Five wars in one

The Ukraine war and the historic defeat of the West

by Patrik Baab

The dream is over – or Europe’s rude awakening

The phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on 12 February was a bombshell. They are once again talking to each other as equals, and a meeting is planned in Saudi Arabia. The US President declared that he would be able to meet with Putin before the end of the month.1 On 18 February, he said on CNN that he did not want the Europeans at the negotiating table. Trump verbatim:
  “I will not negotiate with anyone who wants to prolong the conflict. I will not negotiate with anyone who sends more weapons. I will not negotiate with anyone who tries to push through more ammunition initiatives. I will not negotiate with anyone who tries to prolong the conflict. I will negotiate peace, although this word is obviously heavily censored in the EU.”2
  US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met his Russian counterpart Lavrov in Riyadh. The most important points: 1. ceasefire, 2. new elections in Ukraine, 3. peace agreement. Besides, Russia and the USA are also planning joint energy projects in the Arctic. It will be possible to lift the sanctions with the signing of the peace agreement. Diplomatic relations will be normalised.3 Both sides are trying to avoid a direct confrontation. Rubio explained that the Europeans would certainly be involved at some point, as after all, they had imposed sanctions.4 It is clear that pressure from Washington is required to lift the sanctions, as a unanimous decision will have to be reached in Brussels.
  At the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, the speeches had been rewritten overnight, as one participant sardonically reported to me. The Swiss newspaper “Tages-Anzeiger” speaks of a “radical change of course”.5 The media and German politicians speak of “a betrayal”.6
  Much remains vague at present. But one thing is clear: the West has lost the war in Ukraine. Warmongers in politics are brought back to harsh reality, and degenerate propaganda media are being roused from their war hysteria like a sleeping drunk sobered up with a bucket of cold water.
  US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ended the delusion that had kept the war going. The key points:

1. 1Ukraine will not get back the territories it lost. This is an “unrealistic goal”.7
2. 2Ukraine’s NATO membership is off the table.8 This is also “not a realistic outcome of the negotiations”. So this is clear: Ukraine will remain neutral.
3. The USA will not grant Kiev any security guarantees. There will be no US troops in Ukraine. They see the Europeans as having an obligation and not NATO under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.9 Washington wants to Europeanise the war and its consequential costs.

The war in Ukraine will thus end with a historic defeat of the West. The Russian Federation will emerge victorious. There is hope for peace in the largest and bloodiest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War. There is still fierce fighting everywhere along a front line of more than 1,300 kilometres. On the Ukrainian side alone, 600,000 soldiers are believed to have been killed, on the Russian side more than 100,000.
  At least as many people have been seriously injured, have lost arms and legs, have been blinded and mutilated, their jaws have been shot off; they have been left crippled, badly marked for the miserable rest of their lives. Some of these seriously injured people are treated at the Charité hospital in Berlin.10 Have you ever seen a picture of them?
  This too is cognitive warfare: withholding the true face of war from the public. Propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin.11 The smoke blanket of censorship, which has destroyed the democratic process of opinion-forming and thus caused irreversible damage to democracy, is part of the madness and war hysteria into which the ruling party cartel and its accomplices in the media have led us.
  Today I will try to assess the geopolitical situation. In doing so, I will also take a look back. Because if you don’t know the past, you cannot assess its consequences for the future. This is a core problem of current European politics.
  I don’t want to hide the fact that in this, I represent a minority position in political science, at least in German-speaking countries. On a global scale, however, things look somewhat different.12
  For the perspective you get in our leading media is largely due to NATO propaganda and is limited to the NATO countries led by the US, the EU, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. These countries today represent less than 20 per cent of the world’s population.
  In my considerations, however, I follow renowned and internationally recognised academics such as the geopolitical expert Glenn Diesen from Oslo13, the foreign policy expert from the University of Chicago, Professor John J. Mearsheimer14, and the US economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs15 from Colombia University in New York. I also draw on the British historian Richard Sakwa16 and the Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud17 as well as the French historian Emmanuel Todd18.
  I start with an examination of the current situation in the war in Ukraine and then try to explain the background and the effects of what is happening. 

