Fuck the EU! These were the exact words that the senior official of the Department of State, the sinister Victoria Nuland, uttered in her outburst in February 2014, a few days before an armed insurrection in Kyiv overthrew the Yanukovych government and frustrated the agreement between the European Union (EU) and Russia for early elections and a consensual way out of the Ukrainian political crisis. The rest of the events are sadly well known: the new Maidan regime fully rehabilitated Banderism and pushed Ukraine towards NATO, sparking a reaction from the Russophile part of the country, the civil war, and its subsequent conversion into a large-scale proxy war between NATO and Russia.
Back then, more than a decade ago, one could still believe that the contradiction between the EU and the United States had a significant role in the development of global events. That the EU really represented the potentiality of international alignments that, however imperialist they were, could be different from the ones promoted by Atlanticism and the United States. Now that time is gone. Today, a new wave of warmongering hysteria is spreading throughout the EU. Nothing new, except perhaps the shamelessness with which its advocates, the entire political and media establishment of the EU, try to convince us that sticking closely to the policy of the Yankee officials who once cursed the EU is now the quintessence of Europeanism and of strategic autonomy with respect to the United States. The revolutionary proletariat has no interest in rescuing the unborn imperialist creature of Europeanism—a corpse that lies, along with hundreds of thousands of others, in the mud of the trenches in the Donbass. But the revolutionary proletariat is interested in, at least, not being taken for an idiot by its exploiters.
Undoubtedly, the Atlanticist bloc is suffering an important political crisis today. Nevertheless, in order to understand its real origin and physiognomy, we must take a step back from the media shock campaign with which they try to daze us so that we may, conversely, adopt a historical and strategic perspective. Leaving aside chauvinistic mystifications about the millenary European dream, Europeanism as a concrete political construction project was born in very specific historical circumstances. Certainly, the destruction caused by the Second World War is fundamental to understanding Europeanism, but if we only took this as our general framework, we would fall into another mystification meant to embellish it as a purported peace project. The fact is that, before the signature of the Schuman Declaration of 1950 and the agreement to establish the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, celebrated as founding acts of the EU, a series of fundamental choices and processes had been decided and were already underway. The reconfiguration of the economic dynamics between the United States and Europe via the Marshall Plan, the former’s rejection of a unified, neutral, and demilitarized Germany, and the subsequent Cold War, as well as the formation of NATO in 1949, make up the true concrete political framework that precedes and incubates the Europeanist project. To put it simply, Yankee hegemony was always the premise of actually existing Europeanism.
In the late 1940s, Europe lay in ruins, with its old empires exhausted or completely defeated. On the contrary, not only was the United States intact, but it had reaped immense benefits, now accounting for half of the world economy and having a clear military supremacy (its unchallenged air and sea superiority was then complemented by its nuclear monopoly). In turn, the horrors of imperialist barbarism, which had added a fascist occupation and a genocide on top of the war, had granted unprecedented prestige to the communist movement and the Soviet Union. The Soviet state, though exhausted and severely battered, had survived the trial of the war victoriously and its troops were encamped in central Europe. The European bourgeoisies, aware of their own extreme weakness as well as the palpable existential threat of the proletarian revolution, were thus led to willingly submit to the unprecedented power of the United States. For several decades, this set of circumstances allowed Yankee imperialism to become the global collective capitalist, around which the old European empires were united. Washington was able to make decisions that went beyond the maximum immediate profits of some American capital or other, and could even entail momentarily sacrificing these immediate profits, for the sake of long-term strategies. This is not the place to explain the history of these decisions in detail or to delve into the interesting theoretical implications that emanate from the fact that imperialism reached what probably was its historical peak by consciously negating some of the basic spontaneous tendencies of capital. Neither is it the place to explore how revisionism ended up ruining the prestige of communism by, among other things, being unable to match imperialism in this regard. The point is that Europe became the primary focus for this activity of great strategic importance for Yankee imperialism. As the main industrial area in the world, aside from the conflicting superpowers, and with powerful labor movements, its inclination for either side would decide the fate of the Cold War. This is the context that allowed building the European social welfare, a necessary price to hold back the revolutionary proletariat as well as one of the pillars of the imperialist soft power during the previous Cold War.
