The European Union is preparing for war. The ‘ReArm Europe’ plan, announced in March 2025 and quickly rebranded as ‘Readiness 2030’ following criticism from Italy and Spain, aims to ‘mobilise’ €800 billion in new spending on armaments. Member states are expected to enact this new buying spree through their national budgets, austerity be damned. This financing is being unlocked by activating an ‘escape clause’ in the EU’s neoliberal straitjacket, the Stability and Growth Pact, which has long limited public spending across the bloc. By 30 April 2025, 12 countries — Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia — requested the activation of the clause in a ‘coordinated move to boost defence spending’1. The drive to war advances with a stick and a carrot. The stick has several prongs, the first prong being the alleged threat of a Russian incursion into the EU’s eastern flank. This hypothetical scenario constitutes the ‘exceptional circumstances’ that have upended the bloc’s once-inviolable deficit rules. The second is the supposed menace of a rising China, a state that has not been at war for decades and whose economic growth has not required it to violate its stated principles of peaceful cooperation. ‘If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow, how can we claim that we can defeat China?’, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asked in 2025,2. China is framed as a ‘threat’ to Europe in communiqués of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the alliance’s outlook has increasingly shifted east. The third is the largely unspoken but palpable fear of a US withdrawal — a latent anxiety that the US occasionally plays on to extract concessions from its European allies. The Economist put it bluntly in a June 2025 editorial: ‘To keep Russia out and America in, NATO must spend more.’3.
The carrot concerns the supposed benefits of war. Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, said that rearmament would produce ‘the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs’4. The European Commission promised it would bring ‘benefits for all countries’5. Underlying these arguments is a vision of ‘military Keynesianism’ — increased public spending as a salve both for Europe’s deepening economic crisis and its strategic dependence on the US. For decades, Europe has been plagued by a crisis of underinvestment driven by the austerity logic of its neoliberal institutional architecture. Rising energy costs associated with Europe’s economic war against Russia have seen major industrial shut-downs — and threaten many more. Renewed military spending, the argument goes, would provide a panacea both for Europe’s geopolitical vulnerabilities and its industrial retreat.
But Europe’s persistently tight fiscal space points to another side of the balance sheet — one that has been embraced by capitalism’s more ardent defenders. Bronwen Maddox, the director of Chatham House, British imperialism’s think tank, declared that ‘politicians will have to brace themselves to reclaim money through cuts to sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare’ in favour of militarism — ‘the greatest public benefit of all’6. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh was more brazen: ‘Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state. There is no way of defending the continent without cuts to social spending.’7. This is the cold reality underlying the bluster of European leaders. Britain has already announced plans to slash billions in welfare, and cuts are expected across Europe8. ‘The welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy’, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a former BlackRock board member, said in August 2025,9. Europe’s readiness to dismantle the welfare state shows that there is little Keynes in the substance of its ambitions — and under present conditions there is, in any case, little possibility of a successful reformist solution to the crisis.
Instead, Readiness 2030 and the concurrent efforts to remilitarise Britain reflect a desperate and futile attempt to rescue European capitalism from its long-standing contradictions, which have deepened and ossified through its entanglement with the US. Rearmament has presented European capitalists with a justification for finally dismantling the social democratic compact, while also laying the groundwork for renewed belligerence abroad as Europe prepares to shoulder a greater burden in the US-led imperial system. That assault is already taking shape in Ukraine and Palestine, which have revealed that the European ruling classes are willing to tolerate obscene levels of destruction and violence to preserve their hegemony. Already, that violence is starting to boomerang against European societies as opponents of war and genocide are met with increasing state repression. The pillars of the fascist counterrevolution are being erected, and Europe — the same Europe that gave us the slave trade, colonial genocides, and two world wars — is building its arsenal.
Europe as vassal?