Military situation in the Ukraine war

Ukraine is currently being destroyed in the largest European war since the end of the Second World War. The country has lost around 20 % of its territory, its economy is in ruins and millions of people have left the country: While the population was 52 million in 1991, Ukraine now has 28 million inhabitants. The country has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, and of course, there are millions of refugees and internally displaced persons.19
  The territorial losses are painful and make reconstruction difficult because the resources from the Donbass will be lacking. Yet the alternative is not to lose the territories incorporated into the Russian Federation or to recapture them, but to lose these territories or to lose even more.
  The American and European ideas of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia through the proxy war in Ukraine now seem like ash in the mouths of Western politicians. This proxy war of the NATO West against Russia on the ground in Ukraine, of which former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke20, is ending in disaster. The Kremlin regards NATO membership of Ukraine as an existential threat, just as the USA would not accept Russian military bases or missiles in Mexico. Ukraine will remain neutral. Moscow has thus prevailed.
  Attempting to challenge the largest nuclear power only reveals the West’s megalomania and its inability to realistically assess the balance of power. Once again, the sleep of reason has produced monsters. We can now keep dreaming and dismiss the normative power of facts as Russian propaganda, but this will only lead to more destruction. The loss of reality of Russophobic fanatics in the political and media elite of the West is the main reason for the high death toll.
  The number of those killed and seriously injured, i.e., what the British and Americans call ‘casualties’, exceeded the million mark on the Ukrainian side on 1 September 2024. The actual figures are top secret on both sides. However, conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of obituaries. According to this, more than 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers had already been killed at the beginning of September.21 Other estimates put the number of casualties at 650,000 by mid-2024.22 Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson puts the total number of casualties at 1.2 million; if you include the seriously injured, he comes to three million, a whole generation of young Ukrainians.22a
  The figures on the Russian side are not quite as high. The anti-government portal Mediazona, which is financed by the oligarch Khodorkovsky, has also analysed obituaries and death notices. On 13 September 2024, its analysts came up with 69,059 casualties, plus 19,547 mercenaries from the private military company Wagner who were killed in Bachmut’s meat grinder alone – as is known from the statistics on payments to surviving dependants.23 This results in a death toll of around 90,000; adding the casualties of the DNR and LNR militias, the figure is around 120,000.24 The large disparity in favour of Ukraine is due to the fact that the Russians have 5–10 times more artillery, rockets and drones, depending on the section of the front. Military analysts estimate the ratio of casualties to be 8:1 in unfavour of Ukraine.25 By the end of December 2024, the UN High Commissioner had recorded at least 12,456 deaths among the civilian population, including at least 669 children.26
  The Kursk offensive, which began with the planning of NATO, turns out to be a dead end for the Americans and their NATO satraps. What was unimaginable for me just a few years ago: German tanks are once again standing on the sites of a German war of annihilation with more than 27 million dead Soviet citizens. With its advance near Kursk, Ukraine was trying to open up a new front in order to force the Russians to withdraw troops from Donetsk and thus slow down the Russian advance. Secondly, it was a bargaining chip for possible negotiations. Thirdly, it wanted to achieve a PR success and show the West that the initiative had not been lost in order to mobilise new support. Fourthly, it was an attempt to play a game of vabanque to force the West to become directly involved so that the front in the Donbass would not collapse and the path to Dnipro would be open for the Russians.27 Fifthly, according to the former top officer of NATO, General Harald Kujat, the Ukrainian offensive was aimed at capturing the Kursk nuclear power plant and thus gaining the potential for nuclear blackmail. This attempt failed.28 Between 35,000 and 55,000 casualties remain on the Ukrainian side alone, depending on estimates.29
  The Ukrainian troops’ fighting morale is at rock bottom. In the first four months of last year alone, 19,000 proceedings concerning desertion were initiated.30 The rapprochement between Trump and Putin has increased frustration and resignation among the elites, as in peace talks Kiev, like the Europeans, will at best sit at the side table. On the other hand, the Ukrainian population is hoping for an end to the dying.31
  The overstretched Ukrainian front will be on the verge of collapse if the Russian army completely captures the Pokrovsk railroad junction west of Donetsk. Because behind this there is but steppe – and therefore nothing that could protect the infantrymen from constant drone attacks.
  The assessment of the situation can be summarised as follows: Ukraine has been led to the slaughter. Germany is the biggest economic loser. We will all foot the bill. But there is much more at stake. We are eyewitnesses of the primal catastrophe of the 21st century: a new Ukrainian division; a self-inflicted defeat of NATO, a tectonic shift in geopolitics, a worldwide economic war and a global attack by predatory capitalism on dependent employees and on the middle class. This war will affect the lives of people across Europe for many decades to come. Peace will cost us even more dearly than war has done.
  Susan Watkins of Leeds Becket University in the UK wrote an article entitled “Five Wars in One” in the September-October 2022 issue of the New Left Review. In this, she discusses the dimensions of the Ukraine war. She gains her analytical tools by looking at the Second World War as a war of imperialist powers, as the Soviet Union’s defensive struggle against the German invasion, China’s anti-colonialist war of liberation against Japan and the subsequent social revolution, the anti-colonialist liberation struggle in Indochina, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Philippines, as well as the partisan war against the Nazis and Hitler’s Wehrmacht in Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Belarus, Ukraine, France and Italy.32
  These reflections have inspired me to think about the five wars in Ukraine. But I will structure them differently than Susan Watkins did:

1. the Ukrainian civil war after the coup d’état on the Maidan
2. the Ukrainian-Russian fratricidal war between the coup government in Kiev on the one hand and, from April 2014 the republics of Luhansk and Donetsk and from 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation, on the other hand.
3. the geostrategic war for USA supremacy 
4. the global economic war and the European suicide 
5. the war against the population of the western industrialised nations.

Those who know nothing, must believe a lot. Most people in Germany know little about Ukraine. This is exactly where the propaganda comes in. So for a start, leave behind what the leading media present to you on a daily basis. Follow me for a moment in my attempt to separate press propaganda from the facts. For there is, as Franz Josef Strauss once put it, “a normative power of the factual, but no fact-replacing power of the phraseological”.

