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- [00:04]
A
No migrants. More in no Europe without Christianity.
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An alliance also with Russia.
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A
Welcome to EU Screen, the podcast that guides you through stories coming from the eu. We talk about the news a bit differently and with people who really know what they're talking about. I'm James Kantor. This is episode 123, owned, extorted and Gaslit, with Dave Keating, broadcaster and author of the new book the Owned how to Free Europe from American Military, Economic and Cultural Dependence. So, hi, Dave.
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B
Hi. Great to be here again.
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A
Yeah. Welcome back to the EU Scream Studios in the heart of downtown Brussels.
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B
Yes, Heart of the best neighborhood in the city.
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A
There you go. Congratulations are in order. You've just written a book, the Owned Continent. Owned, as in Ownership how to Free Europe from American Military, Economic and Cultural Dependence. And let me start with this word, owned, which is in the book's title, that sort of gamer slang that has come to mean totally defeated and dominated, and it's now used widely in social media and banter for total takedown. So that's where Europe is with the us.
- [01:33]
B
Yeah, I chose that word very specifically. And one is exactly what you mentioned, this understanding of owned as kind of like defeated, as one upped in a way from gamer slang. But the other is that the whole phrase is meant to evoke the phrase the old continent, which is a common way for both Americans and Europeans to refer to Europe, both in positive ways and in negative ways. But the main thing is to just wake Europeans up to how controlled they are by America, because in my experience here, living here for 20 years, I've found that Europeans just don't know the degree to which they are addicted to America. And of course, the first step in treating an addiction is admitting that you have a problem.
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A
Now, we'll get to the substance of the book, but let me just set the scene a bit. 2025 has been an annus horribilis, a horrible year for EU US relations. And to top it all, we are speaking after tensions got ratcheted a few more notches higher because of the latest US attacks on Europe, which started with the White House's National Security Strategy. These strategies are issued every four years. And whether this document was done by the most nationalist strand of MAGA or whether it was done in a hurry, you know, it doesn't matter. We're now once again discussing the redrawing of the global order by the US and whether the EU can survive.
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B
Yeah, there has been a lot of excuse making going on in Europe for this document. The interesting thing is this is essentially the exact same thing that was put out by the State Department back in May when they had this substack post called the need for. For civilizational allies. And by that they meant the far right parties of Europe who they consider their allies, and they consider the centrist governments the wayward or maybe even adversaries. When that came out, you had the European Atlanticist crew saying, oh, it's just a substack post. Who knows who wrote it? It's some guy. Don't. Don't pay any attention to that.
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A
Now go back to sleep.
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B
Exactly. Go back to sleep. And now it's in an actual US national security strategy. So that's harder to ignore. But we're hearing the same arguments. Oh, it's. Some extremists wrote it. Donald Trump. I'm sure he didn't read it before he signed it. I don't know how that is supposed to make us feel better that he probably didn't read it before he signed it. The fact is these people are in control of American foreign policy. Trump probably doesn't care one way or the other, but the people around him who are running the show care about Europe a lot. You might even say they're obsessed.
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A
Yes. So this U.S. national Security Strategy, A, it suggests that stabilizing relations with Russia is a top priority. It says B, that the US now will quotes cultivate resistance to the EU by working with far right and extreme right patriotic parties. And it says, C, that the, that the US Needs to do this to cultivate this resistance in order to save Europe from, quote, civilizational erasure, unquote. And you can read that as erasure by non whites and non Christians. So how did the EU react to what are essentially threats of regime change? Did we see the due outrage? Did we see the genius comebacks?
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B
Yeah, we did not. And you know, really, in the first days after the strategy came out, there was near silence from European leaders. Anyone who spoke out against it had the moniker former before their name. And any sitting people were afraid to criticize it. And that's been the story the entire year, that every time Trump or that his officials criticize Europe, European leaders and officials are afraid to head back because they don't want to escalate the situation. We saw that play out again, this time a couple days later. However, after Trump gave that interview with Politico where he called all the leaders weak. We have seen a bit of response, maybe baby steps toward hitting back with the council chair, Antonio Costa, saying that.
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A
This is the guy who's the president of the meetings when the EU government.
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B
Yeah, exactly. Not the EU President. The EU President is effectively Ursula von der Leyen, who has been silenced until.
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A
About a week later when she finally gave a response at a Politico event that was held in Brussels. And she said the following.
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B
I have always had a very good working relationship with the presidents of the United States, and this is also the case today.
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A
And from the bottom of my heart, I'm a convinced transatlanticist.
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B
Of course, our relationship to the united. To the United States has changed.