Much has been said about Europe as a vassal of the US. ‘Donald Trump has exposed how the EU is not even capable of imagining itself a sovereign power determined as it is to remain but a vassal in an Atlanticist empire’, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis wrote in August 2025, commenting on the humiliating
European integration laid the groundwork for European subordination within US-led imperialism.
US-EU trade deal signed the previous month10. Europe ‘has almost completely renounced the idea of greater strategic autonomy’, two senior figures at the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote, arguing that Europe had aban-doned its role as a ‘central front’ in the struggle between East and West that defined the 20th century11. The idea demands closer interrogation. Has Europe’s role undergone a fundamental transformation since the Cold War — or has its subordination to the US been baked in from the start?
For capitalism, the period after World War II represented a serious threat. The Soviet Union’s advance against Germany created conditions for socialist development in a sizable part of Eastern Europe. Its victory over Hitler’s armies won it tremendous prestige among the global working classes, including in Western Europe. The partisan wars in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere —the fiercest acts of resistance against fascism in Europe — produced historic popular backing for communist forces. And, in the decades that followed the war, Europe began to lose its colonial possessions through struggles for national liberation across the Global South — many with the support of the USSR and, later, other countries in the socialist bloc. This was an existential challenge to a capitalist order incubated through colonial domination and sustained by imperial control over the productive capacities of the global periphery12. Agrarian reform across the Third World, and the South’s increasing insistence on sovereign control over land and natural resources, ensured that the old imperial powers could not readily seize new lands through primitive accumulation. Nor could they dump their surplus on the rural populations of the South13. Labour militancy in the West and the systemic rivalry with the Soviet Union, which had secured historic gains in living standards for ordinary working people, prevented the capitalist centres from putting the social democratic order on the chopping block.
In response, capitalism transformed. The inter-imperialist rivalry that produced two world wars made way for a new consensus. A ‘collective imperialism’ was born — a framework where the imperialist centres collaborated to maintain their dominance over the global periphery while taming their internal contradictions. Samir Amin called this the Triad, a group of countries that principally included the US, the core countries of the later EU, and Japan. There were inequalities built into the architecture of this Triad. Collective imperialism was sustained by structures of unequal development not just between North and South, but within each pole of the Triad itself. Here, European integration served a dual function. Externally, it laid the groundwork for European subordination within US-led imperialism. Internally, it created new mechanisms for the extraction of surplus from Europe’s peripheries to its dominant centres. The same institutional architecture that facilitates Franco-German dominance over Southern and Eastern Europe — and countries in the Global South — also locks the entire project of European integration into dependence on Washington.
Facing a historic crisis of postwar accumulation, the nations of the Triad launched a multi-pronged strategy to contain communism and rescue capitalism from its contradictions. Within the metropoles, they made historic concessions to the working class. They expanded suffrage, raised taxes, curtailed monopolies, and initiated large-scale public works projects. Following the Keynesian formula, state intervention in the capitalist economies aimed at improving aggregate demand while maintaining high employment and high levels of industrial output through deficit financing. This consolidated the social democratic arrangement, which would endure until its contradictions began to unwind it in the 1970s. These concessions were accompanied by radical anti-communist action. Reactionary movements were allowed to bloom, limiting the considerable successes of the left in countries like Italy and France. And US military forces deployed across the continent maintained a state of tension that stifled any alternative political projects on the national levels.
Within the Triad, Europe retained many of the privileges of imperialism. But it would also become substantially subordinated to US primacy through the economic and military architecture of the new world order. After the war, the US became the most vocal proponent of European integration. As early as 1947, anti-communist Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles spoke of the need for a federated Europe and decentralised Germany under US control14, a policy that he later advanced as Secretary of State. ‘[T]he achievement of a coordinated European economy remains the fundamental objective of our foreign policy’, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson said in a speech in 1947,15. Facing a major crisis of overproduction after World War II, the US needed a stable and prosperous Western Europe to absorb its excess goods and capital. To secure this aim, it put forward the Marshall Plan — a sweeping policy of anti-communist containment and a comprehensive framework of economic and political influence that guaranteed Western European markets would remain capitalist and open to US investors16. (A further condition for the provision of aid was consenting to the US’ veto power within the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.) Opposition to the plan was quickly sidelined, with the purge of communist parties from coalition governments.