The Ukrainian civil war after the Maidan coup

Western observers see the events on the Maidan in Kiev in the winter of 2013/2014 as a crossroads between a dictatorship along the lines of Belarus or the overthrow of President Yanukovych. They see the Maidan as a revolution, a transformation from below that has led to a democracy, with some shortcomings, but in which “full freedom of expression prevails”.
  Whenever Maidan eyewitnesses with whom I have spoken hear this, they can only laugh sarcastically. Because the truth tells quite a different story. But in Germany, anyone who reports the truth about the Maidan is censored, banned from their profession and threatened by the Ukrainian secret service – with the connivance of German authorities and the German judiciary. I am also being subjected to all three of these measures.
  I wrote about the actual events in my book “On both sides of the front”. Together with Régis Le Sommier,33 I am one of the few people who have done research on both sides of this war.34 As a result, I was portrayed by T-Online and by my own broadcaster, NDR, as Putin’s election observer at the referendums in Donbass in September 2022; NDR wanted to take legal action, and the Ukrainian secret service put me on the “Mirotworez” death list. In Germany, the truth is punishable by law today, the press has degenerated into a NATO propaganda company and the academic precariat presents itself as the bearer of censorship.
  For those who prefer to consult a scientific study, I recommend that by Ivan Katchanovski from the University of Ottawa. Based on a thorough evaluation of autopsy reports, court transcripts, eyewitness accounts and ballistic investigations, he comes to the conclusion that the killings on the Maidan were staged by Ukrainian fascists and Western governments, in order to overthrow a democratically elected government and bring about a pro-Western regime change.35 He sees the events on the Maidan in 2014 as the cause of the start of the civil war in Donbass, the Russian interventions in Crimea and Donbass, the annexation of Crimea to Russia and the escalation of the conflict between Russia and the West, including the invasion of and war with Ukraine since 2022.
  Protesters were trained in so-called Tech Camps by US non-governmental organisations and the US Embassy to organise mass protests via social media. Non-governmental organisations were funded by USAID, US foundations, and diplomats from Poland and Lithuania. The protesters reportedly received thermal underwear, food, tents, heaters, and table tennis tables. They were rotated to the Maidan every fortnight and then replaced. For their presence, they received payments amounting to twice the average salary. The weapons on the Maidan originated from the looting of police armouries in western Ukraine, specifically in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, where the far-right Svoboda party was particularly strong. US historian Nikolai N. Petro has argued that right-wing extremists and fascists in western Ukraine were planning to unleash a civil war should the coup on the Maidan fail to achieve its objective of overthrowing President Yanukovych and his government.
  According to Nicolai Petro, “During the Maidan, the Right Sector amassed a significant arsenal of weapons and gathered approximately 10,000 fighters. The formation of volunteer battalions was not a response to a Russian invasion but rather reflected the prior consideration that violence would be necessary to consolidate and defend the overthrow. As the spokesperson for the Right Sector expressed just before Yanukovych’s removal, ‘our group is fully capable of fighting through a civil war.’”36 This implies that even if the Maidan had failed, Galician ultranationalists were prepared to forcibly enforce a coup.
  The extent of Western support for the Maidan coup plotters is evidenced not only by the intercepted phone call between Victoria J. Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the US Department of State, and Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine, released on 4 February 2014. Aside from disparaging remarks about the Europeans – “Fuck the EU” – the conversation clearly indicated that Washington was working towards a coup and wanted to bring opposition leader Yatsenyuk to power. On 13 December 2013, Nuland stated before the US-Ukraine Foundation that the US had invested over 5 billion US Dollars in the forces backing the coup. Further details emerged from Nuland’s testimony before the US Congress on 9 May 2014, where the presence of fascists on the Maidan was also discussed.37
  According to Russian sources, the Maidan received as much as 20 million US Dollars per week in direct monetary support. The US and EU reportedly maintained continuous contact with both right-wing extremists and fascists. Ivan Katchanovski reported that, like in a marketplace, negotiations took place over the number of murders deemed necessary for Western governments to compel the elected President Yanukovych to relinquish his office. The agreed figure was around 100, which they achieved.38 Such interference in another country’s internal affairs is a violation of the prohibition on intervention and thus breaches international law.
  This marked the beginning of the first phase of the Ukraine war – a civil war phase. By mid-March 2014, US mercenaries from the security firm Academi, formerly Blackwater, were active in the Donbas. This meant that the US was involved from the onset of the Donbas conflict. The deployment of mercenaries violates the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the UN Charter, rendering it illegal under international law.
  The wave of violence on the Maidan, the violent overthrow, and marauding ultranationalist and far-right groups across Ukraine led the ethnic Russian population in eastern Ukraine, together with local police and defected Ukrainian soldiers, to form self-defence militias and establish their own state structures. As of mid-April 2014, they were supported by volunteers around former FSB officer Igor Girkin, known as “Strelkov” – a total of 52 men. In response to the involvement of US mercenaries, the Russian General Staff dispatched mercenaries from the “Slavianski Corps” to aid the insurgents. According to US military analyst Scott Ritter, Wagner was founded in Donetsk on 1 May 2014.39
  By April 2014, the central government in Kyiv had launched the so-called anti-terror operation against the insurgents in the Donbas. On 6 April 2014, Ukraine’s interim President Oleksandr Turchynov ordered the creation of an “anti-crisis task force” to address “all those who take up a weapon with anti-terror measures […]”40 This was in response to the occupation of administrative buildings in Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk by pro-Russian activists. Therefore, 6 April marked the start of the Donbas war by the coup government in Kyiv. On 2 and 8 May 2014, massacres perpetrated by far-right paramilitaries occurred in Odessa and Mariupol.
  On 7 and 27 April 2014, separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk declared their own people’s republics. In May 2014, the rebels conducted referendums in their controlled territories to gain extended independence or autonomy, against which Putin had advised. Such secessions are debated under international law, but are generally possible legally, even against the will of the mother country, as noted by the International Court of Justice in The Hague on 22 July 2010 regarding Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “International law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence.”41
  Therefore, the illegal war was not initiated by the Russian Federation in February 2024, but by Ukraine in April 2014. By the end of 2021, according to international organisations, more than 14,000 people had been killed, including 3,400 civilians.42 The OSCE concluded that 75 % of civilian casualties were at the hands of the Ukrainian army.43 This constitutes genocide and is a criminal act under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.44
  Putin did not recognise the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk until February 2022. He obviously did not want to get drawn deeper into the conflict. However, Russia supported the separatists logistically, economically and with arms deliveries. The extent of direct military involvement is unclear. Military analyst Jacques Baud assumes that there was no intervention by regular Russian forces.45
  Conversely, NATO has been massively arming Ukraine since the Maidan coup. Joint military manoeuvres and US instructors were used to achieve ‘inter-operability’ as quickly as possible. Here are a few comments on the purpose of these measures:
  Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of the French president General Charles de Gaulle: the war “was triggered by the will of the Americans and NATO and is largely maintained by the European Commission”.
  Alain Juillet, head of the French foreign intelligence service DGSE under President Jacques Chirac, says the Americans provoked the war: “Clearly.” Since 2014, they have done everything they can to ensure that Russia slips into the war. NATO has teamed up with Ukraine “to wage war against Russia. Without NATO, Ukraine would be dead.”
  Günter Verheugen, long-standing EU Commissioner and Vice President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2010: In the war in Ukraine, “it is not about what is best for Ukraine. It is much more about the strategic weakening of Russia”.46

