this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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People here keep saying it's never going to happen but I'm telling you the European move towards independence from the US is very real. It's going to take a couple decades, maybe more, but they're sincerely pursuing it.
That doesn't really seem to line up with the reality of their new US energy dependence and consolidation of the EU apparatus. I suspect any notion of a break within the imperial bloc is political theatre to placate the citizenry.
Energy dependence was not Europe's choice.
Yet it is their reality. And it sort of is.
Nothing but lack of sovereignty is stopping them from dropping support for Ukraine tomorrow, making up with Russia and starting up the cheap energy flows from the east via tanker ships while working on building some new pipe-lines with US military proximity detection alarms on them.
They are constrained by their liberalism and the limits of its imagination. Liberalism which is largely filtered through Atlantacist, UK, or US lens via media, press, etc.
So I think I'm also quite skeptical of this being anything but an attempt to act up, gain leverage and better terms from master America.
The irony of ridiculing them for liberalness while suggesting they cozy up to imperialist Russia, who is actively waging a war of conquest in their own backyard. That's the type of shit I usually hear right before someone insists Russia had NO CHOICE but to attack their neighbors because all their neighbors are joining defensive alliances when they see how Russia abuses their neighbors.
if you mean NATO, maybe check up on their history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NATO_operations
Nazi Aligned Terrorist Organization
Adolf Heusinger: As a top Nazi officer, Heusinger served as acting Chief of Staff of the Army for Nazi Germany, helping plan invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Austria. He was later appointed Inspector General of the West German Armed Forces and became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Washington D.C.
Hans Speidel: A Nazi lieutenant general and chief of staff to Erwin Rommel, Speidel became Supreme Commander of NATO Allied Ground Forces in Central Europe (1957–1963).
Johannes Steinhoff: A former Luftwaffe top fighter ace who became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971 to 1974.
Reinhard Gehlen: A Nazi intelligence officer who helped construct a German foreign secret service with U.S. assistance, which later influenced the creation of the BND
Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin: Lieutenant in the Nazi invasion of the USSR (Operation Barbarossa). He participated in the Battle of Stalingrad. He was awarded the German Cross in Gold. At the end of the war he was a deputy High Command personnel of the Third Reich Navy. He later commanded several tank battalions and became a general and commander-in-chief of NATO’s Allied Forces Central Europe between 1979 and 1983.
Franz Joseph Schulze: Lieutenant in the service of the Nazi air forces as commander of a regiment. He received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. In post-war Germany he was a general and later commander-in-chief of NATO’s Central European Allied Forces from 1977 to 1979.
Karl Schnell: Major and first officer of the General Staff in Nazi Germany, also received the Iron Cross. He replaced General Ferber as Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Allied Forces Central Europe between 1975 and 1977.
Ernst Ferber: Lieutenant colonel in the Wehrmacht General Staff, decorated with the Iron Cross. He became Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Central European Allied Forces between 1973 and 1975.
Johann von Kielmansegg: General Cabinet Officer of the Nazi Army High Command, where he rose to Colonel and commanded several regiments in the field. After the war he joined the German Army and rose to Brigadier General and rose to the highest positions in NATO as Commander-in-Chief of Special Forces in Central Europe in 1967.
Yeah, unfortunately, if you convince a bunch on imperialists to band together, even if for a benign reason like defense, they will realize that they can collaborate on doing imperialist shit from time to time. It still doesn't change the fact that the biggest reason eastern European states make an effort to join NATO, especially those formerly in the Soviet bloc, is for defensive assurances, typically assurances against Russia.
Sometimes, the enemy of my enemy isn't my friend. It's just another asshole bickering with the first asshole.
Russia is providing humanitarian aid to Cuba (that is being starved by your US) and helping to repel European colonizers in Africa, e.g. the Sahel. Yeah, Russia isn't the USSR but one can realize who is the lesser evil in the Global South's eyes.
It’s not "doing imperialist shit" from time to time as you say. It’s imperialist as a foundational aspect. Its goal is to secure US imperialist world order. It’s as defensive as Israel’s existence. Defense against "the enemy" (which goes back and forth between Russia and China these days) is pure consent manufacturing.
To address this, sure. The way that maga people are also against democrats. But this situation is not that. Aligning with the US only serves the US imperialist order and MIC capitalists. US wields the largest military force in the world, 800+ bases on every continent, all major financial institutions. Russia and China do not. Dismantling this order is of utmost importance for the liberation of people worldwide. This is why alignement away from US and towards global south is crucial for Europes future.
