The politics of European hyper-vassalisation

Europe is today more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to Washington than at any moment since the Second World War. How did we get to this point?

This is a longer version of an article originally published in Le Monde diplomatique.

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The EU was sold to Europeans as a means of collectively strengthening the continent against other great powers — particularly the United States. Yet, in the quarter-century since the Maastricht Treaty marked its birth, the opposite has occurred: Europe is today more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to Washington — and therefore weaker and less autonomous — than at any point 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. In recent years, on virtually every major issue — trade, energy, defence, foreign policy — European countries have consistently acted against their own interests in order to comply with Washington’s strategic agenda, or outright diktats.

Speaking of the recent EU-US trade deal — under which American industrial goods will enter Europe tariff-free, while European exports to the US will face a blanket 15% tariff, coupled with the EU’s pledge to purchase $750 billion worth of US energy and invest $600 billion in the US economy — Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called it Europe’s own version of the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. This was the first of several “unequal treaties” imposed on China by Western powers, granting Britain significant concessions and marking the beginning of China’s “century of humiliation”. Similarly, Varoufakis wrote, the EU-US trade deal is a “humiliation that will cast a shadow for decades upon the continent”, marking the beginning of Europe’s own century of humiliation — with the noticeable difference, however, that “[u]nlike China in 1842, the European Union has chosen permanent humiliation freely”, not on the heels of a crushing military defeat.

The French entrepreneur and geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand made a similar parallel in relation to the Trump-Putin peace summit that recently took place in Alaska. Despite the fact that the summit yielded little in concrete terms, Bertrand rightly argued that Europe’s exclusion from negotiations about the continent’s own future — with European leaders, according to the Washington Post, “scrambling to respond” and relegated to begging for scraps of information through secondary diplomatic channels — “represents one of the most humiliating moments in European diplomatic history”. “[T]here are very few examples — if any — in Europe’s millennia-old history of a military defeat against an external power where it wasn’t even at the table to negotiate the conditions for its future”, Bertrand wrote.

“It’s so bad that the best historical parallel — especially if you pair this with other recent events — can’t be found in Europe but ironically in the imperial practices Europe once perfected against weaker nations”, he added. “From the Alaska negotiations to the recent trade capitulation, Europe is being subjected to the same treatment it once meted out to colonial territories — a somewhat karmic, if deeply humiliating, historical reversal”.

As with the EU-US trade deal, the paradox is that Europe has largely engineered its own predicament: by aligning with Washington’s decade-long strategy of destabilising Ukraine — and, since 2022, embracing NATO’s proxy war against Russia, including the self-inflicted blow of severing access to cheap Russian gas — and then sabotaging Trump’s peace overtures by committing to open-ended financial and military backing for Kyiv, European countries have not only undermined their core economic and security interests, but have also alienated both Moscow and Washington, effectively excluding themselves from any major role in the negotiations.

Europe’s entire handling of the Ukraine crisis can only be described as self-destructive. While European leaders presented their actions as serving the “collective interests” of the transatlantic West, the truth is that no such unified interest exists. Indeed, one could argue that Washington’s objectives in this war went beyond weakening and “bleeding” Russia: just as crucial — perhaps even more so — was the goal of undermining Europe itself, by severing the economic and strategic ties between Europe (especially Germany) and Russia, and reasserting US dominance over the continent. This has been achieved both by reviving and expanding NATO — an institution effectively controlled by the US whose core function has always been to guarantee Europe’s strategic subordination to Washington — and by locking Europe into long-term dependence on US energy exports.

Nothing illustrates this strategy — and Europe’s subordination to Washington — more starkly than the Nord Stream bombing, an operation either executed directly by the US or outsourced to its NATO proxies. Germany’s — and Europe’s — silence over the worst act of industrial terrorism in the continent’s history, coupled with their likely complicity in covering it up and insistence on permanently banning Nord Stream, epitomises Europe’s entrenched subservience to the US.

From this perspective, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine can be seen as a strategic triumph for Washington — achieved squarely at Europe’s expense, with large parts of Western Europe, first and foremost Germany, being pushed into recession and even outright deindustrialisation. The erosion of Europe’s industrial base not only cements US geopolitical dominance but also opens the door to the economic cannibalisation of the continent by American capital, spearheaded by giants like BlackRock and other US mega-funds.

As Emmanuel Todd wrote in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power”. With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd warned, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of the European economies from the imperial centre in Washington. The EU-US trade deal — which even contains what are effectively colonial tributes disguised as “investments” — laid bare this reality.

Equally emblematic of Europe’s subservience is the EU’s rearmament drive and its pledge to meet Trump’s demand that all member states boost NATO defence spending to 5% of GDP. Presented as a step towards the “strategic autonomy” and “geopolitical independence” of a Europe capable of acting without external supervision on the international stage, the reality, as various leading intellectuals on the Spanish left recently wrote, is that the strengthening of the European arm of NATO, far from signifying a break with the existing order, “tends to reinforce the Atlanticist apparatus and consolidate the structural subordination of the European continent to North American power” — its adherence to Atlanticist commitments, its automatic alignment with Pentagon directives and its technological dependence on the US arms industry. In this context, the EU’s rearmament project represents the further functionalisation of European states — in a clear subordinate position — within the US global containment apparatus.

A final point worth underscoring is Europe’s alignment with the US in providing unwavering political, diplomatic, economic and military backing to Israel throughout the ongoing genocide in Gaza, now approaching its second year. This stance has laid bare the bloc’s flagrant double standards — the contrast with its response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could not be starker — and has shattered what little moral credibility the EU still possessed on the world stage, deepening its isolation from the global majority. In light of the delegation of European heads of state that rushed to Washington to reassert their support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, can anyone imagine that European leaders would have rushed to the White House to plead with President Trump the cause of the Palestinian people as they were pummelled and starved, not by a strategic foe of the West but by one of its allies, Israel?