War of brothers: the Ukrainian-Russian conflict

On 21 February 2022, Russia recognised the newly established states of DNR and LNR. In doing so, Moscow saw itself as acting in accordance with international law. Once a state is recognised, binding international treaties can be concluded, including mutual assistance obligations. In doing so, Moscow also abandoned the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements, which, according to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Hollande, had only served to give Ukraine time to rearm. They were binding under international law by virtue of a UN decision. Former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr General Harald Kujat therefore speaks of a clear breach of international law.47
  Former US weapons inspector and retired colonel Scott Ritter assesses: “[…] Ukraine and its Western partners simply bought time until NATO could build up a Ukrainian military that could take Donbass in its entirety and drive Russia out of Crimea.”48
  However, there are also direct causes for the start of the second phase of the war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The Ukrainian troop strength in Donbass in 2015 was 121,500 men. By February 2022, the number of soldiers had grown to 209,000. Including reservists, Ukraine had 1,198,600 men under arms.49 Former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made it clear in a December interview with the New York Times Magazine that the US had anticipated a war and therefore secretly provided Ukraine with massive arms in September and December 2021.50 Thus, the Biden administration deliberately brought about the war instead of accepting the Kremlin’s offer of negotiations. Ukrainian military officials report that Ukraine has planned an attack on Donbass.51
  As early as 20 September 2018, the Ukrainian parliament approved constitutional amendments that would make the country’s accession to NATO and the EU its most important foreign policy goal. On 7 February 2019, NATO accession was enshrined in the constitution – a clear violation of Ukraine’s 1992 Declaration of Independence and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.51a Beginning in 2014, Ukraine passed language laws that banned Russian films and the import of Russian literature, introduced language quotas for broadcasters, gradually abolished the use of Russian in schools and made Ukrainian the obligatory language in all areas of state and public life. All these measures were contrary to international law.52 In the meantime, monuments and street names of Russian poets and thinkers have been replaced by the names of fascists like Stepan Bandera, and book-burnings are taking place.
  On 24 March 2021, President Zelenskiy signed a new military doctrine that declared Russia the main enemy and aimed to regain control over Crimea and Donbass. In response, Russia also massed troops on the borders with Ukraine. On 31 August 2021, the USA and Ukraine signed a Strategic Defence Agreement. This was followed on 10 November 2021 by a bilateral strategic partnership agreement with a strong anti-Russian focus. On 15 December 2021, Moscow launched a last-ditch attempt to prevent the escalation. Specifically, Russia proposed an agreement in a legally binding treaty based on the principle of indivisible security, renouncing the use of foreign territory to launch an attack on the United States or Russia; renouncing the conduct of military operations by NATO in Ukraine; renouncing further expansion of NATO to the east; and renouncing the stationing of weapons and military in those countries that have joined the alliance after 1997.
  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told the European Parliament on 7 September 2023 that Putin had sent a draft treaty in autumn 2021 “that they wanted NATO to sign, promising to refrain from further NATO expansion […] And that was a condition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we did not sign that […] So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, near its borders.”53 Stoltenberg here states the real reason for the war: the eastward expansion of NATO, despite all promises to the contrary.
  According to political scientist John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago, the decisive factors for the Russian invasion in February 2022 are the USA and NATO. He writes that “the USA and its allies provoked the war. Of course, this is not to deny that Russia invaded Ukraine and started the war. However, the main cause of the conflict is NATO’s decision to include Ukraine in the alliance, which was seen as an existential threat by practically all Russian political leaders as an existential threat that must be eliminated. However, the NATO expansion is part of a broader strategy aimed at turning Ukraine into a Western bulwark on the border with Russia. Bringing Kiev into the European Union (EU) and to promote a colour revolution in Ukraine – in other words, to transform it into a pro-Western liberal democracy – are the other two pillars of this policy. The Russian leadership fears all three pillars, but it fears the NATO expansion the most. To counter this threat, Russia launched a pre-emptive war on 24 February 2022.”54
  He gives seven reasons for this: 1. There is no evidence from before 24 February 2022 that Putin wanted to conquer Ukraine; 2. There is no evidence that he wanted to install a puppet government in Kiev; 3. He did not have nearly enough troops – only 190,000 men – to conquer Ukraine; 4. Putin tried to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the months before the war began, which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has confirmed; 5. Immediately after the start of the war, Moscow approached Kiev to start negotiations to end the war, which actually took place in Belarus and Istanbul, but were stopped by the West; 6. Apart from Ukraine, there is not the slightest evidence that Putin wanted to attack other Eastern European countries; 7. Hardly anyone in the West claimed before the start of the war that Putin had had imperial ambitions since coming to power.
  Once again, the French historian Emmanuel Todd: Ukraine “was armed in order to attack Russia. Putin’s attack was a defensive invasion […]. If NATO had refrained from making Ukraine part of its military apparatus, this war would not have happened.”55 We are therefore dealing with a proxy war that has geostrategic and economic causes.

