This analysis reflects the author’s belief in the existence of a secret alliance uniting Washington and Islam against Europe.
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Charles A. Kupchan, author of The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, is a professor at the University of Georgetown and the head of a thought current according to which the neo-imperialism embraced by the Bush administration has, paradoxically, brought about the global enfeeblement of the American power:
One of the real threats that lie ahead of us is the transformation of a “light” empire into a “heavy” one which, far from being a source of reassurance for other nations, will make us come across as hostile. Instead of giving the impression of being a beneficent hegemonic power, we thus appear as predators. In the eyes of the whole world, we seem to be losing the legitimacy of remaining a superpower, a legitimacy that was both our main asset and our most precious “product”. If this situation persists, all of our ventures will fail. We may well witness several countries forming armed coalitions against the United States. (As stated during an interview entitled The End of America’s Reign, published by numerous American newspapers in December 2002.)
Strangely enough, Kupchan believes that America’s true ‘challenger’ in the years leading up to 2030 will actually be the EU, not China:
Europe is no longer a group of sovereign nations. Mirroring the United States of the 18th century, it has, instead, become a unified ensemble, a collective entity with a growing aptitude towards embodying a counterweight to our empire.
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Having also authored a book entitled The End of the American Era (Knopf editions), Kupchan predicts that in 2030, the world will be divided among the following confederate blocs: North America (comprising the USA, Canada and Mexico), Latin America, Eastern Asia (revolving around a China that will have formed an alliance with Japan), an ever more impoverished Africa and, last but not least, a Euro-Russian partnership. What he actually foresees is a conflictual multilateralism or, at best, a cold war that differs greatly from the unilateral sort of American hegemony that current US leaders dream of. Summarising his viewpoints, he declared (in an interview with the Italian magazine Sette, 19/12/2002): ‘For the time being, Bush is waging war upon Saddam, but our real enemy is Europe’.
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Let us imagine that, following an extremely severe future crisis, a new European power were to rise and, in the aftermath of a revolution ignited by the native masses and the necessary leadership of a providential personality, undertake an ethnic Reconquista (after all, history can only progress thanks to the alchemical combination of these two elements). As a result, the USA may decide to intervene militarily — in the name of human rights and democracy — and attempt to reclaim our continent, bombarding us and attacking us. I, for one, have serious doubts about this hypothetical version of our future history, simply because American strategists only attack the weak or, at least, those that the US believes to be so. Faced with a regenerated European power, the Americans would be inclined to compromise.
C. The United Kingdom, America’s Mistreated Vassal
If there is any European country that has become subservient to the USA, especially since the Iraqi campaign, it is undoubtedly poor Great Britain, even more so under Blair than under Mrs. Thatcher. In The Guardian (17/07/2003), David Leigh and Richard Norton Taylor explained that their country was now ‘the USA’s client state, having lost its sovereignty to America’s advantage’.
The authors assert that American leaders have compelled Blair to go against British public opinion (for rather obscure reasons, as some people speak of a ‘personal file’), which represents the peak of submission. They also claim that the British commanding officers stationed in southern Iraq are entirely obedient to the Pentagon. They point out that the Tomahawk cruise missiles purchased by Great Britain at Raytheon, USA, can only be used under American permission; the same goes for the British army’s imaging satellites. The authors add that, owing to the ‘double keying’ principle, Britain is banned from using its own nuclear weapons (meaning those 58 Trident missiles carried by submarines and, once again, purchased at Lockheed Martin in the US) without American authorisation; that the American military bases located in the United Kingdom and at Diego Garcia (and financed at British taxpayers’ expense) are not subject to British control in any way; and that British secret services act as America’s dependants, follow US orders and are under the obligation to provide the USA with information without automatic reciprocity.
