The remilitarization component is a signal to the US to expect tons of orders for stuff the EU no longer makes as well as a signal to the EU electorate that any populist uprisings will be forcefully quashed. Just a reminder that the EU Army that was suggested some years ago was never intended for defense against foreign enemies, but against popular uprisings.
Actually the EU Army was a fake - sort of. When I looked into it years ago its TO&E contained many of the same personnel as were assigned to NATO commands. Personnel assignment metadata is a fantastic analytical tool, especially in terms of inferring otherwise secret information. Not just for military, also for policing etc. For instance, just by looking at personnel assignments I was able to forecast for legislators where the next police scandals were about to erupt in 12-24 months time. (Not the delinquent police officers themselves - just the cover-up crew! :))
My conclusion at the time was the EU Army in reality was just a contingency plan against NATO dissolution. Which made a lot of sense. Otherwise it made no sense at all.
I haven't run the numbers for about ten years though, so it may have changed! :)
That's a fair question - but I would say no, for a completely different reason!
If you deploy local soldiers against civilians, that's bad enough. But using foreign soldiers against civilians, even if it's just garrisoning, is a whole new level of disaster: it's likely to provoke the very insurrection you're trying to avoid. As, for example, the British discovered when using Hessian mercenaries in the US war of independence...
A RAND study circa 2003, commissioned for the Iraq war but using data from the previous century, concluded that to effectively garrison a hostile population requires an army commitment of 10% of the target population (5 rotations x 2% garrison). The only instances it found that successfully matched that commitment were all British: in South Africa, Malaya, and Northern Ireland. The USA hasn't been able to match that in any guerilla war since its invasion of the Phillippines in the Spanish-American War
Nor, interestingly, has Israel in Gaza, which is precisely why Sharon got out circa 2006 and forcibly removed all the settlers. Netanyahu however has reversed the equation: if you can't increase your garrison-supporting standing army to 210,000 (10% of 2.1 million), you simply reduce the population to a level the standing army *can* garrison. ;).
Thanks. I thought the Settlers got out of Gaza because for once the United Nations insisted on them withdrawing due to their illegality. I also thought that Sharon was one of the most blood thirsty of all of the leaders of Israel but then there's not much to choose between them.
You might well be right on the UN insistence: that could have played a part in (my understanding) that Sharon removed them by force (for whatever reason).
Whatever Sharon's moral defects, perhaps an important difference is that he was a military professional who understood military reality. Netenyahu's a chancer who rose to power largely on the reputation of his dead brother, the leader of the Entebbe raid. Worse, he arguably was complicit in the assassination of Rabin, the last and best chance for peace.
First of all, when a German is advocating massive rearmament, of which Germany would always insist on being the most armed, only fools with a lack of historical insight would fail to understand how this often repeated tale ends: with fascists in charge, those weapons turned on Europeans - and Europe in flames.
Second, this part is literally mocking the European population.... (".....To this end, she restated the need for a “European Democracy Shield” and “European Centre for Democratic Resilience”...")....because those are the words spoken by an unelected US stooge., that is in control of so much of European policy. The joke is complete.
Why is this awful unelected harridan making policy for the EU. This is nothing short of a dictatorship in my view, a sort of totalitarianism directed from the centre without any authorisation from the demos, because there is conveniently no direct voting power. I can't wait for the European Union to finally break up, a few countries here, a few countries there some years later. The only sad thing is I probably won't be alive to see it.
The EU is being led by fanatics, blinded by Russophobia, delusional in terms of reality, trafficking on a one-way road to the cliff. We have a chance to get rid of them in the vote of confidence in October. Take it!
Good assessment. Thomas Fazi captures the hollowness of von der Leyen’s speech and the dangerous trajectory it represents for Europe. What stood out most is how policies presented as guaranteeing “freedom” and “resilience” are in fact eroding both, replacing independence with dependency and civic participation with top-down centralisation.
Two additional points amplify this concern. First, the EU’s self-inflicted energy crisis is not only a question of economics but of sovereignty. By trading Russian pipeline gas for volatile, expensive LNG imports, Brussels has effectively outsourced Europe’s industrial competitiveness to Washington’s energy exports. This is not “independence” but a shift from one dependency to another, with far higher costs. Second, the so-called war on “disinformation” is less about protecting democracy than narrowing the boundaries of permissible debate. Labeling dissent as a threat to “democratic resilience” risks institutionalizing censorship at the very moment when Europe most needs pluralism and honest debate.