Phoenix in a nosedive: The geostrategic war for US supremacy

The USA, NATO and the EU have been involved in the war in Ukraine from the very beginning. This can be seen not only in Western involvement in the Maidan, but also in the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004. The West’s cronyism with Ukrainian fascists was already conspicuous during the era of President Yushchenko.56 The aim was to draw Ukraine into the Western orbit by any means necessary, to encircle Russia and bring about regime change in Moscow, as well as to open up new sales markets, extended workbenches and raw material depots.57
  For years, the United States has tried everything to build up Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia. This includes the CIA’s presence in the Donbass with at least twelve secret locations.58 The rearmament of Ukraine continued during Donald Trump’s first term as president from 2017 to 2021. This is also Trump’s war.
  Washington and London deliberately accepted a civil war with the coup on the Maidan, accompanied and orchestrated the war against the separatist republics and prevented a possible peace in spring 2022 after the Russian invasion.59 They are therefore jointly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The bottom line is that the West’s strategy of sacrificing Ukraine for a regime change in Moscow has failed.
  Today, we are witnessing a tectonic shift in geopolitics. Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump’s strategy paradoxically looks like the continuation of US policy by other means. The changes in the Washington administration are shifting the focus of imperial strategies of exploitation and domination from the competitors to the satraps: Ukraine is to be forced to give up rare earths worth 500 billion dollars; the EU is to pay the costs of the war alone; Denmark must accept that Washington is accessing the resource-rich and strategically important Greenland; Trump is publicly considering reoccupying Panama; Canada’s national independence is being called into question; an investor close to Trump has announced that he will buy up the Nordstream pipeline out of insolvency proceedings, which would allow the USA to control Germany’s energy supply. Washington consolidates its sphere of influence, renounces the rest of the world and focuses on its main rival, China.
  A look back: On 9 February 2007, Vladimir Putin warned at the Munich Security Conference against establishing a unipolar world order of the West under the leadership of the USA at the expense of Russia and most other states in the world: “I think that for today’s world, the monopolar model is not only unsuitable, but impossible at all. Not only because in today’s world, especially in today’s world, neither the military-political nor the economic resources are sufficient for a single leader. But what is even more important – the model itself proves to be impracticable because it has no basis and cannot be the moral basis of modern civilisation.”60
  Putin’s speech 18 years ago marked the first clearly formulated rejection of the unipolar system under US domination. This concept of unilateralism was developed after the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet system and was first formulated by Paul Wolfowitz in 1990.61 In Munich in 2007, Russia triggered the beginning of a geopolitical revolution. Other states such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa joined in and today form a group that is striving for a multipolar world. The war in Ukraine and the defeat of the West catalysed this process.62
  However, historians see the actual causes for the war in the decline of the West and the USA in particular. After the Second World War, they still accounted for 45 % of global industrial production; today they only account for a maximum of 27 %. In 2000, 66 % of global trade was still transacted in dollars; in 2022, it was only 47 %, and in the first quarter of 2023 it was only 40 %. At the same time, foreign exchange reserves in dollars fell from 71 % to 60 % in 20 years. In 2022, 140 million out of 340 million Americans were considered poor or low-income.
  The same applies to the entire West: in 1980, the West had an 80 % share of the global economy and the rest of the world contributed 20 %. Today, the emerging countries account for almost 70 % of the global economy, while the West has just over 30 %.63
  Emmanuel Todd: “If Russia wins, the imperial system of the United States will collapse [...] If Russia survives, keeps the Donbass and Crimea, if its economy continues to function and it can reorganise its trade relations, with China and India – then America will have lost the war. And as a result, it will lose its allies. That is why America and NATO will continue […] Its main cause is the crisis of the West […] The West has lost its values and is in a spiral of self-destruction […] Russia is in the process of redefining itself as a culturally conservative, technologically advanced great power.”64
  The Norwegian historian Glenn Diesen writes: “The Ukraine war was a predictable consequence of an unsustainable world order and became a battleground for the struggle for the future world order between global hegemony or a Westphalian multipolar world. The goal of defeating Russia militarily, economically or politically through global isolation has failed. NATO reacted with continuous escalation and theatrics. Since it is an accepted fact that Ukraine has been increasingly ruined by unimaginable suffering and its military objectives have not been achieved, the only possible solution to the conflict is for the West to recognise Russia’s legitimate security interests and thus defuse the security dilemma. The difficulty arises from the fact that this would end the era of liberal hegemony.”65
  Back in 2016, long before the Russian invasion and in the midst of the war between the Ukrainian and separatist republics, the British historian Richard Sakwa said in his book “Frontline Ukraine” that the war in Ukraine was the “suicide of Europe”.66 European integration has turned out to be a pipe dream. Confronted with the task of healing the wounds of the Cold War and building the foundations of a united continent, the EU has failed spectacularly. The European Union degenerated into a money-raising machine for NATO. Now it can continue as a bankrupt.
  In the meantime, there is already open talk in the United States that the Europeans will have to pay for the consequences of the war. The World Bank estimates the cost of reconstruction at 411 billion dollars.67 Bloomberg even speaks of a trillion dollars.68 According to the German Economic Institute, this would burden the European Union’s budget with a three-digit billion sum: based on the current multi-year budget from 2021–2027, experts estimate the costs to be around 130 to 190 billion euros; and the war is not over yet.69 Germany is the EU’s largest net contributor. This means that the costs of the war and the burden of reconstruction will fall on German taxpayers.
  Germany has already spent almost 150 billion euros on the war in Ukraine, money that is lacking in education, pensions, health, infrastructure, housing and the social sector.70 Massive cuts in the social sector will be the result. The billions needed to finance schools and universities will be lacking. The skills gap, particularly among young academics, will increase and we will move towards an “age of idiocy”, as my friend Ramon Schack has called a book. The infrastructure will gradually disintegrate. Thousands of bridges in Germany are already dilapidated and there is a lack of investment in roads and railways. This increases logistics costs for companies and makes it more difficult to find good young talent.
  Elsewhere, Emmanuel Todd reiterates his view that Russia is waging a “defensive and preventive war”: “This war has [...] become existential for the United States. Just like Russia, they cannot withdraw from this conflict, they cannot let go. That is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.”71
  The head of the US State Department, Marco Rubio, has now clearly formulated a change of course for Washington in an interview that can also be found in full on the Foreign Office website and can therefore be said to be programmatic in nature:
  “I think that [the Westphalian system of sovereign states] was lost at the end of the Cold War, because we were the only power in the world. Thus, we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. […] So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia […] So now more than ever, we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.”
  Marco Rubio has thus admitted the failure of unilateralism. He confirms the diagnosis of my late friend Jonathan Schell, who had already described the concept of the unipolar world in 2003 as a path from cooperation and partnership to military intervention and wars of aggression in violation of international law, as an imperialist policy with which Washington is taking the path of arrogance and ignorance and thus “setting the stage for a catastrophe”.72