For its part, the United States took over geopolitically and intellectually from the former hegemonic power, the British Empire. In this true highest stage of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the American strategists developed the heartland theories devised by the British fathers of geopolitics, adopting their same grand strategy, but endowed with an even more global, interventionist character. The concept remained essentially the same: preventing the emergence of an organized power in Eurasia with the potential for a coordinated mobilization of the immense resources of the main continental landmass of the globe. That is the premise of the hegemony of the power based on the outer islands. The application of this strategic concept for Europe did not move an inch from the concerns that drove Mackinder at the beginning of the century: averting a mutual understanding between Germany and Russia at all costs. The cooperation between these two powers, which would integrate the German technological and intensive capital with Russia’s landmass and resources, laying the foundation of that Eurasian power, has always been the bane of Anglo-Saxon strategists. That is where the possibility of European strategic autonomy has always been. This is the geopolitical reason that motivated the rejection of a neutral Germany without foreign troops—a Germany that, in the context of 1945, the United States was fearful of seeing lean too much to the left, which would lead naturally to friendly relations with the USSR. And this is the same geopolitical reason, with a completely different global correlation of classes, for the unconditional hostility of the multiple American administrations—something that brought Trump and Biden together—towards the Nord Stream 2; a hostility that did not subside until the pipeline lay blown to pieces at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Incidentally, the reintegration into the Concert of Europe of a remilitarized Germany whose Nazi apparatus had been hardly purged, promoted in the 1950s mainly by the United States, served not only as a military front line against the Soviet bloc, but also the purpose of disciplining the rest of the European bourgeoisies, which now had another good reason to prefer the permanence of the Yankee military machine in the continent as a lesser evil in the face of the certainty of the resumption of interstate war competition and the prospect of a new German hegemony. To this respect, a small note should suffice to remind that the experience of how implacable the sovereign Diktat of the very Europeanist German finance bourgeoisie can be is still burned into the retinas of the peoples of southern Europe…
In any case, this strategy is inseparable from the role as collective capitalist played by the overwhelming Yankee power, which established the framework for the common agreement and cohesion between the European bourgeoises and erected itself as the ultimate arbiter among them, buffering the intensification of interstate competition (which the United States had made a possibility again with its policy towards Germany) while providing the decisive force against the common class enemy. In short, impotence, mutual distrust, and fear of the class enemy were the unedifying foundations of the Europeanist project. Over time, and by the grace of that negative strategic force of Yankee imperialism at the height of its splendor, these saplings grew into a positive material entity. Economically, we have witnessed the progressive centralization of Euro-Atlantic finance capital in Wall Street, its increasingly deeper entanglement, and the growing participation of multinational funds in the big European monopolies. This material entity has also matured into a colossal political-ideological and military apparatus. This apparatus is expressed in the dozens of think tanks and NGOs in which thousands of hacks all across the continent thrive and whose tentacles reach deep into the innermost recesses of European political, media and academic circles. But it is not just that, as it is also based on the joint forces of NATO, which is a school for the spontaneous acceptance of Yankee supremacy among European officials, or the multiple Gladio—which have been absent from public discourse, dominated by the aforementioned think tanks, ever since Andreotti confessed to their existence several decades ago. Atlanticism is not only a traditional alliance of powers, but also a transnational imperial structure, centered in Washington but, unlike the EU, actually able to integrate key sectors of the bourgeoisies on the eastern shore of the North Atlantic into a coherent operational structure, in which the EU itself is but a single body within a larger system of organizations.