US influence was both overt and covert. Through the US Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which merged with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1952, the US allocated a substantial part of the Marshall Plan funding to intelligence activities. These included support for Italian centrists and reactionaries against the popular Italian Communist Party, and the covert financing of cultural institutions, journalists, and publishers intended to entrench consumerist and anti-communist propaganda across Western Europe. Between 1949 and 1952, the OPC budget grew from $4.7 million to $82 million17. We can therefore trace a continuity in the very architecture of European integration to strategic, anti-communist interests originating in Washington. The Schuman Plan, the precursor to the European Coal and Steel Community, then the European Economic Community, and ultimately the European Union, owe much of their character to the imperatives of US postwar primacy — which required the preservation and advancement of the European bourgeoisie.
NATO was the military arm of this process. It institutionalised the postwar US protectorate of Western Europe, giving the occupation a veneer of multilateral consensus. In fact, NATO subverted European sovereignty from the start, operating more against internal political opposition than against the alleged Soviet threat. The risk of an invasion by the USSR was remote. Every major escalation along the socalled Iron Curtain originated in the West, including the very formation of a military alliance that required a response in the form of the Warsaw Pact. The explicit anti-communist orientation saw NATO rehabilitate fascism across Europe. The alliance absorbed high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler’s former Chief of Staff Adolf Heusinger, who became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and Erwin Rommel’s former Chief of Staff
Hans Speidel, who became Commander in Chief of NATO Forces in Central Europe. It propped up regimes like the fascist Estado Novo in Portugal, one of the alliance’s founding members. And, through stay-behind programmes like Operation Gladio, it funded reactionary and terrorist groups that eroded support for communist and socialist parties throughout the continent. In Italy alone, these groups were responsible for dozens of massacres claiming hundreds of lives, many of them pinned on the left, in a decades-long campaign only revealed in 1990 and confirmed by a 2000 parliamentary report18.
NATO also backed Western Europe’s colonial wars abroad, including France’s wars in Indochina and Algeria and Portugal’s in its colonies in Southern Africa. ‘Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union’, Walter Rodney wrote, condemning NATO’s use of African land as a rampart for capitalism19. NATO support for France’s war in Algeria, for example, aimed not only to preserve France’s colonial holdings but also to soften its opposition to German rearmament. The subsequent resuscitation of the Wehrmacht under NATO and the substantial US military backing that enabled it also secured US influence over Germany, which could be enticed to cooperate on economic policy through threats of US withdrawal — precedents that were established several generations before Donald Trump launched his economic war, underpinned by threats to pull the US out of NATO. As analysts at the CIA recognised, control of Germany put the ‘balance of power in Europe’ in US hands20.
The close entanglement of the military, economic, and the political in NATO would constitute what Grey Anderson called a ‘matrix of management’ that ‘institutionalised US mastery over the western littoral of Eurasia, fulcrum of world power’21. NATO established, preserved, and expanded American influence across this expansive region, which US strategist Zbigniew Brzeziński called the grand chessboard. Over many decades, America had positioned its strategic assets to secure a stable anti-communist front in Europe and obstruct integration across the wider continent — that is, to prevent rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow, or Paris and Moscow. Washington occasionally punished European intransigence. Ronald Reagan’s assault on the German-Soviet gas pipeline demonstrated that the US would not tolerate challenges to the East-West divide drawn up in Washington. The US was unwilling to shoulder the burden of imperialist policy while Europe benefited both from its position within the Triad and trade with the socialist bloc or Third World. This is what made Mikhail Gorbachev’s later belief in a ‘common European home’ naïve: not the impossibility of finding rapport with Berlin, but the underestimation of Berlin’s subordination to Washington. The European ruling class largely accepted the submission of their foreign and economic policies to Washington — even where it raised the spectre of nuclear war — as part of the grand bargain to preserve their role in the global system of imperialist accumulation. It was in this climate that the idea of European sovereignty, now presumed buried by figures like Yanis Varoufakis, dissolved into the common agenda of the trans Atlantic order. In fact, the nuclear question perfectly illustrates the US’ power over Europe.
