Yves here. Kobybko points out that Europe has now woken up to the fact that it now captive to the US, and is unwilling to do what it needs to do to retain some room of maneuver, which is to mend fences with Russia and resume energy purchases. But he greatly misreads how the US came to dominate Europe. Europe was physically devastated at the end of World War II. The US represented 50% of world GDP. It set up international institutions like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank that even BRICS wants to preserve. So US domination of Europe was a long-standing status quo.
A, and arguably the key mechanism for the US preserving its influence long after its sell-by date was NATO. Even though legally it is a weak alliance, it functioned in a much more influential manner due to the US having bases and troops all over Europe and most important, bearing the financial burden of European defense. That enabled European nations to fund more generous social welfare systems than they likely would have otherwise. As far as I can tell, the only European leader who pushed back in a fundamental way against this relationship was de Gaulle, who among other things was a moving force in France being the only European state to build nuclear weapons.
Recall also that neither the US nor Europe deemed it to be conceivable that Russia would prevail in its conflict in Ukraine. Russia was supposed to have been subjugated by now.
Regardless of your views of how the EU got itself so vassalized, Korybko’s discussion is timely. The lead story in the Financial Times focuses on the EU moving out of denialism and starting to grapple with how to recover a measure of autonomy. From its lead story, EU-US tensions over Greenland and tech are far from over, says Macron:
The EU should not be lulled into a false sense of security that tensions with the US over Greenland, technology and trade are over, French President Emmanuel Macron has warned, as he called on the bloc to embark on an “economic revolution” and finally become a true global power.
Macron said he would press his fellow EU leaders at a special summit on competitiveness this week to capitalise on what he called “the Greenland moment”, when Europeans realised they were under threat, so as to move ahead quickly with long-delayed economic reforms and reduce their dependence on the US and China.
“We have the Chinese tsunami on the trade front, and we have minute-by-minute instability on the American side. These two crises amount to a profound shock — a rupture for Europeans,” Macron told the FT and other European media outlets in an interview.
“My point was to say that, when there is some relief after a crisis peaks, you shouldn’t just let your guard down thinking it’s over for good. That isn’t true, because there is permanent instability now.”….
Europe was now dealing with a Trump administration that was “openly anti-European”, “shows contempt” for the EU and “wishes its dismemberment”, Macron said….
Macron once again called on the EU to raise massive new common debt to invest jointly in three innovation “battles” — AI and quantum computing, the energy transition and defence — so that the bloc could become a global economic power.
Macron said the recent crisis over Greenland, when Trump threatened punitive tariffs against European countries opposed to his effort to secure control of the vast Arctic island from Denmark, was “not over”.
He also predicted the EU and the Trump administration would clash later this year over tech regulation — an area where the EU has long irritated the US for applying stricter rules on data privacy, hate speech and digital taxation…
The US could also retaliate against EU countries, including France and Spain, that are planning to ban children from social media, which would lay down a test for the bloc, he said…
EU leaders are due to meet at a Belgian castle on Thursday to inject fresh momentum into flagging efforts to boost competitiveness and deepen integration of the single market.
Macron said he supported attempts to further simplify EU regulations, break down barriers to intra-bloc trade and reduce dependencies on foreign suppliers for critical inputs and technologies.
But the discussions are likely to be dominated by a long-standing French push for the EU to protect key industries through “buy European” policies, with the European Commission due to unveil legislation on the issue this month.
Back in the day, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake called the position that Europe is in the veal pen. The trigger then was the way the Obama Administration kneecapped organizations that had institutional funding yet had the temerity to cross Team Obama by advocating for progressive programs. From our archives in Frustrated White House Slams “Professional Left”:
What passes for the left in this country has been so marginalized that it has limited sway to begin with (although the public is strongly supportive of some positions they defend, such as preserving Social Security and Medicare). And Team Obama would have to have a badly distorted self image to think its centrist (at best) policies qualify as progressive.
A more logical explanation is that the Administration presumed it could either co-opt or corral enough liberals so that any salvos from that flank would be limited to those deemed so extreme that their opposition might actually be a plus (think the controversial Noam Chomsky). Jane Hamsher has chronicled the aggressive Obama efforts to shackle liberal groups :
Someone asked me over the weekend to be more explicit about what the term “veal pen” means:
The veal crate is a wooden restraining device that is the veal calf’s permanent home. It is so small (22″ x 54″) that the calves cannot turn around or even lie down and stretch and is the ultimate in high-profit, confinement animal agriculture.(1) Designed to prevent movement (exercise), the crate does its job of atrophying the calves’ muscles, thus producing tender “gourmet” veal.
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About 14 weeks after their birth, the calves are slaughtered. The quality of this “food,” laden with chemicals, lacking in fiber and other nutrients, diseased and processed, is another matter. The real issue is the calves’ experience. During their brief lives, they never see the sun or touch the Earth. They never see or taste the grass. Their anemic bodies crave proper sustenance. Their muscles ache for freedom and exercise. They long for maternal care. They are kept in darkness except to be fed two to three times a day for 20 minutes…..