As we have explained in other occasions, from a geopolitical point of view, the origin of the war in Ukraine lies in the unipolar drunken frenzy of those crazy 90s. Back then, the Polish American Brzezinski, mentor of Afghan jihadism, already stated the Yankee imperial plans explicitly: the conquest of Kyiv by Atlanticism, which would simultaneously prevent Russia’s recovery, eliminating it from the roster of great powers for good, and would displace the old continent’s center of gravity from Brussels to Warsaw. That is basically what is being decided in this imperialist war, which is starting to produce conclusive results. From the point of view of Washington’s maximalist goals, Russia, not without problems and paying a high price, seems capable of resisting the brunt of NATO’s proxy war, demonstrating that it is a great imperialist power that can severely punish any neighbors who set out on a decidedly hostile course against it, no matter how much encouragement they may receive from the North Atlantic (a calculation that has most likely had an impact on the smaller enthusiasm displayed by Tbilisi’s middle classes in late last year’s attempt at the latest color revolution). Conversely, regarding the minimum program of driving a wedge of deep hostility between the EU and Russia, Atlanticism’s success could not be greater. The economic bonds between Germany and Rusia have been dramatically weakened and the lowest, most bloodthirsty impulses of European Russophobic supremacism have been awakened, with all the Europeanist establishment—cheap postmodern parodies of Churchill, if not the Führer—calling on a crusade on the Asiatic hordes threatening its garden.
This hysteria is nothing new since 2022, and neither is the American strategy. The last few weeks’ media circus about a supposed split between the United States and the EU is unsubstantiated. More precisely, nothing in Trump’s policy suggests that there has been any break regarding the United States’ position in its imperial geopolitics with respect to Europe. Nothing in Europeanism’s reaction contradicts it either. The demand for an increase in military expenditure has been constant ever since the Obama era and the Pivot to Asia: the United States’ decreasing relative power requires reallocating its forces in front of China, which correlatively calls for a greater protagonism of Atlanticism’s European flank in the confrontation with Russia. This increase in military expenditure is explicitly connected to the demands that Europe shoulder even more of the costs of NATO. In the end, not only is the anti-Russian orientation of the EU preserved, but it is also taken to a demented level. Demented, that is the most appropriate qualifier for the cannibal monologue by the likes of Macron, Sánchez, or von der Leyen about sending European troops to Ukraine, which would leave humankind on the countdown to midnight. Similarly, the term circus fits like a glove for describing all of last weeks’ Europeanist blabbering about strategic autonomy with respect to the United States, a challenge that consists in… doing exactly as the Yankees demand! It is worth noting that, in order to have any substance as a concrete political concept, strategic autonomy should involve some sort of autonomous strategy, different from what has been applied so far. Likewise, it would mean seeking out other potential supporters and associations, different from the current ones, to substantiate such a new strategy. Ultimately, as we have already mentioned and as Atlanticist strategists know quite well, in concrete reality that autonomy would have meant a friendly reorientation of the policy towards Russia.
The current crisis within the Atlanticist bloc cannot be explained by a split between the United States and the EU. This crisis is actually, deep down, social and political, and it is only from that point that the geopolitical ramifications emerge. It is actually the crisis of the accumulation model established during the unipolarity period. It is a crisis that dates back to 2008 and is increasingly unsustainable. It is the consequence of the proletarianization of the broad middle strata that made up the sociological base of Atlanticist imperialism. It is also the consequence of Western finance capital finding growing difficulties in doing as it pleases around the world, due to the emergence of new imperialist powers. The internal social unrest and the demands of a bourgeoisie that notices how it is losing the competition against peers it disdained until not long ago have ended up causing a deep rift at the heart of the ruling class within the Euro-Atlantic bloc.
