Lunch tirade

I had lunch the other day with a partner in a big law firm who said that Romanians had always idealised America and now she did not know what to think. She asked my advice.

I said that 20 years ago I had described Romania as the eternal and fascinating adolescent always looking for some adult figure to descend like a deus ex machina to rescue her, but America is an idol with feet of clay and always was.

I said that the myth of the 20th century is that the Munich conference in 1938 was a terrible betrayal whereas in fact it was nothing of the sort, because had England and France gone to war they could have done nothing to help the Czechs any more than they helped the Poles the next year.

But in 1939 we started a World War which led to 70 million dead, to Eastern Europe being ruled by the communists, the other half of Europe being ruled by America.

The Second World War is the story of the creation of the American empire, which was motivated like all empires by what Schopenhauer called the will to power.

Roosevelt foolishly ruled out a negotiated peace and insisted on unconditional surrender and that precedent is why now European countries do not talk to Russia or Iran.

The great danger to England in 1938 and 1939 was not Germany. It was Japan and Roosevelt without any doubt provoked Pearl Harbor which led to the destruction of the British Empire and the creation of the American empire.

Looking back now the creation of NATO was not an altruistic attempt to save Western Europe because even in the time of Stalin Western Europe was not in danger from communism.

Nato and the Marshall Plan were American empire building just like the wars against Saddam, Gaddafi, Venezuela and Iran.

America sacrificed Eastern Europe by refusing to permit a democratic united neutral Germany which Khrushchev offered in 1955 . Instead the Cold War pointlessly and expensively continued till 1989 - much better to have had Finlandisation which would have left Germany and perhaps later Eastern Europe neutral, capitalist, prosperous and free.

Being Finland was a very good thing and it would be a very good thing were it possible for Ukraine now.

Empires need enemies or at least the American empire needs an enemy and after Hitler it had Stalin and then communism and after communism came to an end it found new Hitlers in Milosevic, terrorism, Saddam, autocracies in general and now Putin.

The history of Europe since 1945 is a meditation on the crimes of Germany during the war and America constantly battled Hitlers until Trump.

All the Hitler analogies were hopelessly wrong until suddenly we are faced with somebody who genuinely does resemble Hitler and instead of confronting him America finances him and protects him while Britain, France and Romania all assist the new Hitler in various ways surreptitiously.

Undoubtedly America is a rogue state, far more so than North Korea. The North Korean government is very cruel but it is cruel to her own people and cruel to a small number of Japanese and South Koreans whom she kidnaps from the seaside, but the number of people kidnapped by North Korea probably comes to some hundreds whereas it's estimated that 38 million people have died as a result of actions by the United States since 1970.

So Romania should forget about the idea that America is a benign hegemon or a providential figure that can intervene to make the world a better place.

On the contrary it is the cause of most of the wars we have had in the world since the end of the Cold War.

The solution of course would be for Romania and all the other countries in Europe to distance themselves from America, have good relations with America’s enemies and be isolationist.

Unfortunately America is a very vindictive and dangerous country and it's much easier to say that than to do it.

I must have talked the poor woman to death. I hoped I could convince her.