The bloc has allowed its most war-crazed members to dictate its Russia policies – and now they want to attack Moscow first
We have reached a point where, with regard to Russia, the US is more reasonable and less bellicose than its currently semi-rebellious European vassals.
Washington is trying to end the senseless proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and also to facilitate a broader détente with Moscow. The NATO-EU European elites are desperate to keep the war going and to build their own countries’ whole futures on confronting Russia – forever.
The deranged European “elites” will fail, one way or the other. Their perception of reality is distorted by delusions, their resources – military and also intellectual – are far too small, and their aims make no sense. But the problem for the rest of us is that they may yet cause enormous damage on their way down the rubbish chute of history. And while they are all fairly insane – minus exceptional cases, such as Slovakia and Hungary – there still are important differences: they tend to get even more bonkers the farther east you move on the map. Call it the West-East NATO-EU Insanity Gradient, if you wish.
That’s what a recent Western mainstream media specimen brought out with beautiful clarity if unwittingly. Its lede was buried so far down that most readers probably never got to it: “I put it to a major eastern European politician that western European states care little about wars in eastern Europe. He replied, ‘We know. That’s why some of our countries are asking, ‘Why don’t we attack Russia now, instead of sitting waiting for it to attack us?’” So writes Simon Kuper in the Financial Times, under the heading “Return of the Two Europes.”
A “major eastern European politician” … Come on, who was it this time: The Estonian wonder brain Kaja “Let’s Break Up Russia” Kallas, again? Or Poland’s current viceroy from Brussels Donald “I want some nukes, too” Tusk? Clearly in any case, this one was not from Ukraine but from somewhere (officially) inside NATO and the EU. And he or she has told us that they – “some” others are involved as well – are thinking about launching a preventive war against Russia.
Based not on anything that you could conceivably call self-defense – not among the moderately sane, in any case – but only their own hysterical delusions. That, in and of itself, is sensational, though not really surprising. Even more exciting: It’s also sensationally awful since it’s really about some all too well-connected idiots – that NATO-EU expansion thing, again – in possession of very moderate militaries seriously thinking about starting World War III for the rest of us with a great power that has a large, very efficient, battle-hardened, and motivated conventional military and almost 5,000 nuclear weapons. Surely, that’s a page-one first-order scoop! Right?
Nope, it’s not. Not at the Financial Times, in any case. Maybe that’s because Kuper – former sportswriter, now all-purpose deep-thought ruminator and clearly confidant of at least one absolute nutcase in high office in the NATO-EU East – chose to end his piece on that bang instead of making it its actual topic from the get-go. Even more intriguingly, everything that happens in his article before we get to that wallop of an ending about ending us all, seems to imply that we are supposed to find that idea rather understandable if not, perhaps, really quite attractive. Because, you see, it’s from the NATO-EU East.
For here is what Kuper feels we need to think about: Milan Kundera. Yes, really, Kundera. I know… Because that effective novelist and once fashionable essayist had an idea once. An idea hitting it off with the eternally fresh Zeitgeist of – drum roll – 1983. Yes, that would be that 1983, the year of America’s Ronald Reagan at his most gung-ho and the Soviets’ Yury Andropov at his most paranoid; one of the very worst of the many, many bad years of the Cold War, one when we did almost manage to trigger the big one, nukes and all and then nothing). Obviously, that idea is now officially enshrined, rather like a relic, on the European Parliament’s website.
And Kuper just can’t forget it either: Namely Kundera’s notion that what, during the Cold War, used to be Soviet Eastern Europe wasn’t really Eastern Europe but, actually, you see, Western Europe, only better: namely with Kafka, rainy cobblestones, Habsburg gilt and schmalz, and, of course, “YALTA!”
“YALTA!” (meaning the 1945 Yalta conference where the post-World War II reorganization of Germany and Europe was arranged) – always to be pronounced in an aggrieved, resentful voice, please, preferably with a Polish accent – meaning this particularly precious part of Europe had been “kidnapped” by the big bad Russian bear and sold out by the mean West, that is, the rest of the West, as it were. You get the idea.
