The trouble is, when will it ever make economic sense from the perspective of the military industrial complex to turn off the tap? Even if Ukraine offers nothing in payment the European countries sending all their F16s about to become new customers for F35s…
Indeed, now that there’s a credible enemy and NATO was forced to dump a whole bunch of its existing stock, there’s going to be an unlimited tap to produce and sell new weapons. Micheal Hudson loves to talk about the protection racket US managed to setup in Europe.
Yeah to me this is why I think people saying the collective west (chimerical) is getting “owned” because tens of thousands of Ukrainians (also Russians) are getting thrown into a meat grinder are wrong. Unless you mean countries like Germany are getting ripped off by the Failed States of America for monopoly priced energy and new weapons. The current state of the board is exactly what the Failed States and its military and energy concerns want. They’ve planned this shit for a long time.
My impression is that US basically had two objectives. The primary one was to try and collapse Russia. That would’ve been the big prize because then they were hoping to Balkanize it, and put in puppet regimes that would let US companies exploit them while allowing US to surround China from the west. That goal failed miserably as we’re now seeing.
However, the secondary concern was that Europe was increasingly becoming integrated with Russia and China economically and in the long run that would mean that it would shift away from US politically. The war put a stop to all that and forced Europe firmly back into US camp for the time being. Military spending US is going to force on Europe is going to help bolster US economy at the expense of mass austerity in Europe. On top of that, US will get to poach a bunch of European companies which was the purpose of the inflation reduction act.
Finally, US is trying to force Europe to decouple from China which is very important for US as it would mean that Europe would be stuck purchasing goods from US at monopoly prices. It looks like Europe is reluctant to do that at the moment, but the pressure from US is immense.
My view is that this plan is not sustainable long term. Europeans are already starting to realize they got played and we’re seeing anti war parties polling increasingly high across all the major European countries. I expect there’s going to be a huge backlash against the US as the economic situation continues to unravel in Europe. At that point, it’s quite likely that European countries will start patching things up with Russia. Unfortunately, the right were the only ones to take a stance against the war while the left sided with the liberal war mongers. So, now we’re seeing a huge political surge of the right in Europe.
I also expect that both EU is going to collapse going forward. EU only makes sense when there’s economic prosperity, but once the pie shrinks everybody will want to keep their piece of it. I think it’s very likely that Hungary will be the first country to exit the EU within the next couple of years.
It’s also a question how long NATO can be sustained given that US is the only country in the alliance with any significant military strength or industrial capacity. After the war ends, I expect that US will be increasingly losing interest in Europe and will refocus on China.
