PREVIEW： Realpolitik #34 ｜ The End of NATO
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about the recent Munich Security Conference, and why it is so important for the world's leaders to attend it. I also talk about some of the key take-aways from the conference, including the call to action by the EU's foreign minister, Catherine Ashton Ashton Ashton.
Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad.
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As has become customary, this is a live episode, so please drop your comments or questions
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in the chat or on the comments page on the website, and I will do my best to address them.
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Today, we're going to be talking about the Munich Security Conference, which took place
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over most of last week, with really the final days being Friday and Saturday, or Thursday,
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Friday and Saturday, where the big hitters, the country leaders, Secretary Rubio, etc., came
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and spoke. Now, first, I want to tell you what is the Munich Security Conference and why is
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it important. The way that the global calendar works is that first you have Davos, sometime
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usually in January, where the corporations meet with the governments, and it's really
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corporate-focused for the most part, and they go around and they discuss their priorities
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and what they expect and what they want and things of that nature. And then afterwards,
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the governments themselves, particularly at the defense and security level, ship off to
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Munich and have their own big conference that kind of sets the global security agenda. And this is an
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old event. It's been happening for 60 years, but it's really been gaining prominence as the government's
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version of Davos, where they set out, as I said, their security priorities. And now you have
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participation of the Chinese and of the Indians and of a bunch of other countries. And it gives you a great
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great deal of insights into the nature of foreign relations. If you will remember from previous
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episodes, we discussed how in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin
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pretty much set out his opposition to further NATO expansion and warned that there were going to be
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consequences. And then the result of that was the 2008 invasion of a big part of Georgia, which sort of
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ended the possibility of Georgia joining NATO and pretty much put a halt on further NATO expansion.
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In the 2022 conference, Kamala Harris, formerly the vice president of the United States,
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went to the Munich Security Conference and more or less said that Ukraine would be joining NATO at some
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point in the future. And that was really the straw that broke the camel's back and that drove the
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Russians to decide that, OK, we're going to actually go ahead and reinvade Ukraine, following up on their
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intervention in 2014. So it's actually a big deal. And the theme of this conference was really that
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the global order was collapsing, that the United States cannot be trusted, and that essentially
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American-European relations were breaking down. And I thought I'd sort of show you a little clip
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of how things were going. This was from a session between the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
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and Kayakalas, the essentially foreign minister of the EU, was participating. And this was how she was
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Escalation. So what I'm hearing outside of forums like this privately is thank you for America.
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So she's rolling her eyes at the American ambassador for saying that the Americans should be thanked for
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their role in ending a bunch of conflicts under President Trump. And she really wasn't having any
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of it. And it was really like that all through. What you saw was essentially that Britain, Canada,
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the EU, Australia, all were ganging up against the Americans and against evil Hitlerite dictator,
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Donald Trump. Some of it was comical. Some of it was genuinely comical. Here you have Kayakalas.
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I think it's worth listening to again. Let's do this.
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We hear the call to action. Europeans assemble. And let me take more inspiration from the Marvel
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universe. Heroes are made by paths, are made by the paths they choose, not the powers that they are
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graced with. Europe's path is clear. Defend Europe, secure our neighborhood and build partnerships
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I think what somebody who's the foreign minister of the EU is taking her cues and her ideas from
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Marvel, we really have a big problem. Just saying, it seems like a pretty serious problem
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that this is the level of intellectual discourse. And it was really like that throughout the conference.
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Keir Starmer obviously spoke at the event. Macron spoke at the event. Mertz of Germany spoke.
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And they were broadly in agreement that the world was back in the 1930s. And to the extent that there
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was disagreement, it was over who was the new Hitler. Was it Putin or was it Donald Trump?
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Trump. They were attacking the far left and the far right and insisting that the only solution
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is really for the globalist governments in Canada, the EU, Britain, Australia to fully align with one
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another and to coordinate their actions completely to cut off the threat from any kind of populism.
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And you always see this language and this attack on populism, by which they mean popularity.
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So they're defending our democracy. But what they mean by that is more or less their democracy,
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them remaining in power, them remaining in charge. And so to enable them to do this,
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the big focus was on attacking Trump and attacking any kind of nativist politics that would try
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to put the peoples of the countries that these individuals govern ahead of the special interests
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that actually control the people in charge. And so one of the big themes of the conference was the
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importance of Europe being able to go it alone and being able to defend itself without backing from
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the United States. This is clearly deeply unrealistic, and I'm going to explain why.
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The first reason that this is highly unrealistic is that essentially the countries of the EU have
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fundamentally diverging interests. It's the leaders of the EU who believe that their interests are fully
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aligned. But if you think just in terms of a map, if you look at a map of Spain and Poland,
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the threats that are facing Spain are fundamentally coming from North Africa. Obviously, that's what the
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geography of Spain dictates. The threat facing Poland fundamentally comes from Russia.