The global economic war

The USA and its European satraps believed they could bring Russia to its knees with economic sanctions. I still remember Annalena Baerbock saying: “These sanctions will ruin Russia!” The West has frozen foreign assets of the Russian Federation worth almost 300 billion euros, major Russian banks have been banned from the SWIFT payment system, Russian companies cannot buy high-tech or dual-use products in the West, energy companies such as Shell, BP or logistics companies such as Maersk have left Russia. These sanctions were not decided by the UN and are therefore all in violation of international law.
  In the meantime, these people have become quite meek after German research institutes have also determined that the sanctions have boomeranged.73 The economic campaign against Russia has failed. It has led to rising energy, commodity and food prices in the West. US companies have lost more than 300 billion dollars as a result of the sanctions – too much for Trump.74
  By blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, which investigator Seymour Hersh attributes to Washington, Germany has fallen into the energy trap. Russia’s economic power was criminally underestimated. The Russian Federation has overtaken Germany in the production of steel and aluminium – both essential materials for war – and has caught up with the United States.75 According to US military analysts, Moscow also has a clear lead in terms of military capabilities.76
  In Germany, almost 40 per cent of the population have no (significant) assets at all, which puts them under massive financial pressure in a crisis situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the explosion in energy prices in the wake of the Ukraine war and inflation. On the other hand, private wealth is concentrated in so few hands that the five richest German business families (Albrecht/Heister, Boehringer/von Baumbach, Kühne, Quandt/Klatten and Schwarz) together own around 250 billion euros, which is more than the poorer half of the population, i.e., far more than 40 million people. Of the 250 billionaires, only one comes from East Germany. However, poverty is still more widespread there and, at around 30 per cent, a much larger proportion of employees work in the low-wage sector than in western Germany.77
  Russia’s economy is growing in the new markets of Eurasia and the Global South. Only the USA, Canada, the 27 member states of the EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, South Korea and Taiwan sanction Russia, as well as Turkey on certain points.78 According to my calculations, that is currently 40 states. The United Nations has 193 member states. The remaining 153 continue to trade with Russia.
  The American historian Nikolai Petro from the Long Island University has pointed out that the sanctions are failing to have the desired effect for two reasons: Firstly, Russia has had experience in dealing with sanctions since 2014 and has strengthened its domestic economic resilience. Secondly, 153 countries remain partner states of Russia. This makes it possible to circumvent the sanctions across the board.79 They have to, because many African countries are dependent on Russian grain imports. The West’s sanctions against Russia have made grain prices 30 % more expensive, producing a mountain of African corpses. It is not Russia that is isolated, but the West. The European Council on Foreign Relations found the phrase: “United West, divided from the rest.”80
  By the end of 2022, Russia had become China’s second-largest supplier of crude oil. India is also an important oil customer. The country only produces 10 % of its domestic demand. But 34 % of the remainder of India’s oil consumption in 2023 came from Russia. At the same time, the eastern trade routes are being expanded. New nuclear-powered icebreakers are being built in the shipyards of St. Petersburg, making it possible to transport oil and gas to China and India via the northern route all year round. A contract between the Russian atomic energy agency Rosatom and China’s Hainan Yangpu new Shipping Co. Ltd. regulates the construction of new ice-going container ships. According to Rosatom, more than 3 million tonnes of transit goods will be shipped there in 2024. Progress is also being made with the expansion of the 7200-kilometre North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will run from St. Petersburg to ports in southern Iran and on to Mumbai. These transport routes bypass Europe and shorten the standard routes through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal by less than half. This reduces the transport time from Moscow to Mumbai from 40 to 60 days to 25 to 30 days. This reduces transport costs by 30 per cent. Progress also made on the western route through Azerbaijan. Rail freight rates there rose by 30 per cent in 2023. The rail link between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf was opened in June 2024.81 At the same time, the routes from Europe to Asia through the Suez Canal are becoming more dangerous. The Houthi rebels in Yemen are threatening cargo ships in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Moscow has prevailed in the trade war with the West.
  However, the consequences of the economic war are having a different impact on the USA and Europe. Ukraine is the biggest loser of this war, an entire country, hundreds of thousands of people are being sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical and economic interests. The second loser is Germany.
  The Munich-based Ifo Institute registered a decline in the business climate in the automotive industry in August 2024: it fell by 6.2 per cent to minus 24.7 per cent, a veritable “nosedive” in sentiment, according to Ifo expert Anita Wölfl. There is a lack of orders, especially from abroad.82 Due to the high energy prices, 37 per cent of industrial companies intend to relocate their production to other countries. Leading economic institutes are warning that Germany’s growth forces are dwindling.83 In a study by the Swiss International Institute for Management Development (IMD), the German economy is losing out on almost all location factors.84 The credit agency Creditreform has registered more company bankruptcies than it had for almost ten years.85 The German Economic Institutesees high net outflows of direct investment from Germany and speaks of deindustrialisation.86 China and the USA are emancipating themselves from German exportism. Its being decoupled from cheap Russian energy is affecting Germany’s industry. The Leibnitz Center for European Economic Research and Creditreform calculate in their closure report that 176,000 companies closed down last year. As the main causes, they see high energy and investment costs, interrupted supply chains, staff shortages and political uncertainty. All of this together is a “toxic cocktail” for the economy.87
  At the meeting of the Eurasia Society on 28 August 2024 in the Russian Orthodox Church, Wintersteinstr. 24, Charlottenburg, Michael Schumann, Chairman of the Board of the Federal Association for Economic Development and Foreign Trade BWA in Berlin, said, “We work according to the Noah’s Ark principle: when the deluge of anti-Russianism and sanctions against Russia comes, we put the most important companies on a ship, batten down the hatches and wait on Noah’s Ark until the tsunami is over.” Given the key economic data, it is however doubtful whether the German economy will recover quickly.
  The elites of the West have wandered into a maze with a dead end, and instead of coming to their senses, they are driving the population deeper and deeper into the Ukraine war. This, too, has economic reasons. During a visit to Kiev on 6 September 2024, US Secretary of State Lindsey Graham made it clear that Ukraine was sitting on trillions of US dollars worth of raw materials that were “good for the US economy” and that Ukraine was fighting so that the US would not have to do so.88 CDU member of the Bundestag Roderich Kiesewetter: “If Europe wants to complete the energy transition, it needs its own lithium deposits. The largest lithium deposits in Europe are in the Donetsk-Lugansk region [...] So here we additionally have completely different goals in the background. “89
  The Deputy Head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, posted on 30 August 2024: “According to freely available data, the total value of Ukraine’s former mineral resources is estimated at almost 14.8 trillion dollars, but 7.3 trillion dollars of these are now in the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. This means that almost half of the former Ukraine’s national wealth is located in the Donbass! The resources of the Crimea, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, which have also reverted to Russia, are estimated at a further 821 billion dollars. All this corresponds to almost 63 % of the former Ukraine’s coal deposits, 42 % of its metal deposits and 33 % of its rare earths and other important materials, including lithium. In order to get their hands on the coveted mineral resources, the Western parasites shamelessly demand that their protégés wage war to the last Ukrainian.”
  But it is not just about those resources that could halt the downward trend of the western industrialised nations’ rate of profit and support the strategy of decarbonisation.90 It is about the continued existence of the dollar economy. This is precisely why the US will continue to try to contain Russia. The dollar is considered the world’s reserve currency. That is why the US Federal Reserve can issue unlimited dollars. This is because every nation needs dollars and must hold dollar reserves in order to trade and, above all, to purchase commodities such as oil and natural gas. This is why the USA can export its inflation: The entire world functions like a sponge, soaking up this inflation and enabling the US government to run up huge deficits and finance an astronomical military budget, as well as allowing a tiny proportion of the population to enrich themselves excessively. States wishing to leave the dollar economy will suffer the fate of Libya, Iraq, Iran or Venezuela.
  This is where Russia comes into play. Because Russia is a threat to the proliferation of the US dollar. Russia has become astonishingly resilient over the past 20 years and cannot simply be brought to its knees by military intervention. Russia is reducing the size of the dollar sponge. And the smaller the sponge, the more difficult it will be for the US to finance its deficit and maintain its economic hegemony.91
  Here you can see – from different perspectives – the actual reasons for the war. Emmanuel Todd assumes that, in this respect, the third world war has already begun. However, this global conflict is taking a different course from the one the West would like. He names ten major surprises of this war in Ukraine, and, “the tenth and final surprise is just materialising. It is the defeat of the West. One might be surprised by such a statement when the war is not yet over. But this defeat is certain, because the West would rather destroy itself than be attacked by Russia.”92
  The United States will resist a further economic nosedive – even at the expense of its vassals. In the Ukraine war, they have not prevailed militarily against Russia. This is why Trump has also spoken to Putin about the dollar economy – and why he is increasingly aiming for cooperation rather than confrontation. The fact that the Europeans look stupid in the process is an entirely desirable collateral damage.

