Ursula von der Leyen has the answer. Borrow even more money. Borrow like there’s no tomorrow.
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The most remarkable thing about the rapid demise of the U.S. is that when it hits the bottom of the ocean floor economically, it will be in a better state than the EU. The panic among EU leaders, in particular Ursula von der Leyen, is breathtaking. Barely a week passes before she makes another crackpot policy announcement, gives herself a salary increase, or makes a statement about needing to give even more money to Ukraine. But in recent months these announcements have become more radical and existential, and we are seeing a new dawn now in the EU where the only solution to cover up the feral spending and borrowing is to fabricate a war with Russia and then blame Putin for the whole fiasco.
Every now and again we get a sober reminder about the economic situation of the U.S., EU and Russia. The recent news that Putin is going to sell around 2 million tonnes of diesel oil to “global markets” (as U.S. media phrases it), the lion’s share going to the U.S. before, during and just after the midterm elections in a bid to stabilise the price to help Trump. We will have to assume that countries who buy some of their diesel from the U.S. will continue doing so, but it might, in fact, be Russian oil.
There’s a lot of fake news buzzing around originating from Trump, who likes to distract journalists away from the top issues. It’s hard to see how the American public will respond to Trump’s latest decision to buy Russian diesel, but it’s hard to see this being a solution to the global oil crisis, let alone Trump’s record-low ratings. Will Trump really go ahead with a new wave of strikes on Iran after the midterms, as he has said? Or is it that his own intelligence agencies have picked up information that Iran is poised for a massive strike, and so therefore he is obliged to send even more troops, plus a carrier, to the region?
Regardless of how France and Germany get their diesel in the coming weeks, after Trump forced these governments to dip into their own reserves by threatening a U.S. export ban, it’s hard to see how the Achilles heel of most EU economies – crude oil products – can still be controlled by Moscow. While intellectually challenged figures like Mark Rutte make such stupid comments about how Russia could never win a war with NATO based on comparative GDP data, this latest move might be a huge wake-up call for Macron and Merz, the latter facing dismally low poll ratings. How do you continue to fund a war in Ukraine with the ‘frenemy’ relationship pushed to breaking point, such as is the case now with the U.S. having to buy diesel from Russia? EU countries loathe Putin, as the one hope they had to magically breathe new life into EU economies by taking Ukraine under its wing was shattered when Russian forces invaded. Putin is everything they are not. Nobody can deny Putin is a leader – the very thing that is so desperately lacking in EU countries. Leadership.
But the situation now has reached farce. With a global diesel crisis brought about by Trump’s war with Iran, EU countries are expected to buy diesel on the international market, topped up by Russia. In fact, buying oil from your enemy is nothing new. Countries have been doing this for decades. Even in Syria, we saw terror groups in the north-east of the country take over the oil infrastructure and then sell oil back to the Assad regime.
It’s hard to see how EU countries will draw a line in the sand between their geostrategic military objectives and their very realistic need for a stable oil supply. But in the midst of this chaos, Ursula von der Leyen has the answer. Borrow even more money. Borrow like there’s no tomorrow. Her latest proposal is to expand the current seven-year EU budget to 2 trillion euros, and there is only one way this can be achieved, as member states are never going to cough up more for the EU experiment. She will be forced to borrow from international banks to replace a previous loan of 750 billion euros for COVID. This is the solution for failing economies. Where once for so many years EU apparatchiks would defend the EU’s failure to implement its own rule book, in preference for constantly adopting new legislation, now this seems to have been replaced by ‘create a panic about Russia and make the EU a sort of executive of NATO without a single trace of democratic virtue’. Von der Leyen doesn’t stipulate what this massive increase is for, but we can assume some of it will be siphoned off for Ukraine. Madness on steroids. But hidden in the text is a new series of taxes which the EU itself could impose on individuals, and so in the smoke-and-mirrors confusion we see there is a back-door way to start taxing EU citizens, something Brussels never touched before. How long has the whole project got?