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A
Why? Because we are changing, as you say, Dave. I mean, one of the few EU dignitaries who seems to have punched back a little bit is Antonio Costa. He says we cannot accept this threat of interference in European political life.
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B
Yes. Antonio Costa said that it's not for the US Government to be dictating domestic politics, and it's up to European citizens to decide who are the good parties and who are the bad parties. And then we had German Chancellor Friedrich Merz kind of head back against the strategy, but not really forcefully defending the eu, which has been the main target of criticism. Uh, in fact, at one point when he was speaking, he said that if Donald Trump can't deal with Europe, at least he could deal with Germany. Now, that may have just been a slip of the tongue, but it's a horrible thing to say when you think about it, because that is exactly what Donald Trump wants, to divide Europeans against each other.
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A
But Pope Leo, the Chicago Pope, he calls on US President Donald Trump not to, quote, break apart the transatlantic alliance. And so, you know, Leo is actually on the money there. Also interesting, the far right in France pushed back a little bit against Trump. They're really gunning for power come the next presidential election in 2027. You know, they're very aware that Trump can be very divisive within France. And so the far right in France, not necessarily playing along, but the far right, like AFD and other parts of Europe, very much on board.
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B
Yeah, I would say the far right in France is the only far right party that has not embraced maga, because pro Americanism is historically not a big political winner in France, but that's very different from the rest of European countries.
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A
So my take. And, you know, on EU screen, we've been saying for more or less 120 episodes that we should pay attention when the international far right talks about the great replacement remigration, banning abortion, suppressing LGBT people. All of these very unpleasant things are direct messages to their base and to base instincts. And why? Because they're about ensuring that births of white babies continue and maintaining a form of white supremacy. And if there was any doubt about this as an official policy, there really cannot be any longer, at least official policy of the, the current White House. So what we are seeing is that this obsession with whiteness is a cornerstone of the far right Atlantic alliance. And given that the whiteness myth is centered on Europe, Magus seems desperate to preserve an image of Europe cast in that light. Hence the sort of missionary zeal in this document which again talks about saving the continent, saving the old continent, saving the owned continent from civilizational erasure.
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B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this, it's this obsession with whiteness. And where does whiteness come from? Whiteness comes from Europe. And they have this, you know, ancestral obsession with Europe that is not really connected to modern European realities. And that's something that's pretty common in the United States. I think, as you know, that people don't think of these countries as real places. They think of these things as history storybooks, a kind of vague stereotypes for each place, not real places that have functioning modern democracies and modern realities. But what's interesting I've noticed is, you know, I always try to tell Europeans that most Americans don't care about Europe, but right now the Americans who care the most about Europe are MAGA. They are obsessed. The word Europe appears 48 times in the national security strategy. The word China appears only 23 times. The subject of Europe dominated that national security strategy. And why? Because preserving European whiteness is at the center of their kind of racial obsessions. You know, when the national security strategy is talking about, you know, these countries will soon be majority non white and be taken over. And then once that happens, we can no longer work with them. It's absurd. The country with the most, let's say, the highest Muslim population in Europe, if you ask a MAGA person, they'd probably say half of France is Muslim now in it's not even 10%. And for most countries it's most Western European countries it's less than five Eastern European countries, it's zero. So it doesn't even make sense what they're saying.
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A
And we had another assault on the EU this month again at the very moment that you launched this book from Elon Musk. And that's important because lest we forget, he's on, off the richest person on the planet. And he's put himself at the service of those, the far right who want to undermine the eu. And he's doing so through his social media network X. So Musk went berserk after the EU fined him a measly 120 million euros. I tried to do the math in.
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B
An hour or something.
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A
Musk then supported comparing the EU to Nazi Germany. That post got 40 million views plus. And Musk then called for the EU to be abolished. And that was then supported by Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who's now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia. And again, what response do we get? The spokesperson for Ursula von der Leyen. Oh, outlandish statements are part of free speech. We don't want to get involved in ideological discussions. That was her response.
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B
What's crazy is I saw that reported in American media as a strong response. What's like, what planet are you on that you think that was a strong response?
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A
What's your red line? I mean, he compared the U2, Hitler.
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B
Germany and Kotritz abolition.
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A
How further can you get? It's part of the freedom of speech that we very much praise in the eu and it allows even for the craziest statements that you can imagine. And I think all of that, in a sense, is to do with this sensitivity around the technology that Musk controls and specifically when it comes to Ukraine's ability to keep Russia at bay.