The US decision to deploy Pershing II missiles on the continent in the 1980s transformed the landscape of European politics. The purported threat from the East helped reinforce reactionary politics on the continent. The deployment of the missiles created a powerful bargaining tool that drove a renewed push for militarisation and helped secure Europe’s consent to an escalating confrontation with the Global South, where processes of national liberation continued, threatening the entire edifice of imperial power. Across Europe, there was broad popular opposition to the move22. The protest movement recognised that the deployment was not a response to Soviet threats but an instrument in a new doctrine of ‘counterforce’ power that presumed the US’ capacity to win a nuclear war by ‘decapitating’ the Soviet leadership through a massive first strike. But the US went ahead regardless. The deployment would help precipitate the collapse of the pacifist bent in European — and, especially, German — government policies in the years and decades that followed.
The retreat of Soviet power in the 1990s did not resolve these contradictions — it accelerated them. In 1994, a year into the administration of Bill Clinton, the US dispatched F-16 fighter jets to Bosnia-Herzegovina against opposition from France and Germany. This marked the first NATO combat mission in its history. The attack was framed as an instrument to ‘preempt a European solution’ to the brewing Balkan conflict, and presaged the brutal bombing campaign that dismembered Yugoslavia years later. The German government — by now largely stripped of its pacifism — supported the latter assault and embarked on the first German foreign military intervention since the Second World War, bombing a region that Hitler’s Wehrmacht had devastated six decades earlier.
It was also in the early 1990s that proposals for NATO expansion began to mature. From the start of the decade, the US had worked to sabotage efforts
German leaders understand that their dominant position within the EU remains tied to their subordinate position within the Triad — a reality that the loss of cheap Russian energy imports has cemented.
at the construction of a pan-European security architecture, most forcefully articulated in the Charter of Paris adopted by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in November 1990. Although the US backed the CSCE process in public, it was vehement in its opposition in private. No organisation would ‘replace NATO as the guarantor of Western security and stability’, George H.W. Bush told French President François Mitterrand in April of 1990, just months after greenlighting the CSCE conference. By 1997, the US Senate was engaged in active debate about absorbing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. ‘Europeans have proven incapable, left to themselves, of settling their differences peacefully,’ Senator Joseph R. Biden said in his opening remarks. ‘The United States it seems to me must continue to lead the new security architecture for that continent.’23. In 1999, having promised not to expand an inch eastward, NATO did so by some 1,000 kilometres. Russia was in the forefront of the US’ mind. In the debates on enlargement, it received more than twice as many mentions as the three acceding countries combined. With the consolidation of NATO across the continent, Europe was now firmly embedded in the US-led imperial architecture. In Eastern Europe, that process was both supported by a torrent of post-socialist reaction, and in turn benefited from it. Founded in anti-communism, the NATO of the 2000s fuelled the flames of historical revisionism that swept across Europe’s east, rehabilitating Nazi collaborators and fascist militias like the ‘Forest Brothers’ in the Baltics. These new entrants to the EU and Atlantic order, in turn, advanced this historical revisionism within both blocs — for example by pushing for the EU to equate communism with fascism. The gradual advance of an anti-Soviet memory politics quickly became a conduit for the anti Russian nationalisms of today. As a result, states that once proclaimed fraternal bonds of socialism and – to a significant extent – felt and practiced these in reality, have been turned against each other. The consequences of that process are unfolding before our eyes, as hundreds of thousands die on the battlefields of the Donbas.