If you think NATO is for defense you have some serious brain de-worming to do. You know the genocidal warmongers who kill millions have little interest in “defense”. Stop playing dumb. NATO is interchangeable with the USA, and the USA is the most fascist nation on Earth currently (alongside Israel and Ukraine, which it put into place and uses as proxies). Wake the fuck up dude you live in the Death Star.
A perfect example of a Liberal with no imagination, if anyone wanted to see it. Stuck in the ruts of your propaganda and ideology, you just can't help but doing the same thing over and over which is why you will never escape daddy America's orbit.
I'll freely admit the US is on some grade A bullshit. I'll also freely admit it's the inevitable end result of centuries of behavior. But cozy up to modern Russia instead? I could understand the idea if they were still the USSR, but that's not what they've been for decades. Just because you're distancing yourself from one abusive asshole doesn't mean you run straight into the arms of another abusive asshole.
sad to see how myopic you are and blinded by propaganda. maybe you should wonder why is "abusive imperialist modern russia" running the American oil embargo of Cuba to deliver humanitarian aid in the form of energy, the only one on Earth to do it? Why are they allying themselves closely to the DPRK and China? Why are they helping decolonize Africa and destroy the French and US backed terrorist groups? Why did they help stabilize Syria for so long and prevent it falling into Zionist Al Qaeda control much earlier?
You can answer 'they don't have good intentions, it's just in their interest to align against the imperialists and with their victims". OK, I don't care. Russia fights on my side, meanwhile westerners never have not even the 'leftists'.
If you learned a bit more about the Ukraine war you would realize they are right there as well. Ukraine was overtaken by a CIA backed Nazi coup in 2014 and was built up by NATO to invade and balkanize Russia, starting by cleansing all the ethnic Russians in the Donbas regions. Tens of thousands dead by Nazi hands before Russia intervened. If anything Putin is too soft and too late, he should have hardened his heart earlier and done what was needed before it could fester and entrench itself to the extent it did but he kept getting strung along by the fake Minsk agreements (which Merkel later openly admitted were done in bad faith and perfidiously to buy time to arm Ukrainian nazis)
Liberals who view Putin as an aggressive tyrant are just like the conservatives who viewed Obama as a radical socialist.
Obama was terrified of being perceived as a radical leftist and was constantly compromising and capitulating to the right in order to prove that he wasn't one. It didn't make a difference, because the right wing's boogeyman caricature of him was impervious to facts and reality.
Similarly, Putin has constantly brushed off provocations and sought to compromise with the West (to a foolish degree even), but his actions have no effect on his portrayal, because the NATO media cinematic universe needs a villain.
I'm going to focus here because I think this is the real crux of our disagreement. I don't see Russia as fighting for you. I see them as fighting over you. This is why I see siding with Russia as little more than trading one master for the other. It will feel amazing to overthrow the current masters, but then what? How long will that elation last when Russia starts tightening their grip?
Russia, unlike the West, supports liberation movements in the Global South
Isnt it weird how you ignored this and focused on doing word salad? It's almost like you have no actual material argument and are focusing on waxing poetic over something that hasn't happened.
The crux is not in your wet dreams of evil "Ruzzian" backstabbing the crux is in what's happening in real life.
Europe should've cozied up with China if they feel like cozying up with Russia is politically untenable and geopolitically unsound. But Europe and Europeans are far too Sinophobic, so they can look forward to further vassaldom by the US.
China cannot provide energy to Europe in the short term. Europe has to get that either from the USA, from Russia or from the Middle East (or some combination of the 3)
Since the imperialists have disabled all the Russian pipelines into Europe, and pretty permanently burned the bridges of their relations with Russia now Russia is pretty much off the table for a few decades at least. Plus their capacity is all going to China now anyway, and their oil and gas infrastructure is also being harried by Ukrainian attacks on Russian tankers, depots and refineries. They've layered so many sanctions onto Russia it will basically be legally impossible to unwind it, they've dug themselves a hole.
The Middle East is now off the table, since Europe stood by and watched a genocide for 3 years build into a massive regional war and let America escalate the war that then wiped out all of it in the short to medium term. For 5 years at least (even if the war ended and the strait opened today) the Middle East will be unable to provide any significant amount of energy to the EU. They could have intensely pressured the US and Israel to reel it in at any point since October 2023, but instead they have done the opposite, giving them diplomatic cover and military logistical assistance and censoring and brutalizing their own populations on behalf of Zionism.