Trump’s second term expresses how deep this rift is and signals that, today, the epicenter of the bloc’s political crisis can be found at the belly of the beast. Of course, the disagreements have nothing to do with peace or freedom. The reinvigorated support for the genocide in Gaza and the resumed bombings on Yemen, as well as the coup d’etat in Romania, showcase that the debate is actually about whom to wage war against and which class factions and subsidiary levels of the imperialist chain should bear the expenses of the restructuring. On the one hand, one faction clings to the declining momentum of unipolar hegemony, increasingly in conflict with reality. Paradoxically, they are stronger in Brussels than in Washington these days. Although they show no hesitation in posing with the Wolfsangel, they keep a certain degree of formal alignment with the discourse of the liberal ecumene promised by Yankee hegemonism. As unipolarity nostalgics, their maximalist wing dreams of restoring it and turning the world again into an undisputed plundering ground for Western finance capital, which is not possible without a war that displaces the emerging imperialist powers. This sector believes that, by maintaining the pressure in Ukraine, the Russian state might fall apart, and openly claims that this would create the best conditions for the true battle against China. Its more realist wing, despite becoming less and less optimistic about the possibility of defeating Russia on the battlefield, considers that the continuation of the war serves its interests as a means to preserve internal cohesion and stability within the bloc, altering its structure and internal balance as little as possible, in the classic maneuver of deflecting an internal crisis onto an external enemy. The pro-Trump faction, on the other hand, seems ever more lively. In addition to having channeled the social indignation of proletarianized broad middle strata, let down by the social-reformists’ empty promises in the early 2010s (something that we have been warning about for a few years and that we highlighted when we explained the historical logic of social-fascism), it also seems to be increasingly endorsed by a key sector of the great bourgeoisie (see the Big Tech magnates’ reconciliation with Trump), leaving it in the right position to lead a new internal regime restructuring. Even though it concurs with considering China as the main enemy, this faction realizes the danger and short-sightedness in the game of the traditional liberal establishment. It acknowledges the United States’ decreasing ability to play the role of the global collective capitalist. Consequently, in light of the urgency of the domestic social crisis, it prefers not to rely on nebulous global victories and instead opts for the nation first, for restoring cohesion within its own nation by imposing immediate costs on the links of the imperialist chain in which it keeps its hegemony. Aside from the shameless annexationism and the escalation of tariff wars, this is reflected domestically in the rise of the most overtly racist forms of nationalism and the subsequent intensification of the repression and exploitation of the deepest sections of the proletariat. In this respect, and now free from liberal facades, this faction feels at home cheering on the racial war spearheaded by Zionism (another key point of consensus also supported by genocide Joe and Europeanists). As a matter of fact, the weakening of Hezbollah and the collapse of Syrian Ba’athism have generated the best conditions in the last two decades for the long-awaited final settling of scores with Iran. As dangerous as it may be, the chances of success and the potential plundering ground that this war offers seem more reachable than the nihilistic dream of crushing a nuclear superpower. Not in vain, both Putin and Trump admit that the Middle East is being discussed in their conversations about Ukraine.
Of course, the contending factions embrace key consensuses. We just pointed out how they all close ranks around Zionism. In domestic terms, there is no debate that the proletariat, both directly and via its indirect wage, will bear the fundamental costs of the restructuring. There is also no discussion that a new major downsizing awaits the labor aristocracy. No one is questioning the slogan launched by the Financial Times: from welfare state to warfare state. In the absence of the revolutionary menace that once forced social concessions, the days of welfare are numbered. In this respect, there is not even any controversy about the fact that Europe will pay a special price in the restructuring of the bloc: on top of the arms race against Russia, which all American administrations have demanded, the decline of the German industrial stronghold was already intensifying thanks to the war so enthusiastically promoted by Biden—Trump only seeks to accelerate it.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, the current circumstances make it difficult to conceive a solid peace. It is not even clear whether there will be a truce or a long-lasting armistice, and we can imagine the resistance and the sabotage attempts from the staunchest Atlanticist sector, fortified in the EU. These attempts may create dangerous crises that send the proxy war out of control, causing it to turn into a direct conflict of an even larger scale. The end date of the war may be a matter of the utmost importance from the political perspective of the correlation among multiple imperialist factions, inside and outside the Atlanticist bloc. It is surely an existential matter for the proletarians who are being kidnapped and sent to the slaughterhouse. It is not that important from the historical perspective of the grand strategy of Yankee imperialism. The war has already generated a profound hostility between the EU and Russia. The former is poisoned by its own Russophobia and the latter has suffered many casualties at the hands of Banderites armed with European weapons. The war may go on for some time with more involvement from the EU in order to partially make up for American supplies (which, as of today, are still flowing towards Ukraine anyway along with the much-needed intelligence information, after an official pause lasting only a few days). The conflict may also come to a standstill, which with absolute certainty would give way to a cold war between the EU and Russia—open hostility and intense arms race included. For Trump, all of these are acceptable outcomes that fall within the broad margins of Washington’s great game: preventing the emergence of a great Eurasian power and reducing the room for maneuver of the conflicting powers. Precisely, preserving the confrontation with Russia is by itself a way of mitigating the threats to the cohesion of the Atlanticist bloc derived from Trump’s nationalist orientation.