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B
Yeah, I mean, but I think that the lesson that the commission should learn here is that it doesn't matter if they hold fire or not. They will be attacked. So they dragged this case out, gave like the lowest fine they could in this initial instance, and yet they were still attacked full force. The full force of the US government came after them. Now you can say, what's left for the US government to do? They're already calling for the abolition of the eu, or at least Elon Musk is in. The senators are implying it. What reason does the commission have now not to go the full hog and fine x4 content violations? Because they've already been accused of doing just that. So they might as well just do it. This strategy of, you know, these tiny little weak measures, it's clearly not working. A. Because these people do not respect weakness. And once you display weakness like an animal displaying, I don't know, what do they do? Display their hindquarters or something? And then the. The predator recognizes that as weak prey. Or do you puff up your chest and say, don't mess with us. I can't understand at this point what would be the reason to hold back on the content? Fine.
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A
Not even the Starlink dimension for Ukraine, the idea that Musk should somehow be kept on board to keep providing that service to Ukrainian forces.
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B
But I think that it's clear that Musk isn't on board. And so he already hates the European Union. If he was going to cut off Starlink for that, he'll do it or he won't do it. I think he'll do it or he won't do it. Irregardless of this content fine. Because clearly, either they don't see a difference between this fine and a content fine, or they purposefully are muddying the waters. But I don't see the Starlink reason as being a good reason.
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A
Dave. So your book is about how Europe is effectively owned by the U.S. how U.S. business and strategic interests really are preponderant in Europe, and you look at a number of distinct areas. So let's start with the NATO system. It's built almost entirely around American military command and control.
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B
Yeah. I mean, there's many ways in which the US dominates Europe. One is through NATO, which, as I write in the book, is not an alliance, it is a protectorate. NATO, as it's currently structured, does not function without the United States. And Kaia Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, has directly admitted as such. She said there is no NATO without the United States. A lot of people want to muddy those water here and pretend NATO is an alliance, but it really isn't. And that has been painfully clear, I think, over the past year. But there's many other ways in which the United States dominates Europe militarily. I think most Europeans are not aware of the number of American troops occupying U.S. soil. To a historian 100 years in the future, looking back at this system over the past 80 years, I think it would be hard for them not to define these arrangements as a protectorate arrangement, as you might define it in the Roman Empire when you had neighboring client states. And it's also the military purchasing. And that's the hypocrisy that we're seeing right now, because the Trump administration is demanding that the Europeans spend more on defense, as the Obama administration did, as many administrations did. But they want that defense money sent to America. They want that money invested in the American military industrial complex.
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A
Indeed. And we've got this issue that if Europe simply spends more money on its militaries, but at the same time they don't do what really needs to be done to build out their own military industrial base, then this only likely reinforces dependence on the United States. European leaders will just have locked themselves further into American dependence. And I think you really bring this through in the book.
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B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, first of all, the 5% target is nonsense. And the only person at that NATO somebody who had the courage to point that out was Pedro Sanchez of Spain, one of the most reviled figures in Atlanticist politics right now at the moment.
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A
And let's just define Atlantis politics. This is the idea that our security in Europe is entirely dependent on the relationship with the United States.
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B
Yes. Outside of France, it has been the dominating political ideology of Europe, of Western Europe, over the past 80 years.
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A
So when we talk about Atlanticism, that's what we mean. A complete identification with the North Atlantic Treaty System.
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B
Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, the target is nonsense. It's not reachable for most countries. It's also way more than the US itself spends on defense, which is only 3.2%. Now, Mark Ruta, the secretary general of NATO, thought he had scored a blinder here by splitting the target into 3.5 and 1.5. But the fact is, you still handed Trump a victory, and it's still not. It's an absurd number. And NATO itself is not advertising that split. They're saying 5% in every communication they put out. But the main point is simply spending more does not make European military defense independent. It only reinforces the American control over this continent. And that means that if a any point the US Pulls out, which seems very likely at this point, Europe is still screwed. So what Europe needs to do is a build more defense industrial capacity to produce their own weapons and create a command and control structure that is controlled by Europeans and capable of acting independently. That's what we don't have now. And so spending more only works if you know that you're buying a continuation of the American military protector and security guarantee. And. And all of the evidence points to the fact that the spending is not buying that, that there is no guarantee. The Trump administration is not committed to Article 5 Mutual Defense in NATO.
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A
Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which since 1949 has stipulated that an armed attack against any one of the NATO members, currently 32, that'll be considered an attack against them all.
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B
And therefore NATO is a paper tiger, just as Russia says.
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A
There's one way you describe how European political leaders have run away from some of the truths that you outline in your book. And you use this very voguish word, gaslighting. Let's do a definition of gaslighting first. What is your definition of gaslighting?
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B
Well, I actually watched the movie that it's from.
