( 英語が苦手な場合は、オンラインの機械翻訳を使用してください )
Europe's strategic autonomy is a hotly debated topic on which interests has been reignited by recent backstabbing by USA on France regarding its submarine contract with Australia. Objection from people such as Hugo Meijer, a think-tank pundit of Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) argues that the autonomy could lead to (1) US' full or partial withdrawal from Europe, thus to leave Europe on its own against a Russian threat which (2) Europe itself can not deal with.
Meijer's long article of 144K characters enumerated in great details the reasons to object EU's autonomy, but happened to miss one obvious and fundamental element of the global system, i.e. Americans' desire to maintain USA supremacy. For example, USA will stand by India if it were in a conflict with China, regardless whoever is really to be blamed for the conflict and how little practical value India is of to US, because China is a closer match to US power, thus considered a threat to US supremacy. Even if Europe achieves strategic autonomy partially or fully, now think from the US' point of view, will US ever allow Russia to take over Europe so as to become stronger through expansion than US? Clearly No! Trump's threat to withdraw from Europe is a bluff, which Trump is known to be very good at.
Some people may object me by saying, your way is amoral and is an explicit exploitation on USA. Well, this is the way how geopolitics is played, every country exploits every other country if it can. The most recent instances of exploitation on EU by USA are, its effort to enlist EU into its anti-China bandwagon, and the recent backstabbing at France regarding its submarine contract with Australia.
I point out further that, not only USA will inevitably meddle in conflict between EU and Russia, and stand by EU's side, but also EU needs to do nothing as a returning of favor to USA. This should be viewed as a responsibility of the world's supremacy country. USA needs to protect its own supremacy, alone, and coming with this supremacy status, there is already a hefty amount of benefits in various aspects for Americans, such as US$'s global currency status. For Americans, their best strategy is to maintain the global imbalanced configuration in which US' power stands out prominently over all others, which means to even out local powers and suppress any 2nd tier powers that are closer match to USA. Likewise, for EU, since it is a major and 2nd tier player on world stage, its best strategy and responsibility is to keep the global imbalance capped. I will discuss these later in association with an ancient geopolitics law rediscovered by myself.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of Soviet Union, the world has changed fundamentally. Russia is still strong and belligerent, but is no longer the old Soviet Union who can gobble the world alive. USA's role has also changed naturally, it was a leader of the free world during the old cold war, now it is the dominator of the whole world. When the Biden says, "America is back", it sounds like, a parent deserted his children, suddenly his conscience got the better of him, and came back for his children. I hope you are not so naïve. What they really want is the respect and obedience for a leader from you, while they will continue to act as super bully and put American interests above all. Except the charming words, Biden is no different from Trump. Besides, Americans have never left, they always have powerful influence in the media sectors of major western countries so that they are setting propaganda agenda in world public opinion. They always control the financial system of the whole world, and many other key sectors.
So Mr. Meijer, as an employee of EU's think-tank, his loyalty should be placed on EU, his duty is to advise EU on how to maximize EU's interests. This article of his casts doubt on these things, Could he also be on a US payroll, which is highly possible considering the influence of US in the west (ref. 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18)?
One of the main reason why EU strategy autonomy became a hot topic is the division between EU and USA on China policy. The Americans are selling a China threat theory, to persuade EU to fully jump on its anti-China bandwagon. For example, Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategy adviser, has been advocating a theory that China is turning the whole world into its tributary states. How irony it is that, while Americans are frightening Europeans about the danger of losing its autonomy to China, Americans or American agents are advocating EU to give up its autonomy more fully to USA. The fact that a EU think-tank pundit objects EU's autonomy with USA indicates that EU has already handed over its autonomy to USA, probably to a significant extent. Or maybe Bannon is talking about the danger in a remote future, say 100 years later. Fine, but I dare to bet that the odds for the world to fall into tributary states of USA is 99 times of the odds with China, just read on, you will see.