In any case and along with those strong points of consensus, which ensure there is absolutely no questioning of the social regime, what is being decided in the crisis of the Atlanticist bloc is the restructuring of the internal political regime of the imperialist states that constitute it. That is, the question is for whose benefit social cohesion will be rebuilt and who will pay the costs, which ideological and institutional frame will be the skeleton for the new physiognomy assumed by the bourgeois order. The fact that the internal debate is directly connected to foreign policy and geopolitics is another sign of the severity of the crisis, which resists to be managed in silos, in a technical matter that would be part of normal governmental routine.
In fact, and as a new indicator of the internal origin of the crisis, it was most likely the liberal establishment who contributed the most to turning anti-Russian policy into a questionable party affair, exploiting the Russiagate as their main argument to challenge the legitimacy of Trump’s first victory. On this matter, one of the mystified forms that express the heatedness of this confrontation within the bourgeoisie and through which it tries to explain (and reproduce) itself is by means of a supposed antithesis between globalism and sovereignism—the latter being the apologetic and politically correct term used by the unapologetic and politically incorrect to refer to their nationalism. Conversely and paradoxically, Trumpism itself likewise adopts the same form as an international tendency, with distinct, recognizable characteristics and miniature imitations of the charismatic caudillo figure, which are popping up like mushrooms in most countries under American hegemony. The fact that living embodiments of globalism such as Zuckerberg, Bezos or Musk have joined the ranks of Trumpism or even become direct enforcers of his sovereignist policies is yet another example of the falseness of this contraposition, and in general of any theory that attempts to present imperialism in opposition to the nation-state. The prospects that emerge before the European continent demonstrate the imperialist complementarity of these supposed antagonistic poles and its functionality to the grand strategy of Yankee hegemonism. Thus, the only place where the nationalist logic of sovereignism can consequently lead is the reactivation of the interstate competition between European bourgeoisies, the struggle to avoid becoming the scapegoat that pays the costs when they are imposed on the next subsidiary link of the imperialist chain. In a world where the European hawks are losing more and more ground, the possibility of the intensification of these internal conflicts only ends up relegimitizing the role of the Great Father in Washington as the final arbiter of the Concert of Europe. The way in which the globalists in Brussels promote this rearmament—the only politically possible way: by means of the European national armies—points in the same direction, showcased in the ultimate irony that the most plausible consequence of Macron’s warmongering cries is that France’s neighbor will be, once again, a powerful German army. In the same vein, the pro-Trump European sovereignists, demonstrating that they are but a different transmission belt of the same imperialism, have no qualms about legitimizing this rearming. What the globalists in Brussels call necessary to face the great enemy, Russia, is seen by the sovereignists as indispensable to face the corresponding small enemy of their nation, which, for example, would be Morocco for the Spanish state. Reproducing the Europeanists’ farce, the sovereignists issue the same challenge to their rivals… doing exactly what these rivals demand! Once more, the debate is, at most, about which industrial group will benefit from the contract to produce the weapons needed to confront the external enemy. At the same time, the debate focuses on how to conceptualize the inevitable persecution of the internal enemy: “pro-Russian populists” or “woke Islamo-leftists” seem to be the options. The fact that conscious proletarians may be fit into either of these profiles just as easily as in the other is further evidence of the meaninglessness of this debate from a proletarian point of view, and of the similarity of what, in any case, both factions have in store for our class.
