Looks like there’s a new main villain supercharging Brussels’ tax-and-spend narrative
By Rachel Marsden, a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/rachel-marsden/rachelmarsden.com - © Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
[RT] During
the Vietnam War, US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger concocted
the ‘Madman Theory’. The idea was to force the North Vietnamese and the
Soviet Union to negotiate with Washington by making them think that
then-President Richard Nixon was so crazy that working things out was a
better alternative than not doing so. Hanoi didn’t buy it. But maybe the
EU establishment will in 2026?
Well, they believe there’s a
madman in the White House, alright. But the outcome is, once again,
probably not entirely what Washington had in mind.
“Let no one be mistaken in thinking that the true intention of the US was simply to confront a geopolitical threat,” French President Emmanuel Macron told El Pais in a new interview, addressing US President Donald Trump’s recent threats to take Greenland by force for “national security” reasons. “It was not the Russians or the Chinese who posed the threat. I can tell you that we have compiled an intelligence tally of the number of Russian and Chinese ships and submarines that were around Greenland and whose presence we detected: It is negligible.”
It seems that Trump
has managed to do the impossible and make EU leaders switch out their
Russian invasion fantasies for American ones. And wouldn’t you know it,
that actually works out better for them, because they’ve spent years
trying – and failing – to convince Europeans that Putin is going to kick
down the door to the EU sometime around 2030. This looming, abstract
invasion fantasy that’s always just far enough away to hope that people
will have forgotten all about it by the time they’ve successfully used
it as a pretext to steal billions in taxpayer cash.
Meanwhile, Europeans have long been like, “Yawn, yeah okay, let me guess, you need more of our money again, right?”
It’s like the guy trying to sell you a home alarm system by having the
neighbor – Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky in this case – constantly talk
about how his place got broken into. And how he was just a totally
random victim. Just sitting there, minding his own business, doing
nothing at all to do with dodgy neo-Nazis and NATO weapons on the
Russian border. So it could have happened to anyone! Even you, Europe!
Because NATO’s so fragile, apparently. What have they been buying with
all our money? Nerf guns?
No wonder Europeans aren’t really buying it. Not outside of the
establishment, anyway. And maybe not even them, although it serves them
to keep saying otherwise.
So lucky for guys like Macron, they now
have a whole new narrative that gives them much better cover for the
exact same scheme of washing massive amounts of public funds into
defense spending. The new message coming now from Macron effectively
marginalizes any existential threat from Russia or China in favor of
panic about an American one.
The EU has to become a “power”
to fend them off, he now says. And it’s not just a matter of not being
able to rely on the US anymore, which is what they were trying to sell
back when Russia was the main villain. And this is even better for the
EU’s plans, because Europeans actually find Trump attacking the bloc entirely plausible, for one. So that helps.
And
on top of that, this new narrative lets EU leaders commandeer taxpayer
money not just for the defense sector but for several other sectors as
well, since Europe is deeply dependent on the US right across the board.
And this massive spending spree conveniently boosts their own political
survival odds, because it props up their flagging economies.
Macron is now talking
about the need to build an entire tech ecosystem independent from the
US, phasing out government use of American software like Zoom, Microsoft
Teams, and Webex, and telling El Pais that the US is going to attack on
the digital regulation front in the coming months as well. Probably
because Washington doesn’t appreciate that the EU is fed up with Elon
Musk using his social media platform (and personal bullhorn), X, and its
opaque algorithms, to control online narratives that Europeans get fed.
In the same vein, American officials have also openly confirmed their intent to fund pro-Trump European NGOs, in the same meddling style of their nemesis, George Soros.
It’s already starting to sound like a conscious uncoupling. The EU’s banking chief, the ECB’s Christine Lagarde, is talking
about the need to come up with alternatives to America’s Mastercard and
Visa credit card systems. And Macron is also saying how the world wants
alternatives to the greenback now that America under Trump is “distancing itself further and further from a state of law.”
Macron calls the current American ideology “blatantly anti-European.”
Apparently, it took Trump spelling it out for him, letter by letter, to
notice. Decades of actively undermining the EU as an economic
competitor just didn’t quite make the point clear enough.
So now
that there’s a new main villain supercharging this European
tax-and-spend narrative way better than hating on Russia or China ever
did, guess what? Sounds like Russia’s getting a soft rebrand.
“Like it or not, Russia will still be there tomorrow. And it turns out it’s right on our doorstep. It’s important to structure the resumption of a European debate with them,” Macron told El Pais. The Kremlin confirms that technical talks have resumed between France and Russia. https://www.rt.com/russia/632244-russia-france-technical-dialogue/So
Macron seems to be arriving at the same conclusion that former French
President Charles de Gaulle did 60 years ago: The idea of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” as a counterbalance to the US as Europe’s potential overlord.
Remember
those security guarantees that Macron was insisting the US provide to
Europe against Russia in Ukraine? Well, these days, it sounds like he’d
rather work those out with Russia than with Washington. “We will have to build a new security architecture in Europe with Russia,” Macron now says. “Tomorrow’s prosperity concerns Europeans. Or would you prefer that American ambassadors and envoys negotiate on your behalf the date of Ukraine’s entry into the EU?”
Know what all this is starting to sound
like? Someone trying to dump a bad screenplay halfway through filming.
In this case, because the hero suddenly got recast as the bad guy. In
reality, it was a naive miscast right from the start.