Theoretically, every country wants autonomy if it can, since a non-autonomous country will often have to yield and sacrifice its national interests for the gain of other country's national interests. This autonomy includes many aspects: the media, politics, military and defense, finance, economy etc. These aspects are often intertwined, e.g. foreign influence in the media can lead to non-autonomy in politics, because the media affects the thinking of local politicians and the general populace, which can further lead to more serious and harmful results for the country in other aspects.
Besides Europe, in many other parts of the world, such as Japan, Australia, Canada, etc., the situation is even worse, since there is not even a debate about autonomy.
Australia is the best counter-example of the autonomy from US. It recently tore up a submarine purchase contract with France and signed up an expensive nuclear submarine contract with USA. Clearly it is doing what USA dictates and at its own great cost. Both the preparing of a war with China, or any possible real war in the future that US may drag Aussies with it into, will be costly and bring Australian people absolutely nothing good. Compared with the wars in middle east which Aussies participated with USA, the loss of life and wealth in a war with China, would be much much bigger.
A country's strategy choice must be based on a correct assessment of the country's international situation. However, this is not always easy in countries like western Europe or Japan, where US has strong influence over the media there. A great percentage of the populace, including politicians, journalists etc. have been falling into unwitting victims of a lifetime of propaganda, having a distorted world view.
Japanese scholar 白井聡 said: "US's bad is reported with 1/10 dilution, while China's bad is reported with 10 times exaggeration". The world had been duped by US for years to believe that Iraq had WMD and committed many other hideous crimes, and the US invasion of Iraq was a justified war. Out of the blue, it was revealed that the WMD evidence presented at UN by USA is a tube of laundry powder, and other charges on Iraq were fabricated as well (ref. 28, 29, 30). Aren't these enough signals for the people in the west to be alert of USA's brainwashing power and to double-check the China (and Russia) threat theory as advocated by USA?
The China threat is exaggerated by a multiplication of two forces. The 1st is CCP's desire and propaganda to make itself appear stronger and more successful so as to suppress the criticism by its domestic opposition force. The other is US' desire to paint China as strong and dangerous so as to overprice its protection for its allies, e.g. to force them to exchange its autonomy for the protection, with an ultimate goal to make US primacy more absolute and unchallengeable, and the propaganda power of western media controlled / influenced / infiltrated by US and also serving US national interests. It is an irony that the two opposing propaganda forces ended up working in concert to achieve a common goal: to make China appear stronger and more terrible than it really is.
The above paragraph goes largely true with Russia. You can think of Russia threat and China threat as USA's buy-one-get-one-free sales bundle that if you want protection against this one, you must also join with US in a cold war or even a hot war against another. It's very expensive. The two bogeymen and the bundle sales can provide USA the widest possilbe geographical coverage.
In essence, Americans are selling EU (and other western countries) a protection against a non-existent threat, the threat of losing its autonomy to China or Russia, so that they pay with their autonomy to USA. And this latter non-autonomy could involve joining a US-led war against the two for US' national interests.
I'd like to talk about the incantation words used by Americans very frequently in its recent selling of China/Russia threat theory: "Common Value". Americans refer this to democracy in a country's internal politics. We all love democracy, how about we extend it to the realm of international relationship? Compared with the internal democracy in another country, the former is much more relevant to us than the latter. This common value of international democracy would mean USA can not wage wars arbitrarily against small and weak countries without UN authorization, it would mean USA can not mass-produce tens of millions of refugees that floods Europe and Asia, so the people there would not have to absorb the refugees and make sacrifice for Americans for nothing. Obviously this international democracy is a higher level of common value than the internal democracy of countries.
The "common value" advocated by USA sounds nice, but don't forget the real behavior of its advocator underneath it. Australia publisher and its former Ambassador to Japan John Menadue summarized a US foreign policy flowchart hinged on the common value "democracy" (ref. 34), it's nasty! The American common value foreign policy has been quite fruitful, tens of foreign governments have been toppled by either a US military invasion, or joint work of US economic sanction plus CIA conspiracy plus US media's inciting propaganda. As a result of "collateral murder" of this, 6 millions people have been killed since 911 (Americans themselves put this number at ~930K), and tens of millions turned into refugees.