The infighting between factions of the bourgeoisie only confirms the impotence of our class, which has nothing to gain from the victory of the liberal-Azovites over the libertarian-nativists or vice versa. None of them propose anything other than worsening the living and exploitation conditions of the proletariat and narrowing the allowed political playing field. Nor do either of them propose anything but different paths that lead to the same world war (we insist that they all agree that the final link in the chain of external enemies, after Russia or Iran, is China). War and fascism or fascism and war, such are the options on the menu, and this is the strict order of the dishes. The fact that the reckless warlike maneuvers of European Atlanticists make it necessary at this moment to prioritize the denunciation of the Europeanist monster must not lead conscious proletarians to make concessions to their supposed rivals, the sovereignists. In fact, even though Europeanism—the regional version of that grand globalist conspiracy—poses a threat from the perspective of the great class struggle because of its capacity to immediately trigger a world war, it has barely any prestige left among the vanguard. Gone are the days when opportunists and revisionists unanimously embraced the supremacist and self-complacent chauvinism and exclusivism of the European garden and proclaimed their own Europe, labeled according to the taste of the class faction to which they sought to sell their merchandise: Europe of the workers, of the peoples, and so on. Only a few opportunists, more specifically ones with seats in the European parliament who were revived by the opportunist stupidity of Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar party (just like their own opportunist stupidity managed to revive the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the PSOE), still dare to keep talking, although timidly and with little conviction, about Europe’s supposed “anti-fascist DNA.” There is no need for us to insist that if there is anything inscribed in the genes of the Europeanist monstrosity, it is nothing but the crudest anti-communism. In the dying throes of its decline, the so-called Europe of peace has wound up shouting Wiederaufrüstung!, “rearmament!” in good German. In its final stage, the Europe of humanistic values, the supposed alternative to Yankee militarism, has ended up becoming NATO’s safest stronghold, demonstrating that it was never able to transcend its own nature as an organ of Yankee hegemonism.
However, we must not expect this discredit of imperialism in its Europeanist version to push our revisionists towards independent class positions, when they can once more go with the flow of the latest hegemonic ideological trend. In a certain way, the scarecrow of globalism is merely the reflection in the spontaneous consciousness of the solidity and centralization achieved by that transnational financial capital that has thrived under Yankee hegemony. Of course, when faced with the personification of an international bourgeois class, the last thing that revisionists would ever come up with is to confront it with an international revolutionary class. As if! A sizeable group of European revisionists, a political specter in an extreme degree of decomposition, have preferred to run after the neo-fascists, putting ethnic and national identities before class and realistically and responsibly accepting that the international nature of our class is a “problem” and that the bourgeois state is a legitimate actor for the treatment of this “problem.” As the unrepentant social-chauvinists they are, they will never stop prostrating themselves before any version of exclusivism that the surrounding bourgeois hegemony places in front of them—yesterday, Europeanism; today, the narrowest nationalism.
In a world that descends into barbarism at a breakneck pace, there is more need than ever for an independent proletarian alternative, revolutionary and internationalist by definition. Whereas, at the agitation level, it is urgent to draw attention to the immediate danger posed by the militarism of the Atlanticist European monstrosity, in the realm of propaganda within the vanguard it is still necessary to redouble the struggle against the normalization of nationalist prejudices and the hegemony of social-chauvinism. From a political point of view, in these times of intensification of the inter-imperialist contradictions and of an all-out reactionary offensive, when even the internal debates of the bourgeoisie cannot draw a line between domestic affairs and international matters, the Marxist–Leninist vanguard must pay particular attention to this dimension. And we are not only referring to the theoretical point of view or the analysis of reality, but to the political opportunity to build internationalist coordination and solidarity networks within the vanguard. These networks could be not only a good tactical support for the strategic tasks of the universal ideological reconstitution and the reconstitution of the Communist Party in each place, but in a time when imperialist barbarism puts war and genocide on the agenda, they could become a safeguard for the continuity of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard and the horizon of Reconstitution.
Committee for Reconstitution
22 March 2025