Washington shows no gratitude in the face of this wilful British submission, only a certain disdain. We all remember Donald Rumsfeld’s words when he said that the USA did not require the support of British troops in order to crush Iraq. Great Britain has submitted to the logic of unequal treaties with the USA, as China did in relation to the West in the 19th century. In a display of utter masochism, successive British governments have expressed great pride at this ‘superb cooperation’ (as once declared by Her Majesty’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett). In a devastating analysis published by first-rate magazine Prospect in early 2003, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the former director of the British secret services who had acted as the Crown’s ambassador to China, stated that his country had practically become both America’s lesser military proxy and its 51st state.
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Commenting on David Kelly’s suspicious suicide affair, William Pfaff, who served as the Defence Ministry’s adviser on biological weapons, also denounced this subjection which, under Blair, has been taken to unheard of levels (The International Herald Tribune, 24/06/2002). What follows is British Defence Secretary Hoon’s confession, dated late June 2003: ‘It is absolutely inconceivable for the United Kingdom to undertake a large-scale military operation independently of the USA’. Not only without American participation, that is, but even without US authorisation. Pfaff notes:
In today’s Europe, only France has massive independent military capacities. All other non-neutral European countries simply watch as their armed forces are calibrated in order to become mere specialised units in a US-led NATO.
Blair ventures even further: by selling America the BAE Systems defence and avionics group, what he did was sell off his country’s techno-military capacities.
Blair endorses the American pretentiousness that drives the US to mock international treaties and obligations and grant itself the right to global military domination.
Blair has, however, made a major mistake when adopting this submissive attitude, for his NAI masters lack the necessary means to realise their pretentious and unreasonable ambitions. But why is it that Blair has proceeded to organise his country’s suicide in this manner? Why display such servility towards an America that has become drunk on a power that it does not actually possess? Blair has not gained anything specific from serving the USA, if one does not count the Congress medal that he received for good services rendered. In Pfaff’s eyes, the answer defies reason. He believes that if America’s current foreign policy endures, regardless of whether Bush is re-elected or not, ‘we will witness an American national tragedy’ worse than that the military defeat in Vietnam, one that will, in turn, ‘inevitably lead to a British national tragedy’.
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There is a powerful and quite radical British-American Atlanticist clan which supports the NAI and its neoconservatives and feels that Great Britain must become a sort of American protectorate whose European role is to dissuade Europe from becoming a ‘world power’ and to drive the latter towards contenting itself with being a major market devoid of any and all political will. Thatcher and Blair both belong to this clan, and Clinton’s electoral strategist, Dick Morris, is one of the ideologists behind this tendency. In an article entitled Britain’s Future Lies Over the Atlantic, Not the Channel and published by The Daily Telegraph on May the 19th 2003, he states:
The distance from London to Paris is greater than that which separates 10, Downing Street from 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue. […] Britain’s diplomatic future
is neither connected to France, nor Germany, but to America. The British are an efficacious people, endowed with energy and positivity. Just like the Americans, they worry about their future. Unlike the French, however, they are neither eccentric, nor neurotic, and unlike the Germans, they have never tasted defeat and humiliation. [Classy, is he not?]
This American then proceeds to give his English friends some ‘advice’:
Great Britain is free to trade and share its money with whomever it wishes; if it desires, it can choose to align its domestic policy to Brussels’ continental bureaucracy and abide by it. Fulfil your economic destiny with the continent if you wish; but keep your political vows for a marriage with America. We Americans long for you, far more so than your European counterparts ever could, and our common future is far brighter than what they propose’.
His statement sounds like a dutiful wife’s love declaration…
D. A Consensual Weakness
European countries, including France (regardless of its endless sabre rattling), always surrender to Washington’s desires, because they overestimate both America’s power and its means of action or retaliation. We are not to ‘vex’ our suzerain, you see. What everyone fails to comprehend is that America is neither a superpower, nor even a hyperpower. One abides by its injunctions for emotional and ideological reasons, but not as a result of practical and reasonable motivations. The entire European policy lacks any sort of will to resist American imperialism and is founded upon utter ignorance of the sole true words ever spoken by Mao: ‘The USA is but a toothless tiger’.