Another common value, the last but not the least, I'd remind your attention. USA is recently pumping out extra large amount of newly printed US dollars, in trillions. Since US$ is the de facto global currency, this means Americans are stealing wealth worth of trillions of US$ from the whole world, a sharp increase than its usual stealing over the years. Americans may argue these are not stealing, it's called a debt, but even a fool knows that if you always borrow, never return back, not even ever have any plan to return back, then that's stealing! Clearly the newly printed US$ is a common value, how about we put it under UN management and distribute it through UN to the whole world? Or at least distribute the dollars to its allies with whom USA is emphasizing common value?
The losing of autonomy of countries have far-reaching impact to the whole world than is limited to its own people and territory of the specific country. Without much thoughts we can see that it could cause a domino effect around the globe. A paper by the author, rediscovered an ancient geopolitics theorem called 蘇秦の合従説. The theorem dates back to roughly the same time of period as Thucydides trap conjecture (~2300 years ago), and is more important and more fascinating. Because people in the ancient countries did not take this theorem seriously, nobody could have foreseen something worse than the worst nightmare could become reality, the countries all failed and ended up being conquered one by one by the topmost superpower at that time. In modern language, this theorem states:
For any country, if some country is clear-cut world's topmost superpower and has bullied other countries, it is strategically beneficial to impede that superpower in association with all others. Unless the whole world gets united to contain it, the superpower's advantages over other countries will enlarge further with no limit, there is a tendency for the world to fall into a more dangerously lopsided state.
According to the paper, there is an intrinsic positive feedback loop for the power of the world's topmost superpower, such that its power, and in turn its power advantage over all other countries in the world tends to be self-amplifying. It works like this, the top superpower will uses its advantages over others to bully around and grab national interests at the expense of others, and this makes it even stronger and grow faster than others, so it can bully others more easily and grab more national interests from others. The domino effect of countries losing its autonomy to USA is also an exhibition of the said positive feedback loop.
In fact, there is indeed a positive feedback loop for America's advantage over all other countries in the world such that this advantage is amplifying by itself. One of the tools that facilitate this mechanism is US$ and its global currency status. US has been using kiting cheques of ~US$ 500 billions per year to draw huge amount of real wealth from the world for some ~40 years, this is gigantic stealing, that is the true meaning of its chronic annual trade deficits. US has been putting this stolen wealth into good use to enhance its advantages over the rest of the world, e.g. by luring top talents from other countries to enhance its R&D capability so as to increase its advantages in key scientific and technological fields, or by spending munificently to enhance its military capability to such extent that its military spending is more than the combined sum of the next 12 countries. See my other article: Dire prospect for the world if the US leech on world economy is allowed to suck blood for 100 years.
This theorem can also be stated in another way:
The top superpower of the world will conquer all other countries, one by one, unstoppably and with bloodshed, unless they get united to confront the top superpower.
A key question, is US the world's top superpower? Certainly! In today's world, the US controls global news media and public opinion (moral high ground), the formulation of world rules (legislative power), the police (law enforcement power, US is the world's top military power, its military spending exceeds the combined sum of the next 12 countries), the banking system (the dollar is the de facto global currency), the Internet and SNS, high tech and many other key components of the world. If this is not enough to convince you, think about this, US not only has the power to cheat the world into believing its lies about Iraq with a tube of laundry powder, but also has the power to make the world to live with its illegal aggression and mass killing in Iraq as if nothing significant had happened after its lies were exposed, i.e. the world have become accustomed to not questioning and not challenging anything by USA. The country that can match up with US power does not exist in the solar system. The power advantage of US over other countries is so overwhelming already and still increasing, that the peace and security of the world at large has to rely on a few unreliable conditions: 1. A person morally more corrupt than Trump would never be elected president of US, otherwise, the “America First" may become "Americans rule all". 2. The majority of Americans remain largely satisfied with the current extent and scope of their exploitation on the world. In a short term, this may be ok, but in the long run, this is not good.
