Controlled chaos: how Washington is sabotaging the multipolar world and sacrificing Europe

For all its waning power and apparent internal fractures, the Western imperial bloc remains remarkably united; meanwhile, the Global Majority continues to lack a comparable strategic coherence

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

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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.

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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.

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)