The war against the population

When I talk about a war against our own population, I am guided by an idea of the writer George Orwell. He explained in his dystopian novel “1984”: “… war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The word “war” itself has therefore become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that war has ceased to exist because it has become a permanent state.”93
  As George Orwell writes in his prophetic novel “1984”, “all modern wars are primarily for this purpose.” 94 This means that war is not primarily directed against the external enemy. It is about the surveillance of one’s own population and the expropriation of the middle class and of dependent employees.
  We are not dealing with a battle over Western values or the rules-based order. As the US economic analyst Martin Armstrong has pointed out, this is a political emergency. The power elites of the West need a war because they have maneuvered themselves into maze with a dead end.
  If we take the coronavirus crisis into account, we can say with the Dutch historian Kees van der Pijl: “What is happening before our eyes is the gradual replacement of Western liberalism by an authoritarian state and social structure.” All in the name of the virus or the fight for Western values against the dictator Putin. “The state of war declared in spring 2020 actually serves to secure the existing order.”
  Already with the war on terror after 9/11, “the promise of the American dream soon evaporated and was replaced by the politics of fear, a form of government based on frightening the public. With the Patriot Act, democracy was scaled back several notches. Orwell’s assessment of permanent war as a means of securing the existing social order had come true.”95
  The coronavirus crisis has led to a massive increase in the expropriation of the middle class. As the now published RKI files show, the measures were not medically or virologically indicated, but politically indicated and were enforced by politicians. The massive restrictions meant that many smaller companies had to give up. The services were taken over by large chains or digital groups. In this way, the profit margins of the big players can be secured at the expense of the small ones. This process will accelerate as a result of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed by the West. The population is becoming impoverished and showing a reluctance to consume. People feel that they will have to foot the bill for the war.
  Medium-sized companies are feeling the effects of this in particular. The situation is different for DAX companies: the tax exemption of disposal gains in 2002 under Chancellor Schröder led to German banks selling their industrial holdings and investing in structured securities. This paved the way for the financial crisis. The industrial holdings were taken over by foreign, particularly US, financial investors. US financial investors are now involved in almost all German DAX companies. They help decide on management and bonuses. A corporate strategy that goes against their interests is therefore virtually impossible.
  Relocating production capacity to the USA or China is merely a calculation exercise for such large corporations. They have to secure dividends for shareholders in the long term. Medium-sized companies, on the other hand, are more localized. They will feel the consequences of a misguided policy more severely.
  The war in Ukraine is a single program to promote the arms industry at the expense of the population. In Germany, the SPD and FDP are calling for an increase in arms spending to 3 % of gross domestic product, or 135 billion euros. The Greens are calling for an increase to 3.5 %, which would be 160 billion euros and a third of the federal budget. The AfD demands 5 % of GDP and therefore half of the federal budget of 470 billion euros per year for armaments. This can only be financed through cuts in pensions, healthcare, education and infrastructure. At the same time, we are watching Germany and the EU disintegrate.
  While the EU is pumping billions into Ukraine, more than one in five EU citizens is homeless, applying for emergency accommodation or queuing at charities for a bowl of soup. More than 20 per cent of the population is affected by poverty and homelessness, according to the Lebanese newspaper “Al Mayadeen” – almost 100 million people out of a population of 450 million.96 The European press has hardly reported on these figures from the EU Commission.
  The most dangerous thing, however, is that in July 2024, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz signed a contract for the stationing of new US medium-range missiles in Germany, the only NATO country, from 2026. This means that Germany will increasingly become the focus of Russian hypersonic missiles such as Oreschnik, which can be equipped with nuclear warheads. This increases the risk of nuclear annihilation for the German population, as it means that those responsible in Moscow will also define Germany as the primary target of a pre-emptive strike.
  The war in Ukraine is therefore a transatlantic raid by corporations against their own people. Wealth is being taken from the pockets of dependent employees and the middle classes and distributed to US arms companies, financial investors and agricultural corporations. This accelerates the process of impoverishment. What’s more, it holds the population of Germany in particular hostage to the misguided policies of the warmongers.