The British case is highly emblematic: they relinquish their whole national sovereignty, allowing America to exploit and enslave them (which only applies to their leaders, not their public opinion), all in the name of some fictitious Anglo-Saxon solidarity. As for eastern European countries, they have not fared much better either, which is true of Poland above all others. Following their misadventures under Soviet hegemony, they have thrown themselves into the arms of American ‘democracy’.
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One can doubt the fact that Chirac’s objection to the American warmongering in Iraq is primarily due to his love of international law and a neo-Gaullist desire to counterbalance America’s hegemony. For it is, above all, a pacifistic and Third World-like attitude that has been a constant for Chirac, who holds great admiration for the peoples of the South. He is a naïve preacher of interplanetary dialogue, horrified at the sight of the emerging ‘civilisational clash’, one that he strives to deny at all costs by embracing the delusion of a secular and democratic Islam as well as that of a successful Republican ‘integration’, just like the entire intellectual and political caste in France.
More than anything, he intends to treat the ever more numerous Muslim-Arabs with utmost care. The latter weigh our foreign policy down, reducing our independence through their neo-colonial presence, which is far graver than all the pressure exerted by American hegemony. In this respect, the headscarf affair is the latest example. Neither of the two woes is desirable, of course, but I would definitely rather live in a Europe dominated by an American commission than on a continent where mosques prevail and where we must submit to foreign Muslim control. Why? My position, however unbearable it may seem to those who espouse obsessional anti-American hysteria, is rooted in plain calculating Machiavellianism: for it is infinitely easier for us to liberate ourselves from an American hegemony that has been imposed upon us from abroad than to free ourselves from a Muslim-Arab occupation that has afflicted us on our own soil. In no way is the latter the result of the former, as the usual sophistic claims would have us believe.
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Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a European MP, is convinced that by heading the pacifistic and legalistic campaign against the American crusade, Chirac has put himself into a ridiculous position and, as a result of both Saddam Hussein’s fall and America’s military victory, suffered a political Waterloo. He implicitly believes that any Franco-German opposition to the NAI is but smoke and mirrors, since France and Germany both lack any and all will to attain power, unless one counts that of speech, i.e. that of powerless words.
He notes:
In fact, the US government strived to achieve three objectives: to eliminate the Iraqi regime under the pretext of disarming it, to put an end to the UN’s cumbersome guardianship, and to shatter the unity of a Europe that has turned into a commercial threat and is capable of teaching political lessons. The policy adopted by France seems to be tailor-made and especially suited to allow the USA to accomplish its triple ambition. (Le Figaro, 18/04/2003.)
Bourlanges sinks into partial confusion here: if it is indeed the case that France lacks the means to materialise its opposition, it is nonetheless absurd for it to be expected not to manifest the latter. On the other hand, what he fails to mention is that the American ‘victory’ in Iraq will ultimately turn out to be a plain and simple defeat.
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Having said this, is the French government’s diplomacy not rather grotesque? Mr. Raffarin and Villepin have both made stunning declarations to the media: on the 31st of March 2003, at Clermont-Ferrand, our Prime Minister made a statement in which he declared himself to be in favour of an American victory and, criticising anti-war demonstrations, asked his audience ‘not to fight the wrong enemy’. How absurd. Are they thus siding with those whose war they have declared to be illegal?
Extremely annoyed by the poll conducted by Le Monde on the 31st of March 2003, which revealed that two thirds of the French population were anti-American (a figure that is especially due to the presence of French Muslims), and by the people carrying Saddam Hussein’s portrait and chanting anti-Semitic slogans during anti-war demonstrations, Chirac is now attempting a stunning gymnastics effort. All of this indicates and confirms the fact that Chirac’s anti-warmongering stances were more focused on mobilising voters for the 2007 elections than on actually opposing American hegemony. Politically speaking, he is thus doing the splits. While having lunch with several UMP senators on April the 2nd, he reminded them that ‘the transatlantic alliance cannot be questioned in any way’ and openly wished for an American victory as well. What acrobatics! France is both in favour of the war and opposed to it, you see, and both pro- and anti-American. Hardly credible, is it? As I pen these lines, we must all wonder whether France will not end up sending its own troops to Iraq, under UN mandate, of course, yet under American leadership.