I heard it over and over again — if you wanted to criticize the White House on financial issues, your institutional funding would dry up instantly. The Obama campaign successfully telegraphed to donors that they should cut off Fund for America, which famously led to its demise. It wasn’t the last time something like that happened — just ask those who were receiving institutional money who criticized the White House and saw their funding cut, at the specific request of liberal institutional leaders who now principally occupy their time by brown nosing friends and former co-workers in the White House.
And so the groups in the DC veal pen stay silent. They leadership gets gets bought off by cocktail parties at the White House while the interests of their members get sold out….
Where are they on health care? Why aren’t they running ads against the AMA, the hospitals, the insurance industry barons who have $700 million in stock options, PhRMA, the device manufacturers and the White House for doing back room deals with all of the above?
Why are they not calling for the White House to release the details of those secret deals?
Because they are participating in those deals, instead of trying to destroy them. Well, that and funneling millions of dollars in pass-throughs to their consultant friends that they are supposed to be spending on the health care fight.
The truth is — they’ve all been sucked into insulating the White House from liberal critique, and protecting the administration’s ability to carry out a neoliberal agenda that does not serve the interests of their members. They spend their time calculating how to do the absolute minimum to retain their progressive street cred and still walk the line of never criticizing the White House.
Back to Europe being hobbled and readied for slaughter: Aside from the fact that Macron is even more “all hat and no cattle” than most EU leaders, he and his peers at the helm of large states suffer from very high levels of unpopularity. Simplicius highlighted this tweet:
World leader’s disapproval rating:
🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron: 77%
🇬🇧 Keir Starmer: 68%
🇩🇪 Friedrich Merz: 64%
🇪🇸 Pedro Sánchez: 61%
🇿🇦 Cyril Ramaphosa: 57%
🇦🇹 Christian Stocker: 53%
🇸🇪 Ulf Kristersson: 53%
🇮🇹 Giorgia Meloni: 53%
🇳🇴 Jonas Gahr Støre: 52%
🇧🇷 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva:…
— World of Statistics (@stats_feed) February 7, 2026
BTW, this is the second time in less than 24 hours in which I have seen the image of a tweet, searched for it on Twitter, came up empty, and then went to the feed of the specific Twitter account (manually going back to the date of its publication), and was still unable to find it. It would then turn up immediately on an external search, as in site-specific on Google. So Twitter really is very aggressively suppressing certain tweets.
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website
It’s unimaginable that the US would allow any competitor to reduce its enormous new market share in the European energy industry, which it plans to further expand to make Europe even more dependent on it, and that the US wouldn’t weaponize this if Europe ever defies it on anything of significance.
The US’ dispute with Europe over Trump’s planned acquisition of Greenland, in pursuit of which he even threatened punitive tariffs against several NATO allies before relenting after they agreed to a framework deal, exposed the strict hierarchical vassal-client relationship between them. This was explicitly acknowledged by Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who said that “Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else” in response to Trump’s pressure upon Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech at Davos complemented Wever’s worries when he accused the US of trying to “weaken and subordinate Europe”, in response to which he called for “clearly building more economic sovereignty and strategic autonomy”, though it’s arguably too late for that. Politico recently reported that “Fears grow over Europe’s soaring dependence on US gas imports”, which the US could weaponize amidst serious future disputes with the EU over whatever the issue might be.
Not only could it cut them off from its exports, but its blockade of Venezuela proves that it has the political will to seize energy tankers at sea, the policy of which could be employed in that scenario to ensure that other suppliers aren’t able to satisfy Europe’s needs. Likewise, the only realistic ones that could potentially do so are the Gulf Monarchies, which are all under US influence as it is. It’s therefore indeed possible that this dependence could be exploited to coerce concessions from a recalcitrant EU.
The question thus arises of how this dependence came to be, which is due to the US weaponizing Europe’s paranoia of Russia supposedly being the one to weaponize energy geopolitics as punishment for Europe’s military support of Ukraine, though nothing of the sort materialized. To the contrary, Russia remained committed to meeting its contractual obligations to Europe in spite of its energy exports literally fueling European arms factories producing weapons that are given to Ukrainians kill Russians.
In its defense, Russia’s calculations appear to be retaining its reputation as a reliable supplier in order to not scare away other clients (both current and prospective) as well as secure additional budgetary revenue, some of which is then invested in producing the weapons used in the special operation. To this day, Russia still exports energy to Europe, albeit at a much smaller scale due to Europe’s anti-Russian sanctions and its pivot away from Russian supplies to American ones.
Scaling up Russian energy imports isn’t in the cards, however, since no major European economy dares to anger the US by importing less from it. They only still import much lower levels of Russian energy due to the market’s inability to replace its exports till next year. Any move to scale up imports from Russia, such as resuming imports via the one undamaged Nord Stream pipeline or the several overland ones, could lead to their destruction as proven by the Nord Stream precedent, which is a powerful deterrent.
In retrospect, Europe ceded its sovereignty to the US by sanctioning Russian energy, which it did after the US weaponized its Russophobic paranoia. The US then replaced Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and is willing to weaponize this if Europe ever defies it on anything of significance. Had Europe and Russia maintained at scale their “Faustian bargain” of fueling each other’s arms industry, financially in Europe’s case and literally in Russia’s, then Europe would still have its “strategic autonomy”.
