Martin Jay
The EU doesn't seem to be able to do the maths and is hopelessly distracted by its own deluded ideas.
It's hardly news these days that the western press are no longer serving both the U.S. and Ukrainian leader's interests by lapping up the propaganda tomes that were previously dutifully stenographed. Yet in recent days, what we are seeing from many outlets is a break away from the previous pro-West narrative to a more sober variant which, without saying it in so many words, is presenting the war as a 'fait accompli' and that a more pragmatic viewpoint should be the order of the day by Paris, Munich and London.
Interestingly, this would have appeared to have started with the business press. For a few months now the FT has reported on the war with the rose-tinted spectacles removed and, at times, has even been critical of its chief ally, the EU. In July of this year the pink pages took the gloves off and did what I described as a 'hit job' on Zelensky himself which raised eyebrows as it indicated a milestone.
More recently we have also seen quite an acerbic tone, also with the British press, with the Telegraph plainly calling out his recent trip to Paris to sign a letter of intent to buy 100 Rafael jets, while a corruption scandal rumbles at his feet, with a close friend implicated.
But the business press and their tendency to be more critical of the west's handling stands out. Recently it was Bloomberg which made the point in a rather arduous piece that both western sanction on Russian oil firms and direct hits on Russia's own oil infrastructure raise pump prices for western motorists, which merely underlines the West's fatalist strategy from day one. Sanctions against Russia only seem to make it stronger while driving many Global South countries towards the BRICS model. But now Bloomberg are spelling out the ugly truth about Ukraine's military strategy: It's also fatally flawed.
Recent strikes by Ukraine on three of Russia's refineries, claims Bloomberg, is likely to hike pump prices in the foreseeable future. But what its authors are also worried about is the EU's own new laws, expected to be implemented in January, that bans any shipments of diesel or gasoline coming from countries which are buying Russian crude oil and refining it themselves. The author rightly asks: will Turkey and India's refineries' ships be turned away from EU ports? Wouldn't that have, in itself, a hugely detrimental impact on pump prices across Europe?
The EU doesn't seem to be able to do the maths and is hopelessly distracted by its own deluded ideas. Rather than tackle head on the economic crisis across the 27-member bloc - which is dragging France and Germany down to new levels of desperation - it blithely blunders on with its obsession with going to war with Russia, when the evidence is staring it in the face that it doesn't have the money to do it. Ursula von der Leyen is proposing that the EU borrows 800 bn euros to rearm national governments so as to buy more kit while Germany looks at more painful social welfare cuts just to square their own budget. Of course, this is not her call. She may well propose such a ludicrous idea but at least for the moment there are still traces of democratic process in the EU which put this decision to member states via the grey, soulless European Council of Ministers building in Brussels. Many EU countries don't see the logic of such a mad idea which will present her with a problem, while MEPs in the European parliament literally line up during plenary sessions to have their three-minute character assassination on her - completely unprecedented in the history of the EU project, with most calling for her resignation.
Her answer is almost out of the Nazi playbook: hunker down and try and impose more Orwellian rules for the EU club which crush all independent media and allows EU watchdogs to spy at will on whomever they want. In fact Orwell couldn't have made this shit up himself. In just one week, the EU witnessed an Italian journalist being fired by his own agency simply for asking a question to an EU spokesperson while lobbyists in Brussels who question von der Leyen's competence are having their bank accounts frozen and are facing legal cases. Will she ever resign, despite at least two motions of no confidence tabled in the European parliament? Will EU leaders ever see that the madness of this modern day dictatorship and its lust for absolute control at any cost, will sink the whole ship? The EU seems to be doing all it can to destroy EU economies so it can play the role of a fake superpower by playing an empirical role in the Ukraine war.
The situation now has reached such level of parody that we are talking about raising taxes across Europe and inevitably hiking unemployment so EU countries can continue to bankroll a war with Russia, while Zelensky and his cronies siphon off billions on a weekly basis - while the Ukrainian president himself orders French fighter jets with money he doesn't have. And while this is going on, western media just start to look more closely at corruption and point out the failure of backfiring sanctions and more price hikes for fuel at the pumps. More sober reporting is welcome even if it comes absurdly too late. Are outlets like the FT and Bloomberg reflecting the cynicism and despair from giant corporations which have joined up the dots and seen that the only salient view to take now is how for Europe to cut its losses and stop the war?