Tanks for the memories – live with Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate
Join The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate live for a discussion about the impending delivery of US and German tanks to Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky’s …
“So the primordial interest of the United States, over which for a century we have fought wars—the First, Second, and Cold War—has been the relationship between Germany and Russia. United, they are the only force that could threaten us. Therefore, it’s not an accident that General Hodges, who’s been appointed to be blamed for all of this, is talking about pre-positioning troops in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Baltics. This is the Intermarium, the Black Sea to the Baltic, that Pilsudski dreamed of. This is the solution for the United States. The issue to which we don’t have the answer is: what will Germany do? So, the real wild card in Europe is that, as the United States builds this cordon sanitaire, not in Ukraine but to the West, and the Russians try to figure out how to leverage the Ukrainians out, we don’t know the German position. Germany is in a very peculiar position. Its former Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is on the board of Gazprom. They have a very complex relationship. The Germans themselves don’t know what to do. They must export, but the Russians can’t take up the export. On the other hand, if they lose the free trade zone, they need to build something different. For the United States, the primordial fear is German capital and German technology, and Russian manpower with Russian natural resources. That is the only combination that has for centuries scared the hell out of the United States.”
So, how does this play out? Well, the U.S. has already put its cards on the table. It is the line from the Baltics to the Black Sea. And as he goes on to say, and his next line is, Russia’s cards on the table are that they need a Ukraine that is not pro-Western, that is at least neutral. So, in his words, the U.S. wants to control what he calls “the line from the Baltics to the Black Sea.” Russia, by contrast, their main goal is to keep Ukraine neutral because if Ukraine falls into the Western orbit, then that seriously weakens them and also seriously threatens their prospects of having friendly ties with Germany.
So, he openly declared back in 2015 that so much of this is not about Ukraine. It’s not about curbing Russian aggression; it’s about severing any kind of relationship between Germany and Russia. Notice how he doesn’t talk about a military threat of Germany and Russia being united. He says what scares the hell out of the U.S. is German technology, German know-how, and Russian manpower and natural resources. That’s what scares these people. And that’s what this proxy war has helped advance in terms of sabotaging German-Russia relations. And just to make sure, they blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in case anybody got any second thoughts in Germany.
What Friedman was talking about specifically was a concept for maintaining Western control, specifically U.S. imperial control over Eurasia, which is the Intermarium. The Intermarium is the region that exists between Russia and Russia’s sphere of influence and Germany, including Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Baltic states. Andrzej Duda, the Polish leader, sort of a center-right figure, understands that very well.
Intermarium – Wikipedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Intermarium ( Polish: Międzymorze, Polish pronunciation: [mʲɛnd͡zɨˈmɔʐɛ]) was a post- World War I geopolitical plan conceived by Józef Piłsudski to unite former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lands within a single polity. The plan went through several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion of neighbouring states.
Now to understand the Polish PIS (Law and Order) party, so people like Duda who understood what was happening since he understood and studied Józef Piłsudski.
“All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente—on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany, [while in the east] there are doors that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far.” – Józef Piłsudski
Just like Piłsudski saw opportunity for the rebirth of our Polish state in the way Entente was trying to weaken and pressure “squeeze” Germany, the same way Polish and East European Slavic states saw opportunity. In fact, the US wanted to weaken and pressure “squeeze” Germany by destroying their cooperation with Russia.
Russia and Germany under the leadership of Putin and Merkel were getting too independent and too strong.
I also understand that one of the complications is that the Europeans are very dependent on the Russians for energy supply and business relationships. But they also need to recognize that if we don’t stop now, we could find ourselves in a real conflict with Russia down the road.
Well, actually, let me jump in right there. Germany, arguably the strongest power in Europe, at least economically, has faced criticism. Angela Merkel and others haven’t been aggressive enough. What do you think of that? Do you think Germany has been as aggressive as they should be?
I’m quite an admirer of Chancellor Merkel, and I heard her statement when she was with President Obama in Washington. I thought it was a very good statement. But now we need to have tougher sanctions, and I’m afraid at some point this is probably going to have to involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. Eighty percent of Russian exports are in oil, gas, and minerals. People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. I understand that it’s uncomfortable to affect business ties in this way, but this is one of the few instruments we have.
In the long run, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, with the tremendous bounty of oil and gas we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia. For years, we’ve tried to get the Europeans interested in different pipeline routes. It’s time to do that. Some of this is simply acting as quickly as possible.
The Polish and other Eastern European leaders understood the power struggle between Europe (Germany and Merkel) against the US. And just like the Entente after the First World War wanted to pressure and weaken Germany, which was used by Józef Piłsudski to rebirth the Polish state, today our Polish and other East European countries want to use the fact the US wants to pressure and weaken Germany by destroying their cooperation with Russia to gain something. What Piłsudski taught the Western Slavs is that a strong Russia and Germany are bad for the rest of the Slavic nation. The more Russia and Germany cooperate, the more they oppress weaker nations between them. So when the US wanted to weaken Russia and Germany and forbid them from cooperation, all Slavic states between Russia and Germany, using lessons taught by Piłsudski, jumped on the opportunity. Slavic nations are not stupid; we know Russia is not a threat to us, and they could not attack us. We simply want to weaken Germany and Russia and their cooperation to make sure they would not oppress us.
“However, these were not the things that kept the Chief of State Józef Piłsudski awake at night. What bothered him most was the renewed cooperation between Russia and Germany against Poland. It began in 1918, when German troops, retreating from the areas east of the Bug River, began to hand themselves over not to the Poles, but to the Bolsheviks. They abandoned this practice only at the request of the Coalition. At the end of August 1920, a large part of the Bolshevik troops were defeated near Warsaw, and in order to avoid a pogrom at Polish hands, crossed the border to East Prussia. According to international law, Germany should have disarmed and interned the Bolsheviks until the end of the war. Meanwhile, they let them through their territory to the Soviet Western Front recreated by Tukhachevsky. They then took part in the Battle of the Niemen at the end of September 1920 and were defeated again and finally.”
“There are things in life that are more important than life itself.” ― Józef Piłsudski
“Keep balancing until you can, and when you can’t anymore, set the world on fire.” ― Józef Piłsudski