Prospects: A ceasefire, but no peace

The United States continues to fight for its global supremacy. However, the focus has changed. The confrontation with Russia is no longer in the foreground, but limited cooperation for mutual benefit. The vassals are not asked. Trump tells Ukrainian President Zelensky that he has to accept territorial losses and initiate new elections as soon as possible, which could mean his political and possibly even his physical end. The USA is abandoning Ukraine – the Moor has done his duty. The Ukraine project is over. Europe is no longer a priority for the USA.97 It is now turning all its strength to its main rival, China. The development and markets for artificial intelligence are to be unleashed.98
  Russia will reject any ceasefire that allows Ukraine and the West to take a breather and then resume the fighting. It is the consequence of a lost war that the victor dictates the conditions. If you want to be successful at the negotiating table, you must first win on the battlefield. What the Kremlin wants to achieve is a pan-European peace order based on the principle of indivisible security. This is not possible in a unipolar world in which the leading power dictates the conditions. Mutual security is only possible in a multipolar world.
  EU governments can now clean up the mess they have manoeuvred themselves into. After the Munich Security Conference, they announced that they would provide peacekeeping forces for Ukraine. Moscow is unlikely to accept this, since the Kremlin regards the UK and EU as de facto warring parties.99 This means that Ukraine will not receive any significant security guarantees.100 Like Ukraine, they will at best be sitting at the side table during negotiations.
  But if European politicians decide to support Ukraine unilaterally, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has indicated, they will have to do so without Washington.101 They are welcome to buy the weapons they need from the US. But this would only mean the continuation of a policy based on a fake morality. The formulation of an “unprovoked war of aggression” is a propaganda fairy tale. Rather, Russia has repelled the illegal war of aggression of the coup government in Kiev and its Western backers.
  The change of course does not mean that there will be a return to international law. The example of Gaza shows that power-political measures are no longer disguised with the phraseology of the “rule-based order”. The law of the jungle applies, and there is no need for double-talk. Imperial strategies as the highest form of finance capitalism are simply executed. Allies are degraded to backbenchers, vassals who can be used at will for US interests. This also means that the concept of German free-rider imperialism has failed: letting the US go first in order to get a piece of the loot for themselves.
  Now the servility of Europe’s transatlantically corrupted elites is taking its toll. The renunciation of any foreign policy independence, or, as Robert Habeck has explained it, “servant leadership”, is proving to be a dead end. Now the responsible politicians have to pass the costs of the “world’s most avoidable war” (Richard Sakwa) on to their own populations. Across Europe, but especially in Germany, a process of impoverishment will begin that will result in significant social upheaval and distribution struggles, and even civil unrest.
  Even the last disinterested person will then realise that the ruling party cartel has gone bankrupt. As a result, fuelled by Trump supporters, the development will go entirely in favour of parties like the AfD in Germany. At the Munich Security Conference, Vice President J. D. Vance called for the fall of the firewall and for European politicians to follow the voice of the people.102 He reminded the audience that the greatest threat is not Russia, but the erosion of civil rights and the destruction of democracy.103 A meeting between US Vice President J. D. Vance and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference was not planned, but one with the CDU/CSU chancellor candidate Friedrich Merz was.104 From 2016 to 2020, Merz was chairman of the supervisory board of the subsidiary BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland AG.105 This makes it clear where the journey is headed: With an AfD brought into line with the transatlantic agenda at the side of the CDU, financial capitalism is to be unleashed and comprehensive social cuts pushed through. With a Chancellor Merz, Germany would be the second country in Europe after Ukraine – where a consortium of BlackRock and JP Morgan already manages the national debt – to fall into the hands of financial locusts.
  The dismantling of civil rights and democracy, however, is irreversible. The war has accelerated the shift towards surveillance capitalism. Comparisons with National Socialism are inappropriate here. For one thing, the dictatorship of finance capital is not a national strategy of conquest, but is being rolled out globally. Secondly, it is a “blocked conflict”106: the seemingly free availability of online services sedates the population in surveillance capitalism, and a strong labour or civil rights movement, as in the Weimar Republic, no longer exists as an organised political force. The transformation into a façade democracy, into a “reverse totalitarianism”, is also a product of the West’s disintegration.107
  Europe and especially Germany are falling into the slipstream of the economic development. We are not only becoming the backyard of the USA, but also the backyard of Russia, which will no longer reverse its turn towards Asia; because it is about billions of investments that have to pay off. The people of Europe, especially in Germany, will pay the costs of a war that they did not want to prevent. The lack of civil courage, especially in Germany, the propagandistic blindness and the sluggish agony of large parts of the population also contribute to the decline. For not only those who cause the disaster are responsible for it, but also those who did not want to prevent it.
  If one tries to take a comprehensive view, the world no longer coincides with the global illusions of the West. Washington’s hegemony is no longer realisable. The West’s defeat in Ukraine is sealed, and the conflict is gradually shifting to other theatres. As with the fall of the Roman Empire, asymmetric wars are therefore breaking out on the peripheries of the empire. In a decades-long war of attrition, the USA will overstretch the forces of its satraps and gradually wear down its own.108
  Geostrategic analyst for  “Asia Times”, Pepe Escobar, writes: “In this situation, the hegemonic power behaves like a drunk in a bar who is refused another drink. Chaos and violence are inevitable […] The US is an empire with military bases around the world to enforce its economic and political interests at gunpoint. No nation has fought as many wars as the United States in its 248-year history. The exploitation of its allies and the rest of the world through financial extortion, which relies on the arbitrary definition of the dollar as the primary global reserve currency as a means of applying financial pressure, is another mechanism of coercion and neo-colonial exploitation of resources. But American hubris and the delusion of absolute power will come to a bad end. The empire is fragmenting and failing. This is leading to an existential crisis. The United States and its allies are no longer the economic power they once were. A tectonic shift is unfolding away from the control of the world economy by the Western minority towards a fairer and more peaceful international order.”109
  For the time being, however, this remains a pipe dream. Donald Trump wants to get rid of the war in Ukraine and Europeanise it, but he is sticking to the concept of “Make America great again”. It is therefore a continuation of US imperial policy by other means. He respects the transition to a multipolar world and is realigning his own sphere of influence at the expense of his vassals. But the conflicts we are experiencing are only just beginning. They exceed the capabilities of the incumbent US president. This is because it is a struggle of historical and global dimensions. Trump’s proposal, in times of such upheaval, to pursue nuclear disarmament together with Russia and China could become the most important initiative of a US president in recent decades if he can prevail against the military-industrial complex. Perhaps it can help save the world from a nuclear catastrophe.110
  To summarise:

1. The West has lost the war in Ukraine. Washington is saying goodbye to Europe and resigning itself to the multipolar reality. The US is focusing entirely on the fight against China. Washington is Europeanising the war.
2. Ukraine will be divided. The areas that have been incorporated into the Russian Federation will remain Russian. Moscow is claiming 30 per cent of Ukrainian territory, but will have to relinquish Odessa and Kharkiv.111
3. Russia’s turn towards Asia is irreversible. The West will not succeed in splitting Beijing and Moscow.
4. Trump will force the EU to accept Ukraine and pay for the reconstruction. As a result, the EU will bleed financially and fall apart. Europe will become the backyard of the world economy and geopolitics, both economically and politically.
5. The economic decline of the West is unstoppable in the long term. Foreign Minister Baerbock lets the cat out of the bag and mentions a new EU arms package for Ukraine worth 700 billion euros, which is to be decided after the election.112 With this, the EU has decided to go down with the sinking ship.113
6. The West is divided. The US will partially withdraw from Europe, but will maintain NATO as an instrument to discipline and control the Europeans. In the future, the EU alone will contain the Russian Federation.
7. The European elites continue to refuse to face reality. Provocations such as those of Annalena Baerbock, to deliver the114 the Taurus and attack Russia’s hinterland, could prompt Moscow to launch a preventive strike and cause a nuclear catastrophe.
8. We are further away than ever from a pan-European peace order based on common, indivisible security.
9. We have corrupt, incompetent and uneducated politicians and a depraved academic class who do not know what war means to thank for this.
10. The German people are dozing their way to their doom.

The five wars being waged on Ukrainian soil culminate in a historic collision of the West’s relegation battle. NATO turns out to be a paper tiger and the EU will break apart. The battle for Kiev will be the catalyst for the downfall of the only world power, the United States, and for the disintegration of Europe – if there is still a future for our politicians in view of the nuclear destruction potential and their “apocalypse blindness”115. Paul Valéry’s reference 100 years ago that Europe is only the “Cape of Asia”116 is becoming increasingly relevant. The wrong decisions of transatlantic corrupted elites, who are willing to ruin their own countries for a pat on the back from Washington, have contributed to this decline. It is time for these people to be replaced and held accountable. I want to hear handcuffs clicking. •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2025/nr-5/6-4-maerz-2025/fuenf-kriege-in-einem

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