So the EU had a chance where they could be independent, but they blew it. It's probably too late now. They are now slaves to the USA energy markets for the medium term future at least - and yes, it is entirely the fault of European leadership and their myopic ideological view that allows the US to easily corner them and force them into whatever position it wants. If they had been less sinophobic, less russophobic, less zionist and pushed back more against the USA to guarantee Minsk 1 & 2 and the JCPOA then none of this would be happening, but everytime Israel/the USA commit barbarous and perfidious acts, they are always there to cover for them and side with them reflexively.
There is no conceivable geopolitical benefit for the EU to entertain notions of Taiwanese separatism or any other anti-Chinese talking point like the US. Absolutely nobody in Taiwan thinks the EU will help them, and I seriously doubt your average Euro could tell Asians apart anyways. They don't even lost out that much relative to the US once China becomes a hegemonic power. At least Australia gets the excuse that they're geographically close to China when the EU doesn't even have that.
But apparently the European brainpan can do nothing but seethe that they are being eclipsed by Asian countries they still think inferior despite being Asians themselves. The thought of being Asian is so revolting that they would rather larp as living on some fake continent and be pushed around by a bunch of even faker settler-colonial societies.
Couldn't have said it better myself. It's akin to striving for freeing the superstructure while piling chains on the base so to speak as while technological dependence is an issue its a lesser one than the real problems they've gotten themselves in and it's pure liberal rose-tinted glasses that convinces them otherwise. There is no way this can lead to any kind of independence from the US given the overall situation.
If anything it's a smokescreen to rah-rah-rah against the US for EU audiences while actually creating a draconian censorship regime over the internet that is responsive to the EU in particular which crushes, deplatforms, censors, criminalizes pro-Palestine speech, anti-EU speech, anything critical of the EU-Atlantacist foreign policy blob, etc. They want complete control over speech and the internet within their borders. So it's an attempt at exercising some limited autonomy rather than being entirely subservient to the latest whims of whatever US admin just got in power and decides that they must destroy woke or other nonsense which isn't great for the stability of the liberal project long-term. And that last sentence I think is the real problem. Trump has been leaning on them trying to push American culture war crap which doesn't sit right with European liberals who have decided that kind of thing is 'Russian' so this is their attempt to prevent the US from gaining that leverage over them but it's too little too late given all else that's happened. Some good things like a few open source projects will get funded via it at least.
Yes Europe chose it when they chose belligerence and war, they chose to sit idly by as Trump invaded Venezuela, attacked Iran and started a proxy war they knew was fully preventable with Russia. They let the US blow up Nordstream and helped cover it up. They are cravens and they chose their bed, and they will sleep in it. They could have stopped the rampaging USA with a concerted effort if they wanted to, but they didn't. They liked what it was doing.
Europe's issue is that it is not a particularly unified group, it's a mash of different countries with wildly different cultures that have been carefully kept together so far. The issue is that they are torn between holding together the EU and the abusive relationship with the US, this is how they approach things so weakly, because they must confer and get consensus lasting so long on fast moving issues that the US ends up steamrolling over them. If like you say some european countries took as strong a stance as you want them to, others would not, and it would ultimately threaten the whole union. The US would seize on the split and aim to break it entirely.
There are many contradictions interwoven together driving what's happening.
Then I don't see how a move towards European sovereignty is a thing. I think certain European countries like France are trying to decouple, but for every France, there is a Lithuania and a Kosovo and a Germany that are completely invested in the Burgerlander imperialist project at the expense of Europeans, both worker and capitalist. To really challenge the US, the EU has to still exist. France doing its own thing and Spain refusing to fully cooperate genociding Palestinians while the former Dutch prime minister sucks up to Trump by calling him daddy just weakens EU unity. Ideally, the US wants the entirety of Europe as a vassal, but it could live with a fractured Europe with enough vassals to make sure that Europe can never reunite. At bare minimum, they can count on Germany, the UK, the Baltics, and Kosovo as loyal vassals and can probably rely on the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Poland as well. That's already a huge chunk of Europe.
People get real undialectical on here sometimes
Euros have done this several times before and backtracked. I think it will stick this time but I can't fault anyone for being skeptical.
