For anyone still puzzled about what’s going on in the world, just look to Germany. Whatever the EU’s ruling nation is mulling over, that’s at the core of the world’s problems. Take German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s most recent whining about the world’s hopes of progress being ruined by Putin and the demilitarization campaign on Ukraine. Did Europeans not notice the EU’s failures before February 2022?
I was reading Scholz on Politico this morning and thinking about a global pandemic, the Germans’ domination of EU economics and policy for decades, and the general failures of western capitalism overall. It’s no stretch to theorize that the whole Ukraine affair is another facet of the cover-up/reset the western elites set in motion some years back. The world has been sick economically, morally, and idealistically for some decades now (maybe forever), and puppets like Germany’s chancellor use convenient enemies and excuses, often contrived ones, to cover their crimes against humanity.
Putin and Russia warned this conflict would happen for over a decade. Everybody on the planet knows this. Well, except for BBC, Bild, and CNN viewers, that is. Let’s look at some facts about the shining “progress” Mr. Scholz is now grieving over it.
Professor John J. Mearsheimer presented much evidence that supports my contention in his paper from MIT, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order.” He rightly points out that the American-led liberal order demanded that states relinquish too much authority to the order’s international institutions. But, the diffusion of power and national identity this causes is part of the darker and more disastrous process of complete domination, which is the goal of the liberal elites.
At its core, the western order was always about favored status at the global level and for individual societies. Mearsheimer goes on to discuss how the hyper-globalization the American run order built caused huge economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies. This, combined with the inevitable clash globalists would have with national identity, doomed the post-Cold War order from the start.
The unipolar order tried to forge new traditions and ideals from dozens of nations with centuries-old cultural, linguistic, and ideological identities. The EU’s failures reveal the folly there. But more importantly, the loss of jobs, income, and welfare (hope) that globalization brought, ruined any chance this ordered world would succeed. For decades the United States and its satraps steamrolled much of the world into compliance using finance and the military as levers. Germany is a perfect example now, of how this order was doomed from the beginning. Let me illustrate, but before I continue, I’ll share a definition from Mearsheimer on what an “order” is made up of:
“International institutions, which are the building blocks of orders, are effectively rules that the great powers devise and agree to follow because they believe that obeying those rules is in their interest. The rules prescribe acceptable kinds of behavior and prescribe unacceptable forms of behavior.”
The professor goes on to point out the obvious problem that “great powers write those rules to suit their own interests.” Ironically, it is not the international institutions that are the problem. These interconnecting organizations are fundamentally needed. What’s gone wrong is the uneven, biased, or rigged influence Americans, Germans, the British, Luxembourg, or Swiss bankers have within those institutions. This is no secret, either. The United States has tried to shape the world in its own image, and by proxy, the Germans have tried to shape the EU in their image, regardless of the cultural or ideological consequences. The bigger problem is that the US and the central European idea of liberalism was doomed from the start, as well. The world cannot exist simply to sustain a prioritized elite society, or two.
My American countrymen have lived a privileged life for decades now. And so have Germans and other north-central Europeans. Even Britain has seen the benefits our unipolar system has wrought. Elsewhere, many have paid the price for a few societies to prosper. I don’t want to get into the economic disasters of eastern Europe here. However, it’s completely fair to say Greeks, Romanians, and Bulgarians have had nothing of the prosperity Germans and Netherlands people know. What I do want to emphasize is how America and the German industrial state self-restricted. This can be explained with another Mearsheimer idea on how come international orders fail:
“The same two factors that account for the prevailing order, the distribution of power and the leading state’s political ideology, explain the fall of realist and agnostic orders as well as the kind of order that replaces them. While those same factors also help explain the dissolution of ideological orders, two other factors, nationalism and balance of power politics, usually play the central role in causing their collapse.”
The good professor makes much effort at differentiating so-called “realist orders” from “agnostic orders,” and the specific bases of power within each type. The liberal world order we are discussing here has been of the realist type, powerful, but in the end, unbending at the most crucial points. America, with the help of some European nations, has endeavored to micromanage every aspect of the world’s systems.
Conversely, had the US-led order being more agnostic, we would not be seeing the hegemony crumble now. For Germany (the German people) and Mr. Scholz, we would also not be watching their high and mighty EU notions crumble into unmanageable bits over an energy crisis. Make no mistake, the German leadership and the lever pullers who controlled them had a vision of “progress” that was powered by Russian gas. Only the ownership being retained by Russians seems to have been a problem. So, we have Ukraine, which followed the Arab Spring and a string of institutionalized wars. Yes, Putin has ruined the progress these liberal order captains envisioned, but that happened long before the current Ukraine crisis. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (deceased) and former President Barack Obama used to say, the United States is “the indispensable nation.” This has been acted out. This is how we got to where we are. This was the authentic “progress” Mr. Scholz speaks of.
What of the lesser states? What “progress” were the eastern European nations staring up at with dewy eyes? Well, as our brilliant professor says, problems at home have a way of undermining any kind of broader regional or world order. Nowhere is this more evident than here in Greece. A country that should be one of the most robust and affluent in the world is what one German elitist called the “Florida of Germany.” If the EU were anything true unto itself, Germany’s GDP would not be almost 100 times that of Greece. If the world order has spent decades trying to achieve true “progress,” the average Greek or Romanian worker would not make less than half what their German, French, or British contemporaries do. Thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, these people are worse off than under communism or military juntas.
Greeks, Romanians, Albanians, and others can take the bus to Germany or France to become field workers or bus drivers. And the five Lidl stores here in Heraklion, Crete are another testament to German mercantilism, paying Greeks local wages to send profits back to the Neckarsulm headquarters in Germany. Sorry, Greece does send olive oil and feta cheese to western Europe too, I almost forgot. I am sure I made my point, but if not there’s Fraport, TUI, and a slew of powerful German outfits across the former Soviet sphere that testify for me. Progress ground to a half by the evil Vladimir Putin!
Greece is 52nd in the world economically. Romania is doing better at position #47. The Czech Republic is 48th, but even they are behind tiny Israel. Germany went from a divided and bombed-out ruin in 1945 to become the world’s 4th biggest economy today. In Europe, they are tops above the UK, France, and Italy, with everybody else trailing far, far behind. And in the Netherlands, a country with Tulips, the average worker makes three times what a Greek laborer does. And a German leader blames the Russians for the great liberal democratic dream not coming true?
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a puppet liar. A desperate politician in need of a villain to replace Germany’s real enemy, the greedy liberal order dream of selective prosperity.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.