Five percent
Much has been said about the fragmentation of the trans-Atlantic order today. Indeed, its future looks uncertain as imperialism’s economic, political, and social crises unleash increasingly sharp contradictions within the bloc. But it is not fragmenting because of a hypothetical US withdrawal. In fact, in getting the EU to love war again, Trump succeeded where several generations of US leaders failed.
Western Europe long held immense value for Washington as a bridgehead against the Soviet Union — just as all of Europe west of the Dnepr now serves as a launching pad for a renewed assault on Russia. But empire is rarely satisfied by mere strategic advantage. That is why the US has frequently found itself frustrated by what it perceived as Europe’s insufficient investments in war. Donald Trump is not the first US leader to grumble about European ‘freeloading’. In 1969, Henry Kissinger complained that many European states’ security policies were constrained by a ‘stymied’ unity. ‘Europe does not make even approximately the defense effort of which it is capable,’ he wrote24. His frustrations matured over the next decade. ‘[T]he Europeans get free defense and give nothing for it,’ he said in a conversation in 1974. ‘They are just like an adolescent; they want to be taken care of and at the same time, kick the hell out of their parents.’25. Calls for the US to exit NATO and deprioritise Europe echoed throughout the 1980s, with an assortment of US voices warning that Western European dependence on the US security umbrella has eroded European nationalism and produced within it the ‘perilous’ currents of pacifism and neutralism.
Europe, perhaps, is no more or less of a vassal today than it was at the height of the Cold War. What changed is the political geography of its vassalage, and the near-unanimity of Europe’s ruling classes on the question of militarisation. With Germany facing accelerated deindustrialisation, it is countries like Poland and the Baltics that have become the most ardent supporters of US imperial policy, with Berlin playing catch-up to the apocalyptic pronouncements that occasionally emerge from Warsaw or Riga. A powerful and belligerent eastern flank ensures that Germany could not seek rapprochement with Russia once again.
If political forces like Germany’s Social Democrats or Greens mounted at least feeble opposition to US militarism on the continent in the 1970s and 1980s, that era is gone. In a 2022 speech, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock set out her vision for a remilitarised Germany that reasserts its position of ‘leadership’ in Europe. ‘Our aim is to further strengthen the European pillar of NATO,’ she said, ‘because we want to have a leadership in European and US partnership’. She spoke of an EU that could project military power abroad. ‘The EU needs to become a stronger security provider with more integrated defense industries,’ she said, ‘with military missions able to stabilise regions in its neighborhood.’26.
Today, Germany is engaged in a breathtaking rearmament drive. Merz has proposed spending €400 billion on war, including a plan to raise annual defence spending to 5% of GDP, as required by NATO, an amount that adds up to nearly half the federal budget and brings Germany back to the Cold War peak of 4.9% in 1963,27. ‘Germany is back,’ he said, apparently without a hint of irony, after securing the support of the Green Party for German rearmament28. This agenda — of more weapons at home, and more war abroad — has already found expression in Palestine, with nearly the entire NATO bloc providing active financial, military, logistical, diplomatic, and intelligence support to the Israeli regime’s genocide. German leaders understand that their dominant position within the EU remains tied to their subordinate position within the Triad — a reality that the loss of cheap Russian energy imports has cemented. The US has achieved what it has long sought: sharing the burden of imperialism with Europe. In doing so, it has also helped unleash the spectre of European fascism once again — and, like a century ago, the path towards it is being paved by the liberals and social democrats, who purport to carry the banner of freedom.