It could even fail. There's no guarantee that the attempt to pursue it will succeed. My general point is that they are sincerely pursuing it, there is a real contradiction within the imperial core between these two sides and pulling on the two threads to help it unravel is better than denying its existence.
It is a real force but the governments are complex systems with a lot of internal contradictions. Just as a kingdom can fall for want of a horseshoe nail a push for digital sovereignty can fail for want to read a .doc file. Most people, especially anyone who has used floss inside of an organization using microsoft, have personal experience with these many micro contradictions and none with the geopolitical macroscale ones so the "can never happen" attitude is unsurprising even if unimaginative.
Who else will EU buy weapons and energy from? There is nowhere else to go, they are still deluding themselves that they can be a little autarky and the energy crisis will disappear and the USA will stop destroying all of its competitors. USA has them in a vice grip because they will never go to Russia and China, they are too invested in the US relationship and too deep in white supremacist ideology due to their hundreds of years of being colonizers, which they still have never paid any sort of reparations on. The whole point is that Europe is on the "winning team" the "garden", they will never join the "jungle" because they are the poor, the undeveloped, etc. You have to account for this material reality and ideology in the European elite and masses.
Dialectical is when we believe the hyperbolic statements of Bourgeois Liberal states at face value? How many times have these feckless and powerless liars said they would do this and reject Trump and all that? A thousand. Remember Greenland? They were all rattling their sabers against the USA it was so cute. Meanwhile they assist in genocide in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela. They can simply fuck off with their lies, they are fully locked in with the imperialist interests. They are part of the imperialist blob. They will not 'go their own way' until the Empire is destroyed and there's no plunder to be gained from the global south any longer. As long as USA is the guy with the big stick going around mugging people, they are on that team, until the that guy with the big stick loses. Only then will they abandon the sinking ship.
I don't really care at all what current Euro leadership says. Outside of a little squawking form Spain and Ireland, they're all in the tank for imperialism. Their dialogue does not factor into my analysis because they will not matter in a very short span of time.
Well, you answer your question in the next sentence. Eventually, they will go to Russia and China. It's obviously not so impossible since they were doing it five years ago.
But which way is global development moving? Europe and the US get less developed every day while the global south gets more. Europeans know they're no garden because it's only been 80 years since an outside power (the US) had to step and force them to stop killing each other in history's bloodiest wars over and over again. The material reality that matters is that imperialism gave Europeans across social classes a very good deal for a very long time, but now that deal has stopped paying out. Neither the European working class nor the bulk of the capitalist class are getting anything but fucked by this relationship these days.
We're watching the US's big stick fail miserably right now and blow up in Europe's face. How are we not at the "abandon ship" point yet?
To actually lay out my argument instead of just my lazy comment from before:
The current neoliberal leadership of Europe is dead. It is a shambling corpse with only a few years left before it comes apart. It has not only (and obviously) utterly failed to deliver for the European masses, but it is not miserably failing to deliver for the European capitalists. The European neoliberal imperial internship has lead to the US picking apart the EU's industrial economy, sidelining Euro capitalists and blowing up their ability to secure the segment of global profits they were supposed to get as part of this deal. What is the base of their power then besides simple momentum? A political leadership with no class to support them!
Will neoliberals be in power in the UK, France, Italy, or Spain five years from now? I think we can safely say, for the most part, no - you will get fascism or you will get some kind of anti-neoliberal leftism ranging from socdem to nearly communist. That'll be the Greens in the UK, a revitalized PSOE in Spain, LFI in France, etc, if they can beat their respective fascists. Both of these groups will want to change the relationship with the US for different reasons, but in both cases they want to extricate from the Ukraine disaster. We can see that Eastern Europe is (of course) already further along in this historical process, with the semiconservative socialistish parties doing well in Romania, Slovakia, parts of former Yugoslavia, etc. These parties are quite openly friendly with Russia (and China secondarily) while opposing the EU project and particularly the subjugation to US via Ukraine.