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A
I did, too.
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B
It's not great.
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A
It's sort of 1940s thing.
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B
So it's about a woman who is being essentially tricked into thinking she's crazy to not believe her own reality. And it involves a gaslight. The gaslight is turning on.
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A
The guy goes into the attic. The evil partner goes into the attic, and he messes around, in fact, with the supply of gas to the lights, and they flicker. And she reports seeing, flickering. And he says, no, go see the doctor.
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B
Yeah. So basically.
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A
And he's after the well, which is stored somewhere.
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B
Yeah. So he's trying to get her to deny her own reality and saying what he knows isn't true, but he's trying to create an alternative reality. He said I wasn't any litter. He said I was going out of my mind.
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A
Not going out of your mind. You're slowly and systematically being driven out of your mouth.
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B
Why?
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A
Why?
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B
And you thought I was being cruel.
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A
To you, keeping people away from making you a prisoner.
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B
So that's where this expression of gaslighting comes from. And that's what our European leaders have been doing. You know, when we can see that the Article 5 mutual defense clause is not really intact anymore, and Mark Ruta stands up there and says, article, Donald Trump remains committed to the NATO alliance, when everyone can see that's not the case, when Ursula von der Leyen gets up there and says the transatlantic alliance is strong and everyone can see that it's not strong. I mean, you know, gaslighting is the kind word for it. Lying would be the maybe more appropriate. Appropriate word. And at what point do citizens say, enough is enough? We've had it with these centrist European leaders lying to us, gaslighting us into convincing. You know, these are all Atlanticists. Also, don't forget Ursula Fondre Leyen is an Atlanticist. Friedrich Merz is an Atlanticist. Mark Ruta, this is an ideology of Atlanticism that has created our elite leaders on this continent, and their time should be over. I mean, this has failed. These people's ideology has failed. And. And if Europeans still keep electing these people, then they are signing their own death warrant as a sovereign continent.
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A
Indeed, this is where the gaslighting becomes really important, because in some cases, leaders have been saying things, and we have seen this in the last couple of years that make us, as Europeans, doubt what we are actually seeing in order to get us to accept dependencies, namely the dependency on the United States. And there's one that you mention in the book, book where Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, apparently kept to herself that Trump had told her during Trump's first term that he would not be coming to the defense of NATO countries. And that only emerged because a commissioner whom she subsequently essentially fired, Thierry Breton of France, that only emerged because he revealed it. Your point being here, that Europe's leaders have spent the last decade insisting, despite evidence to the contrary, that NATO is strong and that the U.S. remains committed. You write that they are still claiming it today, gaslighting all of us.
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B
There's a reason why these Atlanticist leaders immediately reverted to form when all of this started happening this year. Because they've been gaslighting us for decades. European politicians have had no political interest in being honest with their citizens about the level of dependence dependency on America. German politicians have always downplayed the American troop presence in their country. Italian politicians especially, I go through in the book some of these egregious cases of the American military soldiers getting away with crimes off base in Italy and Italian politicians always downplaying it. So politicians in Europe, these Atlanticist centrist politicians, have been gaslighting Europeans for decades about the extent to which these individual countries are not, not free, they are not independent. The European citizens have been given an illusion of independence. In reality, they are existing. They are living in an American protectorate system. And so when you come to the citizens and you say, look, you need to support EU federalism, you need to support the European Union because it will free you from America, your average citizen will say, what? Free me from America? I live in an independent country. I live in the independent country of Italy. I'm not under any domination of America, has nothing to do with me. Because they have been given this false sense of reality by their leaders for so many years.
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A
And we just had this situation where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn't come to Brussels for a NATO meeting. And questions about American security guarantees for Ukraine and Europe, of course, continue to remain unanswered. And yet here Mark Ruta, who is the Secretary General of NATO, says he has quotes full confidence in the way the Americans are conducting negotiations on their peace plan. And Rutte committed in June what you call in your book gaslighting of the highest order, where he said that he had no doubt Trump was committed to the NATO mutual defense pact. This is where the US Would come to Europe's rescue in the event of an attack by Russia, despite the fact that Trump had just said the opposite on his way to that meeting just.
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B
One hour earlier on the flight, just.
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A
One hour earlier on the flight on Air Force One. Rutte then now famously toe curlingly calls Trump Daddy saying Daddy sometimes has to make tough decisions like bombing Iran with Israel.
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B
Let him fight for about two, three minutes, then it's easy to stop him, and then Daddy has to sometimes use strong language. You have to use strong language.
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A
Even then, after all that sucking up, you write that Rutte still doesn't really get a firm commitment on mutual defense.