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And the idea that Russia and Spain should be working together to face this common threat
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is just laughable at the face of it. It doesn't really make any kind of sense. Plus, even when you look at
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internal EU relations, you pretty much see that the relationship between the Germans and the French,
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for example, is really completely breaking down. And you saw that with the photoshoot that happened
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between Macron, Starmer and Mertz, where essentially, Starmer and Mertz were on one side,
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and Macron was the odd one out looking deeply embarrassed and very much out of place.
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They childishly refused to shake hands with Macron and tried to put him on the side. And every time he
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tried to say something, they'd sort of try to ignore him. Why is that? Because although the Munich
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Security Conference was full of talk about how European countries should centralize their military
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procurement, how they shouldn't have 10 different models of tanks and 20 different models of destroyers
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and whatever models of armoured fighting vehicles and so on and so forth, the actual way that it works
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is that when push comes to shove, none of these countries is willing to give up its own position.
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So the problem with the French is that they insist on having full autonomy in their own military supply
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chain. The French are the only European country that build their own aircraft, they build their own
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destroyers, their own one aircraft carrier, their own fighting vehicles, their own missiles and missile
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interceptors, and everything of that sort, because they believe that they should remain autonomous no matter
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what. And so when they talk about centralizing military procurement, as they did repeatedly
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in the Munich Security Conference, I mean, Starmer was repeating this, Mertz was repeating this,
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and even Macron was repeating this. When they keep on repeating this message, it just completely rings hollow.
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Because when push comes to shove, two things happen. First, the French insist that they will have full
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autonomy over their own supply chains, and they won't concede anything to anyone. And the second thing
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that happens is that at the military level, these countries refuse to place their militaries
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under anybody else's command, which is what would be required. And then there's another reason here,
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which is that when you're thinking about military technology, it has to be specific to where you're
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fighting. So that's why Russians always built lighter tanks, where the Americans built heavy tanks.
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The Russians built lighter tanks not because they couldn't amass enough steel. The Russians built lighter
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tanks because they know that the tanks are going to have to go over snow, and that there has to be some
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proportionality or some relationship between the weight of the tank and the terrain that is going over.
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And so Russian tanks tend to be 10-12 tons lighter than American tanks, meaning that they are fit for the
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climate that they're fighting in. And if you wanted to build tanks for Spain or tanks for Britain, they will have to
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adapt to the local environment that they're in. So it just simply never actually works.
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Looking at some of the other themes that they were talking about here, and I'm just having to glance a
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little bit at the notes, it really seemed like the objective of all of this was to throw as many
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spanners in the wheels when it comes to what Trump was trying to do in order to paralyze him and in order to
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make sure that he doesn't succeed, especially when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war.
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So you heard a huge amount of discussion about a couple of themes.
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One of the themes was the importance of Europe maintaining its digital autonomy.
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And what they mean by that is a rebuttal to the pressure that has been coming from the Americans,
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insisting that the EU stop regulating free speech to the suffocating extent that it has been doing over
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the last few years. And I think we just saw Starmer a couple of hours ago, tweeting about how protecting
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the kids is a red line, and he won't allow social media companies to do anything that threatens the
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welfare of children. This is the same Starmer that's been happy to look the other way when it comes to the
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grooming gangs in Britain. So you can see how seriously you can take him. Macron repeated the
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same message on digital autonomy. He and Mertz had an event a few months ago, emphasizing the same idea.
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And what they mean by that is that they want to maintain the ability to regulate AI and control it,
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and to regulate social media and control it. Because one of the themes that they kept on repeating was
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how important it is that they be able to police speech in the way that they find fitting.
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And in parenthesis, that kind of reminds you of the Romanian elections last year, which they pretty much
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stole by alleging that the Russians had instigated some kind of campaign on Instagram to influence the
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election. And it turns out the campaign was instigated by the losing candidate in the
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Romanian elections, just so he could accuse his rival of receiving Russian backing. And that's the same
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playbook that they used against Donald Trump in his first term, with a Russia collusion hoax.
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So you see this emphasis coming out constantly out of the Munich Security Conference, that the
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Europeans need to control the digital space more effectively. Meaning that they need to be able to
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define American companies whenever they want to, when they don't comply. Meaning that they need to be
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able to go after X and 4chan, and what's that other thing called Kiwi Farms, and so on and so forth,
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to make sure that they have full control over the discourse. So that really came out. And they just
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don't have any other choice. And the way that these guys see it is that Trump is an existential threat to
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the EU regime in total. Because as I've argued in previous episodes, what Trump really wants to do at this
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stage is to break the EU, even though the EU initially was very much an American-sponsored project,
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because the Americans thought that they could control Europe a lot more effectively if they had the EU.