How about China's power as compared with US' power? Well, China is the number 1 in many less important fields such as: manufacturing of raw steal, concrete, building roads and bridges, refrigerators, cell phones, but USA is the number 1 in military power, such as nuclear ICBMs, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, tanks, etc., and many other most important fields. Clearly, there is a strong asymmetry in the power distributions of the two in favor of USA, such that David Frum, the speech writer for George W. Bush calls China threat a paper dragon.
See the above photo, I raise three questions for you to consider. 1, If the world goes the American way, after 20 years or so, how low a Japanese (and other countries too) prime minister would have to bend down his body in situation like this? 2. Most Japanese have found nothing wrong with this photo, but if we change the face of Blinken with the face of Chinese foreign minister Yi Wang, or the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, how would they react? 3. What would happen to a kowtaoing leader if it were the head of state of Germany, France, Italy, or South Korea?
From the points above, I conclude that Europe must and can achieve strategic autonomy.
Now, my dear readers, I have two questions for you to consider. 1, While Americans can get their national strategy optimized and largely right for their country, but in many of the allied countries of US, although not in shortage of think-tanks and research staffs, why can't they get the national strategy straight and optimized for their own countries, but more like a follow-up or copy-paste of Americans' thought product? 2. What should you do to avoid the dire prospect as predicted by this ancient geopolitics theorem? Please do the part of your duty as a world citizen.
参考資料/References:
My own articles:
1. Ancient geopolitics law rediscovered in "big-power competition" times
2. Dystopia democracy: a world ruled by a global emperor with only Americans having the voting right
3. Data from Bank of Japan shows Japan is in huge disadvantage in global competition relative to US
日本語版 、「日銀データは、米国と比べて日本が国際競争で非常に不利にあることを示す」
4. Dire prospect for the world if the US leech on world economy is allowed to suck blood for 100 years
Others' articles:
5. Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security if the United States Pulls Back
How USA bully and infiltrate its allies:
7. The British-American coup that ended Australian independence
8. US incited Australia into a confrontation with China
9. Anti-China Threat Production in Australia: A redundant, out-of-control industry
11. Why did Japanese semiconductors sink? Has Toshiba fallen into a trap set up by US? / 日本の半導体はなぜ沈んでしまったのか～東芝は米国にハメられた？
12. Sony and Mitsui Real Estate etc. 35 Japanese companies were taken over by overseas capital / ソニーや三井不動産も実質外資 乗っ取られた日本企業35社
13. How is Japan robbed of money by the US companies targeting Japanese financial assets? / 日本はなぜ、アメリカに金を盗まれるのか？ 狙われる日本人の金融資産
14. What does the U.S. want from Samsung? The hidden intention of the White House call
15. TSMC is forced to set up a factory by the United States? -- VP of National Taiwan University
16. NSA spying row: Denmark helped US gather data on European officials, says report
17. Release Meng Wanzhou and the release of the two michaels will follow
18. Canada got hoodwinked in Meng Wanzhou shake down and show trial
American disinformation campaign against China:
19. US government is mounting a disinformation campaign through multiple sources to discredit China – and taking down a huge media entity as collateral damage
20. Doubts Swirl Around Bloomberg's China Chip Hack Report
21. China’s Chip Hack, Amazon and Apple’s Denials, Google’s Trust Reversal
22. NSA official: Bloomberg story created a frenzied, fruitless search for supporting evidence
23. Viral Fake Footage Of “Chinese” Atrocities Shows The Power Of Narrative Spin
24. Faking China Genocide, Blinken is infected by Trump Virus
25. Ouïghours, pour en finir avec les fake news
26. The US Is Doing Far Worse Than What It Accuses China Of Doing To The Uighurs
27. Uighur genocide is Pompeo’s last-gasp attempt to morally nuke China
American disinformation campaign against Iraq:
28. Saddam Suddenly Looks Innocent
29. US supply Iraq with chemical and biological weapons to use against Iran
30. Iraq and the Persistence of American Hegemony
Other USA deeds
31. Americans have killed ~6 millions since 911 while they only admitted 930K
32. US Revamps its North-Syria 'Steal Oil Mission'
33. Syria says US ‘stealing’ oil after American energy firm signs deal with Kurdish rebels
34. US foreign policy flowchart
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