And therefore, the politicos, intellectuals, and future grant entrepreneurs of not-really-Eastern-Europe had some very decent victimhood capital to work with in the ongoing age of competitive victimhood discrimination: a lot of oomph for, say, former picturesque Polish dissidents (and some informers, too, of course), but not the gum under the West’s shoes for today’s massacred Palestinian children.
Indeed back then, in – checks notes: yes, really, 1983 – that slightly displaced West in the claws of that rudely overreaching Russian bear was such a touching sight, so cute yet unlucky, so brave yet suppressed that it needed an old new name all of its own: Central Europe. (No, translation into German strictly VERBOTEN! Because that would be “Mitteleuropa” and then… please, just don’t ask. And don’t mention the war! Come to think of it, either of the two, really.)
Polite Westerners raised on Kundera, Havel, and Garton-Ash learned that: 1) Central Europe is sad, because it’s between Germans (no sense of humor, occasional fits of ultra-violent world conquest) and Russians (did defeat those Germans and have a sense of humor but never do as we tell them). 2) Central Europe is often Slavic, but nice Slavic. Not like, again, those terrifying Russians who every hundred years or so whip our armies’ behinds (Hintern, postérieur, ända, tyłek – in reverse chronological order) when we try to invade them, 3) Central Europe belongs in NATO and the EU – again unlike Russia – because, remember, Central Europe is really Western Europe and definitely not Eastern Europe. Because Eastern Europe, you see, is only Russia now, and, ironically, everyone still agreed that Eastern Europe could not ever possibly belong to us.
In the meantime, a miracle occurred: as “Central Europe” had always really been an extension of the West, the two “good” post-Cold War Europes, West and Center or NATO-EU and Soon-NATO-EU, fused rapidly. Sounds not very likely? No, but don’t blame me. That’s what the FT is telling us, as joining NATO was the same as joining the “transatlantic West.”
And now, there is the rub: That West’s imperial capital in Washington has been taken over by a weird reformer with outlandish ideas about making peace with the other side, who is dissolving the whole Pact, pardon Alliance. Sort of like good old Gorbachev c. 1989, when he tore down and buried the Cold War East from its center in Moscow. The name of this distant (admittedly, very distant) revenant of “Perestroika” and heir to the Gorbachevian tradition of Cold War empire disruption from the very top: Donald Trump. (Didn’t see that one coming, Donald, right?)
And that’s why, Kuper believes with an incredibly deep sense of history (not), the Europes are now drifting apart again. It’s all Trump’s fault! Again! Kuper does not know this, of course, but he rather resembles a post-Soviet nostalgic in Russia who would also be blaming the end of the Soviet empire on one guy alone. Great Men do make history, it turns out. At least when small minds need a scapegoat.
Where to even begin? The two Europes, East and West, have never been one. And NATO didn’t make them so, either. What did happen was that the European NATO-EU bloc ended up permitting the newcomers from the East to shape, even dominate its policy toward Russia. Clueless Kallas is merely the logical if imbecile outcome of that decision.
The reasons for that non-sensical permission are manifold, but the key point is that this pathology must end: there is no sound reason why everyone in NATO-EU Europe should agree to war with Russia just because Madame Kallas and company can’t get over their Kundera. Or you, for that matter, Simon. Indeed, it was a mistake not only to expand NATO but to expand the EU.
And for those who think the “elite” nutcases in the NATO-EU East cannot do too much harm because NATO’s infamous Article 5 is only about “defense”: First, NATO has found ways to go on the attack several times already, ask the Afghans and Libyans, for instance. Second, a pretext can always be found or made. Rely on it: If we, the West, ever launch a direct, open attack on Russia – indirectly and by proxy, we have already done so, of course – our media will lie us into the ground with tales of how “they started it all” – and our intellectuals and experts will eat it all up and drone on about it on our talk shows as long as TV will still be working. Third, the EU itself is now planning to massively militarize. If it “succeeds,” there will be yet another tail with which an idiot from, say, Estonia can wag us all into oblivion – for the greater glory of Kundera and 1983.
