A dark but plausible hypothesis

"A dark but plausible hypothesis is that the American strategy now is to Ukrainify Europe, so that when Ukrainian men run out they can be replenished with Europeans. The point is not to copy every measure used in Ukraine. It is to reach the same result: a country so poor, so tightly controlled, and so sealed against Russia by propaganda that it can be spent as frontline material. In Ukraine that was done with IMF shock therapy, deindustrialisation and a long campaign that turned the country into an anti-Russian project. In Europe the tools are different — energy shock, the loss of cheap Russian inputs, fiscal strain, NATO rearmament and the same kind of information war. For it to work, unemployment and desperation must rise, and some form of attack from Russia must be provoked or fabricated."

So says Mattias Forsgren, a biologist who analyses geopolitics on Substack.

I don't buy this idea but he thinks in a way I like. A lot of the Russian crisis isn't about defence but energy profits. I learnt a lot over the years about how energy pipelines are central to geopolitics. A lot is about preserving and extending American hegemony. Correction: it's all about American hegemony as are the wars in the Middle East.

Mattias Forsgren shares a realist critique of American hegemony with John Mearsheimer. Both thinkers view international relations as an anarchic clash where great powers fiercely protect their spheres of influence, arguing that Western "liberal hegemony" and NATO expansion predictably triggered conflict by crossing clear red lines. To me who read history at the university this makes perfect sense.

The liberal reading of geopolitics as a clash of values is very misleading.

The world is a competition for power and money. Values are useful for propaganda.

Alison Mutler a British journalist in Bucharest, for example, says that the politicians are frightened of Trump leaving them unprotected against the threat from Russia. The politicians I know aren't scared of Russia but speaking to a journalist they might say so if that's their message to the public.