Interesting links

European militarism, the Thucydides Trap, the censorship-industrial complex, and much more

I know it’s been a while, but I’m finally back with my selection of the best reads of the past week (or weeks in this case) — an exclusive content for paying subscribers only. I promise I’ll be sending out much more regular updates from now on — hopefully once a week. Thanks for supporting my work: constantly churning out in-depth articles involves hours of research only a fraction of which is paid. So again, thanks.

• Let’s start with Wolfgang Streeck’s latest article, an absolute must-read on Europe’s emerging new order — a terrifying mix of austerity 2.0, renewed German hegemony and aggressive militarism in the context of the bloc’s “hyper-subalternity” to the US. Just when you though the EU couldn’t get any worse…

  Working with the Baltic states and Poland, the United States has managed in recent months to push Germany into something like a position of European leadership, on the provision that it takes responsibility for organizing and, importantly, financing the European contribution to the war. Step by step over the past year, the EU was simultaneously turned into an auxiliary of NATO — in charge, among other things, of economic warfare — while NATO became more than ever an instrument of American policy flagged as “Western”.

• I also wrote about the same topic here.

• Adam Tooze on the conflict in the US between different business interests — those interested in trade with China on the one hand, and those that thrive on war (i.e. the military-industrial complex) — and how the latter is winning.

• Washington Post article on how leaked intelligence documents show that key nations, including some of the most populous in the world, aren’t going along with with President Biden’s policies toward Russia and China, and indeed are more or less overtly strengthening ties with the countries, as I’ve noted in several recent articles of mine (see here and here).