None of this trajectory should surprise us. Europe’s slide into authoritarianism is not an aberration but a continuation of patterns deeply embedded in its history. As I’ve argued in my own essay (link below), "Why Europe’s Democracy is an Illusion Built on Empire and Control", the continent’s democratic institutions have always been layered atop traditions of hierarchy, coercion, and empire. Today’s centralization of power in Brussels and crackdowns on dissent are simply the latest expressions of that long-standing tendency.
Fazi is right. Instead of renewal, the speech signaled more of the same, a Europe doubling down on the very mistakes that have already weakened it.
I just would like to know who is actually *seeing* this — “The speech was filled with the Orwellian vocabulary of freedom, liberty, peace, prosperity and independence”. It is truly frustrating! Keep up good work, Thomas!
It's tragic that a single EU "policy" - the draconian so-called common foreign and security policy, via its deliberate finessing of both the parliament and the Member States, as well as its obfuscating and utterly bizarre split between the TEU and the TFEU (facilitating gaming by anti-democratic zealots) - could have led so thoroughly and so quickly to the EU-wide economic collapse that now seems inevitable.
Now that Russia and China a few days ago contractually locked Europe out of both current *and* future Russian energy supply (simply by absorbing Russia's current and future output including undeveloped oilfields), it's now too late for Europe to reverse its sanctions and say sorry. The EU sanctions against Russia have been reversed into legally irreversible "embargo"-equivalents by Russia against the EU (and UK). The die is cast.
Which in turn means that we now live in a new economic world. Never mind, the irony is that so long as Russia remains determined to retain its self-image as the Third Rome, Western values will survive. :)
Turned into princesses and busy asking their women to pay for their coffee. Only to promptly turn into an incel when said women refuse. Before we ask where the giants are, I’d be first glad to know where the men actually are.
Mrs Dr Goebbels of the Fourth Reich.
The remilitarization component is a signal to the US to expect tons of orders for stuff the EU no longer makes as well as a signal to the EU electorate that any populist uprisings will be forcefully quashed. Just a reminder that the EU Army that was suggested some years ago was never intended for defense against foreign enemies, but against popular uprisings.
Actually the EU Army was a fake - sort of. When I looked into it years ago its TO&E contained many of the same personnel as were assigned to NATO commands. Personnel assignment metadata is a fantastic analytical tool, especially in terms of inferring otherwise secret information. Not just for military, also for policing etc. For instance, just by looking at personnel assignments I was able to forecast for legislators where the next police scandals were about to erupt in 12-24 months time. (Not the delinquent police officers themselves - just the cover-up crew! :))
My conclusion at the time was the EU Army in reality was just a contingency plan against NATO dissolution. Which made a lot of sense. Otherwise it made no sense at all.
I haven't run the numbers for about ten years though, so it may have changed! :)
Thanks for this. Does that mean it is not a credible attack force against recalcitrant civilians?
That's a fair question - but I would say no, for a completely different reason!
If you deploy local soldiers against civilians, that's bad enough. But using foreign soldiers against civilians, even if it's just garrisoning, is a whole new level of disaster: it's likely to provoke the very insurrection you're trying to avoid. As, for example, the British discovered when using Hessian mercenaries in the US war of independence...
A RAND study circa 2003, commissioned for the Iraq war but using data from the previous century, concluded that to effectively garrison a hostile population requires an army commitment of 10% of the target population (5 rotations x 2% garrison). The only instances it found that successfully matched that commitment were all British: in South Africa, Malaya, and Northern Ireland. The USA hasn't been able to match that in any guerilla war since its invasion of the Phillippines in the Spanish-American War
Nor, interestingly, has Israel in Gaza, which is precisely why Sharon got out circa 2006 and forcibly removed all the settlers. Netanyahu however has reversed the equation: if you can't increase your garrison-supporting standing army to 210,000 (10% of 2.1 million), you simply reduce the population to a level the standing army *can* garrison. ;).
Thanks. I thought the Settlers got out of Gaza because for once the United Nations insisted on them withdrawing due to their illegality. I also thought that Sharon was one of the most blood thirsty of all of the leaders of Israel but then there's not much to choose between them.
You might well be right on the UN insistence: that could have played a part in (my understanding) that Sharon removed them by force (for whatever reason).
Whatever Sharon's moral defects, perhaps an important difference is that he was a military professional who understood military reality. Netenyahu's a chancer who rose to power largely on the reputation of his dead brother, the leader of the Entebbe raid. Worse, he arguably was complicit in the assassination of Rabin, the last and best chance for peace.
Observing from the US, change is coming. The same discontent that propelled Trump seems to be growing in Europe. Afd, National Rally, Reform.