Conclusion
In 1983, echoing the line of the Ronald Reagan administration, neoconservative writer Irving Kristol urged Western Europe to rearm and ‘recapture the spirit of nationalism’ that had long been absent. ‘Nationalism in Western Europe is up for grabs,’ he wrote, ‘and unless it is seized by political parties that believe in our values and traditions, it could be seized by people with less palatable
The EU is rearming not because of a weakening trans-Atlantic alliance, but because the contradictions within the US-led system have reached a point whose only terminus is war. The EU, like the US, can only survive by preserving the structures of imperialist accumulation that birthed it and sustained its prosperity.
aspirations.’29. He was worried that the left might come to power and pull Europe towards the socialist east and anti-colonial south, isolating the US in the imperialist bloc. For a time, the collapse of the USSR appeared to settle the debate. The nationalisms that are spreading across Europe today have little by way of progressive character — and left forces have as yet failed to recover from their long retreat. But the question of who comes to define the future of Europe remains unresolved.
The contradictions embedded in Europe’s rearmament drive run deep. The EU is rearming not because of a weakening trans-Atlantic alliance, but because the contradictions within the US-led system have reached a point whose only terminus is war. The EU, like the US, can only survive by preserving the structures of imperialist accumulation that birthed it and sustained its prosperity. That is why, despite the occasional intransigence from European leaders, European integration has consistently served to strengthen rather than challenge Atlantic relations. But this project carries a fatal cost. As austerity deepens to fund rearmament, and as the costs of losing access to cheap Russian energy compound industrial decline, the forces driving political reaction within the European project will intensify.
The move from welfare to warfare represents the terminal point for a political project whose fragile social democratic consensus emerged in the unique conditions of the postwar order. These conditions will not return. But neither will imperialism’s unchallenged hegemony. The world is undergoing tectonic transformations unseen perhaps since the immediate postwar years. The renewed advance of the Global South and the emergence of new institutions and infrastructures of South-South cooperation will increasingly chip away at the system of imperialist accumulation that has ensured Northern prosperity at the South’s expense. In response, capitalism has embarked on a last-ditch effort to rescue itself through war, targeting the emerging centres of economic and political sovereignty that threaten it. But the people of Europe not only remain opposed to the substitution of welfare with warfare that is being imposed on them. By witnessing the genocide in Gaza, millions have become conscious of the violence that is carried out abroad in their names — and without their consent. As the contradictions of this moment sharpen, it is the job of progressive forces to channel that rising consciousness into a principled anti-imperialism. This requires pulling Europe away from the sinking ship of Atlanticism, organising its working people in solidarity with those around the world who are seeking their liberation and sovereignty, and mounting an offensive against Europe’s elites in their moment of weakness. War cannot come at the expense of our welfare; but our welfare must not come at the expense of lives and livelihoods outside our borders.
Notes
1 European Commission, ‘12 Member States request activation of the na-tional escape clause in a coordinated move to boost defence spending’, 30 April 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ ip_25_1121.
2 Clash Report [@clashreport], ‘EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas: “If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow, then how can we claim that we can defeat China?”’, Twitter, 28 February 2025, https://x.com/clashreport/status/1895446444234158408.
3 The Economist was referring to a comment by NATO’s first Secretary General, Hastings Ismay, that the alliance’s goal was to ‘keep the Sovi-et Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down’. Although The Economist insists that ‘no one wants to keep the Germans down’ today, the state of the German economy following the sabotage of the Nord-stream II pipeline suggests otherwise. ‘To keep Russia out and America in, NATO must spend more’, The Economist, 19 June 2025.
4 David Lynch, ‘PM hails defence sector as offering “next generation of secure, well-paid jobs”’, The Independent, 3 March 2025, https://www. independent.co.uk/news/business/pm-hails-defence-sector-as-offer-ing-next-generation-of-secure-wellpaid-jobs-b2708073.html.
5 ‘How the defence bonanza will reshape the global economy’, The Economist, 27 June 2025, https://www.economist.com/lead-ers/2025/06/26/how-the-defence-bonanza-will-reshape-the-global-economy.
6 Bronwen Maddox, ‘Defence is the greatest public benefit of all’, Finan-cial Times, 19 February 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/e0bd86f9-fd4a-4802-8199-44daaa97d13a.
