreting the laws of war.

In 2021, an article in Military Review, authored by two senior US Army legal experts, argued that the US would need to fight on the basis of far more permissive rules if it hoped to win a large-scale war. Further articles in the same vein followed.

Geoffrey Corn, a professor of law at Texas Tech University and former senior legal adviser to the US armed forces on the laws of war, assessing Israel’s military conduct in Gaza, argued that “the systems and processes that the IDF implemented are very similar to what we would implement in a similar battle space”.

Corn had made these statements to the American magazine The New Yorker.

The same report states that the idea “that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in line with the US military’s understanding of its own legal obligations, has become the general consensus among American military lawyers and their allies in the academy in recent years”.

The “Dahiya Doctrine”

The military tactics adopted by Israel in Gaza in turn derive from the war fought by the Israeli army against Hezbollah in 2006.

It was then that the Israeli armed forces elaborated what became known as the “Dahiya doctrine”, named after the southern suburb of Beirut — generally considered Hezbollah’s “stronghold” but simultaneously home to thousands of Shia civilians who have no necessary connection to the organisation.

The doctrine, conceived by General Gadi Eisenkot, then head of the IDF’s Northern Command, entails the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure as a method of collective punishment, designed to turn the local population against the military entity controlling that territory.

Eisenkot subsequently declared: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”.

Israel is once again applying this tactic in Lebanon where, despite the new ceasefire, it continues to level villages and civilian infrastructure — often through outright controlled demolitions.

It is estimated that since early March, Israeli forces have destroyed or damaged more than 62,000 residential units across the country. The objective is to create a permanent buffer zone that definitively prevents residents from returning.

In late March, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz declared that the 600,000 Lebanese living south of the Litani River — situated roughly 30 kilometres from the border with Israel — would never be allowed to return, and that their homes would be destroyed.

Permanent State of War

From a strategic standpoint, Israel has embraced what some have called the doctrine of “permanent security” and others that of “preventive war”, in opposition to the theory of containment previously adopted by the Jewish state.

Whatever one chooses to call it, this approach envisages no negotiated resolution to conflicts, only a military solution pursued through the massive use of force. In practice, this doctrine translates into a permanent war encompassing not only Gaza and the West Bank, but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran — what many in Israel have termed the “war on seven fronts”.

This campaign involves a total disregard for international law, rules out any political compromise and aims exclusively at the elimination of the adversary — through the decapitation of its political and military leadership or annihilation via overwhelming military superiority.

But the conflict with Iran, which rapidly spiralled into a regional war, has exposed all the limitations of this theory.

The resort to targeted killings, and to exorbitant levels of violence and destruction, has failed to bring about the collapse of the Islamic Republic in Iran or of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Even Hamas remains in power in the devastated Gaza Strip.

For its part, Israel has been ground down by over two years of uninterrupted conflict. Its army is worn out by casualties of men and materiel, by the constant mobilisation of reservists and by the need to fight on multiple fronts.

The United States has squandered enormous quantities of armaments and strained the logistical capabilities of its navy and air force, only to find itself ultimately compelled to evacuate its bases in the Arabian Peninsula.

Washington has lost control of the Persian Gulf and must now contend with the global crisis triggered by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Both the US and Israel find themselves in an unprecedented strategic, political, and moral paralysis. The temptation to resort to ever greater levels of ferocity and violence as a way out of the impasse — if heeded — is destined to drag them both deeper into an abyss into which they risk pulling the region and the world.

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)

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

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)

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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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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)

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.

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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.

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’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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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)