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In order to be able to oppose the US, our words cannot rival the importance of power. This statement was confirmed by a recent alarmist report brought to us by the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) on 07/02/2003, a report that warns of Europe’s demographic, techno-economic and scientific decline in the face of the USA and Asia. Yves Messarovitch wrote the following in Le Figaro Magazine (15/02/2003), entitling it ‘The Law of the Strongest’:
The inevitable truth is that the USA and Europe (that of France and Germany anyway) have chosen structurally diverging paths. America watches as its industrial, financial and even military potential increases day by day. It creates more working posts than it terminates, deposits more patents, works harder and, ultimately, grows wealthier. On their part, France and Germany are essentially struggling to evade a pattern of employment loss, innovation weakness and lack of working appetite. It is however only by curing these ailments that the re-conquest of our diplomatic and military sovereignty can take place. One cannot be achieved without the other.
Indeed, claiming to counter America’s global policy and to resist its imperialism is all well and good, but one must first have the means to do so, meaning the will and power to rival its hegemony. The anti-Americanism embraced by the pacifists, ecologists, paleo-socialists, human rights activists, ‘alter-globalists’ and other overexcited Europeans will never be anything but ineffective pseudo-lyricism and a soft romantic attitude.
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The USA is clearly alone in its rejection of a ‘multipolar’ world, which acts as
a false nose in its efforts to mask a ridiculous and impudent claim to (hegemonic) primacy. The threat to Washington’s power does not, however, stem from the pleadings which one hears from France and Chirac, but, as always, from China. Taking advantage of his visit to Moscow on May the 27th 2003, Chinese President Hu Jintao declared (in a report published by The Russia Journal Daily): ‘The tendency towards a multipolar world is irreversible and prevalent’. He then went on to mention a ‘strategic partnership with Russia’. During a speech at the University of Moscow, he implicitly attacked the USA and its unilateralist pretence, while simultaneously preaching Machiavellian pacifism: ‘Peace cannot be attained through the use of force’. In no way does this prevent China from aspiring to become the world’s foremost military and nuclear power in the medium term, of course. Unfortunately for us, the Chinese dragon emerging from its ancient torpor must indeed be a greater source of worry to the Pentagon than the Franco-German axis.
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How does the USA fight against cutting-edge European industry? The answer is: through European cowardliness and pusillanimity. Infuriated by the success of the Airbus and Ariane projects, the American administration has introduced an array of measures to weaken its European rival; not only by using political means to impose its high-tech (and especially military and technological) products upon the European market and attempting to undermine Europe’s spatial programmes (notably its satellites, which often outperform American ones), but also by proposing a hypocritical policy of industrial cooperation known as a ‘transatlantic relationship’.
Let us give the emblematic example of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), a combat aircraft that can strike against several targets. It is a new generation fighter bomber developed in the USA. The Americans suggested that the Europeans join this project by abandoning their own combat fighter plane programmes. Except for the French, who still cling to their Rafales, Europe simply gave in. British Rolls Royce and BAE have thus taken charge of 8 % of the American project. Adopting the attitude of a consenting victim, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany have also joined in. Instead of investing more than 4 billion Euros into its own programmes, Europe is to spend it all on research and development to the sole profit of the US, which will subsequently proceed to sell Europe the JSF. As ever, it is of course voluntarily that our pusillanimous European politicians immolate their countries’ sovereignty and independence upon the altar of ‘transatlantic friendship’.
A Global Coup Page 13