‘Impending’ war in Europe is looking more like an economically motivated crisis

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With the global economy beginning to emerge from two years of paralysis, Washington seems to be gambling on a Pentagon-fuelled economic recovery, with Russian “aggression” as the justification. 

With western court stenographers repeated predictions of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, down to the hour, becoming something of a laughingstock, the actions of the US and its NATO satellites are looking more like those of someone who has already decided what the outcome will be, rather than taking meaningful action to prevent it. 

Secretary of State Blinken’s appeals to Moscow to choose the path of diplomacy ring about as hollow as his pretensions to care about the starving citizens of Afghanistan, while robbing them of half their sovereign assets. Such rank hypocrisy passes with as much serious scrutiny as could be expected from the press that we are to believe prevents democracy from “dying in darkness.” 

Were someone to remind Blinken of his bald-faced inversion of reality, they might raise the point that Russia has laid out its concerns regarding the threat it sees from NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. This is not new information, as Russian concerns have gone unaddressed since the end of the Cold War and in blatant disregard of promises which Moscow believed to have been made that further expansion would not occur. It has even gone so far as to propose sweeping changes to the European security landscape that would see it become a partner to the NATO alliance. It may be that President Putin’s counterparts from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang lose sleep over just that eventuality and what it may mean for the future of the diplomatic and economic ties they have cultivated with Moscow. 

Fortunately for those leaders, both Russia’s concerns and its suggested solutions have been scornfully dismissed out of hand, showing that Washington, not Moscow which stands to lose everything in a full-scale war, is the side intent on shutting the door to diplomacy.  

It might be easy to characterize this as reciting Kremlin talking points, were it not for the fact that Ukraine, whose sovereignty has suddenly become so uniquely sacrosanct, has also cast doubt on western “intelligence” predicting an imminent Russian invasion. 

With the loudest war-drumming coming from Washington and not the actual countries whose citizens are at risk, the question arises as to why the Biden administration seems so intent on provoking and maintaining such a dangerous level of tension.

NATO as a captive arms market

As a former high ranking US official from the Reagan era told me in a previous conversation, the successive waves of NATO expansion from the 1990s onwards were in large part driven by the desire to obtain new markets for advanced American weapons exports, despite the fact that the justification for those exports (the USSR) no longer existed. The function of NATO countries as a captive arms market was also on full display during the Trump administration, when the former president threatened to upend the alliance unless member states raised their levels of military spending (meaning American arms imports) to at least 2 percent of GDP.  

Regardless of whether war breaks out in Ukraine, we are now likely on the cusp of yet another wave of new members joining the North Atlantic Alliance. Sweden and Finland, already deeply integrated into US security policy, are now being touted as likely new applicants. A renewed push for membership of the states south of the Caucasus, namely Georgia and Azerbaijan, cannot be discounted, especially given the rising influence of NATO’s second-largest member, Turkey. 

Europe as a captive continent

It has been well-established that war would cause a wholesale severing of ties between Russia and Europe, the latter deriving as much as a third of its energy supplies from its massive eastern neighbour. Even the economic powerhouse of the continent, Germany, would be crippled by such a cut-off as half of its consumption of natural gas comes from Russia. Naturally, such a huge gap in the market will have to be plugged and to the surprise of no one, Washington has offered up its own liquified natural gas (LNG), of which it is the world’s leading producer, to assist. Such a gap created by an economic blockade of Russia would be too large for the US alone to fill, so it has set about recruiting compliant allies to redirect their exports accordingly. Qatar seems to figure very prominently in these plans and is already preparing major diversions of LNG exports from its traditional markets in Asia to Europe. 

As such radical and rapid shifts in the energy system will mean that Europe’s consumption needs will be delivered by maritime transport rather than pipelines, supply will be much more vulnerable. As demonstrated by the grounding of the Evergiven cargo ship in the Suez Canal, even a short interruption will have immediate and long-lasting ramifications. 

All this leaves Europe perilously vulnerable to external shocks but will see handsome profits pouring into US coffers as well as those allied states it has recruited to redesign their export profile. Those states, particularly in the GCC will almost certainly be expected to “recycle” their new profits back into the US economy, in the form of huge infrastructure projects, arms deals and financial investments. 

It has been noted by some that the North Atlantic alliance suddenly seems more unified behind American leadership than at any time since the Cold War’s end. The fact that a smirking president Biden could boast about definitively killing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany in the presence of the German Chancellor is highly suggestive that planners in Washington are not unhappy with the myriad opportunities that a Russo-Ukrainian war would create. It almost causes one to wonder if such a crisis were not currently underway, would one have to be created?