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It's just that now the EU has turned into a golem, essentially, which has way too much power,
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way too much control over regulation, and therefore can't do very much.
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Another theme that we saw coming out of the Munich Security Conference was that they need to be able
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to have less protectionism. Now this is genuinely hilarious. The premise of the EU was that it would
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be a protectionist block for certain industries. And if the EU was to try to be less protectionist over
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things like farming, it would pretty much face a full-on revolt from people like the French farmers,
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and as we're already seeing from the Dutch farmers. So they're talking about being less protectionist,
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but this is by far the most regulated piece of real estate in the world. Nobody is more regulated than the
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EU. Nobody is more protectionist than the EU. It's just that they're using that as a vector of attack
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against Donald Trump, because he's trying to use tariffs in order to extract concessions from the
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Europeans. And you constantly see this, where these guys pretty much say anything, regardless of whether or
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not it's true, in order to defend their interests. That's all that they do. You saw Europe complaining
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an enormous amount over Greenland, and over Trump wanting to take Greenland. I'd have to argue that this
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is valid to some extent, because you can't just grab the territory of another Christian country.
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You have to buy it, you have to acquire it in a legitimate way. So Trump kind of threatening to
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use force on Greenland wasn't really a good idea, and he backtracked from that. But they will never
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forgive him for it. And it's not that they will never forgive him for it because he wanted to take
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Greenland. It's that they won't forgive him for it because he's a threat to the status quo.
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And the Trump example is really a problem for them. So we also saw, as I said, a lot of focus on
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developing defense industries. And they're looking to India and Brazil and the Gulf and maybe even China
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to partner with them on building up their defense industrial base. The issue here is that China has
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pretty much eaten Europe's lunch. I mean, what China has done with its industrial base was to grow it to
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such an extent that it's become literally the world's manufacturing superpower, bigger than the next 10
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countries combined. And that's why the Americans are pushing to consolidate over Europe and Japan,
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and to some extent, South Korea, because they need that industrial base if they're going to compete with
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the Chinese at any point in the short term. Europe, instead of reading this correctly and realizing that
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their interests are naturally aligned with their cultural allies, who are, at the end of the day,
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the Americans. These are the natural civilizational ally of Europe and the natural civilizational leader of
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Christendom as a whole, just because of the size of the United States. Instead of doing that, they're
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looking to partner with India. And they're looking to partner with one of the most corrupt countries
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in Latin America, Brazil. And they're looking to partner with the Gulf, which is, at the end of the
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day, your civilizational rival, no matter how you spin it. Plus, China has pretty much eaten Europe's
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lunch. What China has done was start from very low-level manufacturing, low-skill manufacturing,
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to become the technology leader in a whole range of industries with enormous defense applications.
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They now have their own lithography machines to build microchips. They have their own microchip
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manufacturing. They're leading in all kinds of genetics-based medicine, in all kinds of
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medical manufacturing, etc. They're leading in all kinds of optics and fibers and things that are
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absolutely necessary for you to build modern weapon systems and modern communications.
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So the Europeans are looking at this from the completely wrong angle. And you see that throughout
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in the Munich conference, and you see zero relationship with reality. Like, the extent to
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which these guys are dissociated from reality is insane. And the Canadians and the Australians are
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fully in on the EU strategy. And they're trying to find a way to back each other in what is essentially
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a rebellion of the provinces against the imperial center. That's the way to think about it. As I think
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it was the Danish Prime Minister who said it, or the Danish Foreign Minister who said it, it's one thing to be
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happy vassals. It's another thing to be miserable slaves. And with Trump changing the paradigm when it comes to
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the way that the West should be operating, they are just in rebellion. You also saw a lot of talk about
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technological autonomy in the EU and technological independence. So not just digital, but everything
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to do with supply chains and manufacturing. And here a couple of thoughts come to mind. First, energy.
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You can't want to build a manufacturing base and have green energy. A strong manufacturing base requires cheap,
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reliable, reliable, predictable energy. Renewables are not in that picture. You can't operate an industrial
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base based on wind and solar, because wind and solar are both incredibly unreliable and unpredictable.
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So this is by definition impossible. But you saw them constantly harping on about climate.
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And you see them consistently committed to this agenda, which fundamentally serves China.
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China. No sense of reality. Second, if you want innovation and technology, you have to deregulate.
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And you have to lower taxes. And you have to make entrepreneurship rewarding.
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And this is impossible for them to do. Because it means that most of the jobs of the EU are unwanted,
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because the only jobs that you get within the EU are regulatory jobs. So these guys aren't going to do
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what's required to cut off the branch that they're sitting on, in order to achieve the objectives
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that they're saying they want to achieve. If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the Lotus Eaters,