7 Janan Ganesh, ‘Europe must trim its welfare state to build a war-fare state’, Financial Times, 5 March 2025, https://www.ft.com/con-tent/37053b2b-ccda-4ce3-a25d-f1d0f82e7989.
8 Stephen Castle, ‘Britain Aims to Cut Billions in Welfare Amid Budget Crunch’, The New York Times, 18 March 2025, https://www.nytimes. com/2025/03/18/world/europe/uk-welfare-cuts-benefits.html.
9 Alex Berry, ‘German welfare state “can no longer be financed” — Merz’, DW News, 23 August 2025, https://www.dw.com/en/german-welfare-state-can-no-longer-be-financed-merz/a-73742270.
10 Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Europe’s century of humiliation’, Unherd, 9 August 2025, https://unherd.com/2025/08/europes-century-of-humiliation/.
11 Jana Puglierin and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘The art of vassalisation: How Rus-sia’s war on Ukraine has transformed transatlantic relations’, Europe-an Council on Foreign Relations, 4 April 2023, https://ecfr.eu/publica-tion/the-art-of-vassalisation-how-russias-war-on-ukraine-has-trans-formed-transatlantic-relations/.
12 Utsa Patnaik and Prahbat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, His-tory and Present, Part I, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021.
13 Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha, ‘Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capital-ism in Permanent Crisis’, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2020. Vol. 9, No. 1. p. 81.
14 Armin Rappaport, ‘The United States and European Integration: The First Phase’, Diplomatic History 5,2 (Spring 1981):123.
15 US Department of State Bulletin 16 (18 May 1947): 991-94. Cited in Rap-
paport: 125.
16 The brainstorming session for alternative names for the programme is illustrative of its ambitions. The first proposal was ‘Committee to Combat Communism by Aiding Europe’, and seven out of 15 proposals were var-iations of ‘Committee to Preserve America by Aiding Europe’, https://x. com/elisabmpiller/status/1656365313926000659/photo/1.
17 United States, United States Senate, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-76 (Church Committee), Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976), 31-32.
18 Philip Willan, ‘US ‘supported anti-left terror in Italy,’ The Guardian, 24 June 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/24/terror-ism.
19 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972, p. 189.
20 Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Review of the World Situation’, CIA No. 5–59, 17 May 1949 (Central Intelligence Agency, “Review of the World Situation,” 19 October 1949, CIA 10-49, Secret | National Security Ar-chive); cited in Grey Anderson, ‘NATO’s Hegemonic Formula: Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management’, New Left Review 140/141 (March-June 2023): 5-34.
21 Grey Anderson.
22 Diana Johnstone, The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe’s Role in America’s World, London: Verso, 1984, passim.
23 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-105shrg46832/html/ CHRG-105shrg46832.htm.
24 Henry Kissinger, ‘Central Issues of American Foreign Policy’, US State De-partment 1969, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v01/d4.
25 ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, US State Department 1974, https://his-tory.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve15p2/d52.
26 Annalena Baerbock, ‘Seizing the Transatlantic Moment: Our Common
Responsibility in a New World - Speech by Foreign Minister Annale-na Baerbock at The New School in New York’, Federal Foreign Office,
2 August 2022, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/ news/2545662-2545662.
27 Statbox, ‘Military Expenditure in Germany, 1960-2022,’ 2024, https://tgmstatbox.com/stats/military-expenditure-in-germany/.
28 Kate Connolly, ‘“Germany is back”: Merz secures Greens’ support for defence spend boost’, The Guardian, 14 March 2025, https://www.the-guardian.com/world/2025/mar/14/friedrich-merz-germany-greens-sup-port-defence-funding-plan.
29 Irving Kristol, ‘What’s Wrong With NATO?’ The New York Times, 25 Sep-tember 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/25/magazine/what-s-wrong-with-nato.html.