First of all, when a German is advocating massive rearmament, of which Germany would always insist on being the most armed, only fools with a lack of historical insight would fail to understand how this often repeated tale ends: with fascists in charge, those weapons turned on Europeans - and Europe in flames.
Second, this part is literally mocking the European population.... (".....To this end, she restated the need for a “European Democracy Shield” and “European Centre for Democratic Resilience”...")....because those are the words spoken by an unelected US stooge., that is in control of so much of European policy. The joke is complete.
Why is this awful unelected harridan making policy for the EU. This is nothing short of a dictatorship in my view, a sort of totalitarianism directed from the centre without any authorisation from the demos, because there is conveniently no direct voting power. I can't wait for the European Union to finally break up, a few countries here, a few countries there some years later. The only sad thing is I probably won't be alive to see it.
The EU is being led by fanatics, blinded by Russophobia, delusional in terms of reality, trafficking on a one-way road to the cliff. We have a chance to get rid of them in the vote of confidence in October. Take it!
See also: https://leonvermeulen.substack.com/p/the-eus-high-horse-trade-policy-is
Good assessment. Thomas Fazi captures the hollowness of von der Leyen’s speech and the dangerous trajectory it represents for Europe. What stood out most is how policies presented as guaranteeing “freedom” and “resilience” are in fact eroding both, replacing independence with dependency and civic participation with top-down centralisation.
Two additional points amplify this concern. First, the EU’s self-inflicted energy crisis is not only a question of economics but of sovereignty. By trading Russian pipeline gas for volatile, expensive LNG imports, Brussels has effectively outsourced Europe’s industrial competitiveness to Washington’s energy exports. This is not “independence” but a shift from one dependency to another, with far higher costs. Second, the so-called war on “disinformation” is less about protecting democracy than narrowing the boundaries of permissible debate. Labeling dissent as a threat to “democratic resilience” risks institutionalizing censorship at the very moment when Europe most needs pluralism and honest debate.
None of this trajectory should surprise us. Europe’s slide into authoritarianism is not an aberration but a continuation of patterns deeply embedded in its history. As I’ve argued in my own essay (link below), "Why Europe’s Democracy is an Illusion Built on Empire and Control", the continent’s democratic institutions have always been layered atop traditions of hierarchy, coercion, and empire. Today’s centralization of power in Brussels and crackdowns on dissent are simply the latest expressions of that long-standing tendency.
Fazi is right. Instead of renewal, the speech signaled more of the same, a Europe doubling down on the very mistakes that have already weakened it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chandragupta/p/why-europes-democracy-is-an-illusion?r=2rza6e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
So its pretty clear that the EU is going to collapse, where is everyone going to go and live? Im thinking Alaska
Was any of that in her electoral manifesto? Anyone know? She was elected, wasn’t she??
She has been working for a long time, successfully, to bury the EU for good.
She's a full blown fucking Nazi.
So Thomas: when will Europe storm the Bastielle
I just would like to know who is actually *seeing* this — “The speech was filled with the Orwellian vocabulary of freedom, liberty, peace, prosperity and independence”. It is truly frustrating! Keep up good work, Thomas!
When tyrants and "elites" feel threatened and unpopular, they double down on the things that made them unpopular. Law of nature.
Blonde strigoi Ursula's gone pig-headed
"peak surrealism" - nice!
It's tragic that a single EU "policy" - the draconian so-called common foreign and security policy, via its deliberate finessing of both the parliament and the Member States, as well as its obfuscating and utterly bizarre split between the TEU and the TFEU (facilitating gaming by anti-democratic zealots) - could have led so thoroughly and so quickly to the EU-wide economic collapse that now seems inevitable.
Now that Russia and China a few days ago contractually locked Europe out of both current *and* future Russian energy supply (simply by absorbing Russia's current and future output including undeveloped oilfields), it's now too late for Europe to reverse its sanctions and say sorry. The EU sanctions against Russia have been reversed into legally irreversible "embargo"-equivalents by Russia against the EU (and UK). The die is cast.
Which in turn means that we now live in a new economic world. Never mind, the irony is that so long as Russia remains determined to retain its self-image as the Third Rome, Western values will survive. :)
Thanks, Thomas. In a continent of 450 million, how can this be the leadership? Shaking my head. Where are the giants of the past?
Thanks for your response Isadem. I agree.
Turned into princesses and busy asking their women to pay for their coffee. Only to promptly turn into an incel when said women refuse. Before we ask where the giants are, I’d be first glad to know where the men actually are.