Are the UK and the EU strategically fortifying regional security, or are they recklessly courting catastrophe on behalf of the USA?

Dresden after it was bombed in 1945 by the USA and the UK

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This is about the future of Europe, about the future of the UK. That’s what WE give a damn about

by Richard Steinhardt

My father once explained something to me. He said, “You see, we always think these people, these capitalists are sophisticated, and we always think that they are motivated by subtle designs and intellectual theories of stability, law, international relations, the complex adjustment of economic mechanisms, and so on. But what you have to understand is this. Let’s take the case of Mexico. Mexico nationalised Pemex in the 30s. The motivations of US capitalism are not subtle at all. Picture this in your mind: the USA is a slavering wolf and that Pemex is a piece of bloody meat and they want it.” And that is the right way to think about the USA, as a wolf: US capitalism is a slavering wolf, with the smell of bloody meat in its nostrils.

In 2008, the European economy, with Britain inside it, was the largest economy in the world by far. The GDP of the EU was approximately $16.2 trillion, while the GDP of the US was about $14.7 trillion and the GDP of China was $4.6 trillion. We were $1.5 trillion richer than the USA and we were about $11.4 trillion richer than China. And that was the opportunity to establish a common foreign policy, to establish a joint army, joint defence. But the reality is, the whole of Europe is covered in US bases. We are, in effect, and this is revealed when the USA becomes actively hostile as the EU shows signs of ploughing its own furrow, occupied.

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The USA occupies Europe. One sign that things had gone bad is when US interests penetrated the EU bureaucracy itself – like a nematode worm – and then tried to get US laws and deals through the EU parliament made into European law without going through the nations of Europe.

Emblematic of this US attempt at complete co-option was the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership proposed in 2015. The central aims of the original TTIP were to entrench US corporate power in Europe and expand US corporate rights over EU worker rights. TTIP was designed to weaken labour and environmental standards and undermine democratic sovereignty. A key mechanism was the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which was identified as a tool granting corporations a private right of action to sue governments directly for passing public health or environmental laws that could affect future profits. This was seen as a “treaty to outlaw democracy” that gave corporations veto power over public policy.

Most Europeans have long been desperate to free themselves, and become independent of American power. Also of every other kind of power, but especially American power, and this seems almost impossible in the case of the UK. Places like signals intelligence GCHQ are completely integrated into the NSA, and into all the rest of the US military industrial structure. Ray McGovern calls this structure MICIMATT: the Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academia, and Think-Tank complex.

In the UK, we had a hundred US bases of all sizes and types at the time of the Cold War in the 1980s; according to CND. Reagan was sorting out his first strike policy with cruise missiles at Greenham Common and elsewhere. There was always a sense of desperation about how we would become independent from US foreign policy. How would we do it? It still seems like an impossible task.

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Where we talk about foreign agents of Israel in the USA manipulating politics, we obviously highly exaggerate. But the situation of US influence and interference inside the UK is infinitely worse and absolutely real. Foreign agents of the USA openly manipulate British politics. We are completely penetrated, completely indivisible. We serve, to the chagrin of some, as the USA’s bridgehead into mainland Europe and are one of the instruments the USA uses to undermine the consolidation of European power and sovereignty. Europe does have the most enlightened set of legislation on the planet in most aspects. There was, and is, a lot to love about European unity and sovereignty. Prior to Ukraine and Yugoslavia, the enlightened legislation of the EU conferred some dignity on all Europeans.

Perhaps we do retain a few pockets of independent action in places like MI5 and MI6, and in the rest of the civil service; Mehdi Hassan is proof of that. Listen to his more independent-minded discourse. The intelligence services have won prizes for diversity and inclusion, you know.

Be that as it may, according to Brian Berletic, an insightful commentator on geopolitics, there has been a division of labour made by the USA. Pete Hegseth had a conversation with European leaders and made clear, publicly and privately, that the war in Ukraine was being delegated to the Europeans as part of a division of labour. Pete Hegseth, as US Secretary of Defense, explicitly told European allies in February 2025 at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group that Europe must provide the “overwhelming share” of lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine going forward. The US would shift focus to China in the Pacific; intelligence sharing and other support would continue, but primary conventional responsibility for prosecuting the war in Ukraine has been assigned by Yankee power to Europeans.

So, while the Banderite Ukrainians still get all the US military intelligence and all the support the USA’s MICIMATT infrastructure can afford (which includes a huge pile-up of budget skimming subcontractors) directions are given to European governments from Washington with the illusion of disagreement generated as a cover, while the whole conflict is directed from Washington. The Europeans have been tasked with doing the USA’s dirty work.

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If there is a nuclear war, the United States will not get attacked, it hopes, instead the Russian Federation might lose its patience with the Europeans (who manufacture tens of thousands of AI-enabled drones and ship them to Ukraine) and so the Russian Federation might send a few SARMAT and POSEIDON missiles to wipe out every single decision-making centre and military and intelligence installation in every European country, but leave the prime mover, the USA untouched.

In the event of a nuclear war, the core GCHQ is designed to rotate and go underground, but I doubt it could do it in less than twenty. The Russians say it takes three minutes for a SARMAT or Oreshnik to reach London. Though, I suppose they may comfort themselves in Cheltenham (nice town) and in Vauxhall that they would be able to read the writing on the wall days in advance and so protect themselves.

If Europe turns to rubble spotted with lakes of glass, the USA thinks it might safely de-escalate from the other side of the Atlantic. So we are becoming the proxy that manipulates a Ukrainian proxy, the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist proxy that the USA leveraged into power in 2014, and that it propped up in the same way it installed and propped up its proxies elsewhere: the famous examples of Korea and Vietnam, Cuba and so on ad nauseam. The US puppets manipulate puppets to manipulate puppets. It is a chain of puppetry.

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But, at the same time, you can tell that the European leaders are also desperate to act rationally in the interests of their own continent. Some European leaders may be bought and paid-for compradores (after all the USA can print its funny money off at will) and the CIA may be able to blackmail or bribe almost all key western politicians (just imagine the state of Macron’s dirty laundry!). Nevertheless, in my view, these ‘compromised’ and bought off people are still Europeans and love Europe and their deeper instincts are to protect and serve Europe and their own countries and communities and family.

You get a sense in which, at the moment, the EU and the UK are using the strategic moment (which has been planned by the USA – read a 2019 RAND Corporation report titled Overextending and Unbalancing Russia) to gain a little independence from the USA, at the same time as the European countries and the EU itself are being forced by their colonial quisling to act as proxies for the USA and US capitalism, thereby damaging their own economies by pouring flames on the war of the USA against Iran and cutting European economies off from affordable Russian Federation energy resources. We are in a terrible bind!

The powerful Europeans who colonised and then migrated to America to use it as their lebensraum thought they learned a Darwinian lesson: that the path to incredible vast wealth was colonisation, genocide, slavery and hyper-exploitation, and that the rest was just guff. We see the evidence for this US imperial barbarity out in the open in the world today on every front, and we must try to wriggle free with our eyes on the prize of a sovereign, civilised, inclusive, peaceful, prosperous, tolerant and social democratic Europe.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.