Europe's economy is a fucking disaster in ways that are quite obviously the fault of the US. The intentional draining of Germany's industry via the Ukraine war and the short-sighted buffoonery of the Iran war have obliterated the energy market so badly that there simply is not path to recovery under the current conditions. Europe basically has three paths forward: return to the grand European tradition of constantly being at barbaric war with each other and shrink into irrelevance on the world stage (fascism), pursue some genuine independence and sovereignty (socialism), or be transformed into a third world style comprador state on the losing end of unequal exchange. The US wants the third option, and it's certainly not impossible, but it's the hardest to achieve because it has no class support. There is no existing comprador bourgeoisie while there is still a very strong national/continental bourgeoisie. The working class is decently well organized and not likely to roll over. That option, therefore, produces conditions for class collaboration between workers and capitalists, which then leads back to either national bourgeois victory (fascism) or European proletarian victory (socialism).
Already all over Europe, political parties are in turmoil with venerable institutions collapsing and upstart anti-establishment of the left and right grasping for and approaching power. Europe's status quo as a junior imperial partner is already over. What's undialectical is projecting this obviously fractious, unstable, and declining system as eternal into the future. It's already done.
Friedrich Merz is such a pathetic, servile worm that he would rather kill himself than defy the US. Maybe the next German government (probably not tho)
Before that, he would rather indirectly kill millions of Germans by privatizing health care more and more and getting rid of social security. The German social Democrats and the Greens would do the same or worse, if they win the next elections. Neither a popular front nor a national front (hypothetically) is currently possible in Germany, because the burgoise powers are not actually convinced, that fascism (German or US) is a bad thing. The way forward is to build actual working class power.
Nah, the sentiment will bounce violently back in the other direction the minute Trump is out of office, even if the new Democratic or not-Trump Republican president continues or even intensifies the US plunder of Europe
Europeans suffer from what I call racism-induced mass economic amnesia
by the time they are done 'moving away' from the USA it will be too late, they'll be drained dry and made into a tourism spot for Americans. Energy seals the deal, they have none and everyone they tried to get it from got blown up by American wars so America is the only provider left, and this advantage will be pressed. Copper is coming out of the walls to pay for US backed wars, and then the dry husks will be tossed aside and used as tax havens and tourism spots. France is probably the one nation in the entire EU with a chance of partially mitigating this due to nuclear energy, but they would need to triple down on that immediately.
Yeah possibly. I don't disagree that they may fail. My only point is that they clearly see what is happening and are making a sincere attempt to resolve it. They may not be able to under the conditions though.
i wanna see them try to blow up china when they start selling solar panels to europeans.
they'll just pull some shit in Taiwan like landing a ton of Patriot systems and a nuke, forcing China to start a war to respond. Then they'll rope the EU into their sanctions game. They already complain about the "over production" of EV vehicles and Solar Panels.
i figure they are already doing that tbh.
china would quietly sanction them and everyone will wonder why the fuck is the us economy on free fall.
The EU is already sanctioning Chinese solar panels and EVs I believe, they say it's to protect their own renewable sectors but in actuality it's more about keeping the price of renewable energy high so that oil can be competitive at higher prices.
I don't think the US is already doing moves that overt with Taiwan, instead it's more like sending a senator there in a publicity stunt. Nukes are another level of escalation beyond anything we've seen, but I don't put it past the US. They already are getting them in Japan. They hilariously had a nuke in Japan in a cargo container submerged off the coast of a small unpopulated island, it was there for like a decade I believe. A nuclear weapon just sitting there unattended for years.
as you said the eu has no energy, so it's only a matter of time with the sanctions game. they are already quietly opening up to russian energy again. i think it's a matter of how they worm their way around us influence, like any of the us vassals.
as for taiwan, the us recently sent literal billions in weapons and some taiwanese politicians are already openly talking about not turning into an ukraine situation with those, which means there might be significant popular support for that idea. they are constantly provoking. not to mention the "military exercises" they like to do in the region.
i'm not optimistic about their nukes at all, however with nuclear weapons we sadly don't have the power of hindsight, but we can see what they do out of desperation in the new war on iran. really brings out the existential dread, so we get the real feeling of a cold war.
in a way, some of the things you predict will happen in the future are already happening now.
Weapons send to Taiwan are mostly a grift. It goes back to US foreign policy of never fully committing to sending actually useful weapons to Taiwan because of the belief that Taiwan can always "flip" back to the Mainland and hand over said weapons to the PLA. It's because of this that Chiang Kai-Shek got shitty hand-me-down weapons, but at least he got them for free and those shitty hand-me-down weapons were still better than what the PLA had at the time. Lai is no Chiang. He's still getting shitty hand-me-down weapon platforms, but now he has to pay a premium.