Crisis of hegemony and the vassalisation of Europe

Wide-ranging interview on NATO, the EU, Iran, the deep state’s cooption of the left, the misuses of the term “fascism”, the deepening global crisis of capitalist hegemony and much more

I recently had the pleasure to go back on the Macro N Cheese podcast hosted by the great Steve Grumbine.

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