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B
Exactly. After, after all of this sucking up all year, after surrendering all of this money, all of this sovereignty, all of these promises to adjust EU law, they have walked away with nothing. There is no guarantee for Ukraine. In fact, they seem to have achieved the exact opposite here. And that line from Mark Rutte calling Donald Trump daddy has become famous here in Brussels. Now think tanks are using the term Daddy diplomacy describe the European leaders, and let's remember that also includes Keir Starmer in the UK describing their strategy of appeasing Trump, of mollifying him, of flattering him, and that the point is that Daddy diplomacy has failed. You know, I think that the most toe curling aspect of this is when Trump repeated it back in that interview with Politico where he said, quote, NATO calls me Daddy. He's listening to this. He also earlier said, said, they call me the president of Europe. And he meant that they call him that. Maybe in jest, but I think there's no doubt who the they is there. I think it's highly plausible that Mark Rutte told him that privately as a joke. But all jokes have a kernel of truth. And this has been across the board. Emmanuel Macron in France has also done this. Really, the only European leader who has refused to do this is Spain's Pedro Sanchez, who has now been isolated. He is public enemy number one for the Atlanticists here in Brussels. And he, he's paid a political price for standing up for Europe.
- [26:39]
A
And here, Dave, you offer some tough scenarios about why the Europeans must immediately, immediately start building up their own sovereign defenses. You say that the Trump administration or the US is eventually pulling soldiers out of Europe, whether Mark Ruthe wants to acknowledge that or not. And you really hammer this home that these troops are gonna go.
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B
Yes, I think that that should not make people think that the US is going to be isolationist or is not interested in continuing to control Europe. As long as those troops are here in Europe, it makes it harder to not protect Europe if Russia invades. Those troops being here do provide a security guarantee just by their presence and that's why the US wants to pull them out. But they still want to control the who. They want to control the arming of The European countries, they still want to be in charge of Europe's defense, but without being on the hook for actually defending Europe if it's invaded. So this isn't a question of the worst case scenario being that Trump leaves Europe alone, because clearly they're not leaving Europe alone. They're obsessed with Europe. The worst case scenario is that they meddle with European politics, trying to put their own preferred MAGA parties in government so that we have puppet states. And the very worst scenario is that the United States States divides Europe between themselves and Russia.
- [28:06]
A
Indeed. And there is this very, very dark scenario which you talk about in your book. Sort of a thought experiment, but I thought it was a useful one where there wouldn't be that much Europe could really do if Trump were to go ahead and take Greenland from Denmark in exchange for Putin taking the Baltics.
- [28:27]
B
Yeah, and history is precedent here, obviously. We've seen totalitarian regimes divide Europe between them before. Think with the level of collusion we see happening between the United States and Russia right now. It is not an impossible scenario that Europe is divided between two spheres of influence, maybe recreating the Iron Curtain, and there's very little Europe could do about that in that scenario. That's a very scary thought. Now, do I think that's likely? I hope it isn't. But Europeans need to be thinking about it as a possibility, and they need to have some way of resisting that if it were to happen. This is not an impossible scenario.
- [29:07]
A
And this prerogative of building up the European military, in a way, here's the problem. It is the wedge issue in Europe from hell. France, and in particular Emmanuel Macron have warned for years about the need to build up a European military. But the Eastern Europeans and Poland in particular, they don't want any limit on the amount of US Weaponry that they can buy. And where you land here, Dave, in your book, is very interesting. You say it's very hard to admit that the French were right and that the pro NATO Atlanticists, those who would keep buying from the US they mustn't be listened to anymore. You're very, very strong on this.
- [29:51]
B
Yes. It's been personally frustrating to me that over the past three years, we in Western Europe have had to admit that we were wrong and Eastern Europeans were right about Russian aggression. And the polls and the Belgian Baltic people have been keen to remind us that at every minute that you were wrong, you were wrong. Especially pointing to France. The degree to which Western Europe didn't recognize Russia as an adversary, I think is exaggerated by Eastern Europeans. But in any. In any event, people with humility in Western Europe have been able to admit that they were wrong on that front. I have not met a single Polish or Baltic person who has been able to admit that they were wrong about American dependence over all these decades. When they blocked efforts to have EU defense. Those efforts that were blocked by Warsaw, by the Baltic countries, and by London at American command, Washington insisted they used their friends within the EU in order to block those efforts. That was wrong. We are now in a very dangerous situation thanks to Poland, thanks to the Baltics, and thanks to the UK And I haven't heard any of them admit that they were wrong about that.
- [30:56]
A
And the thing is, Dave, Europe does feel trapped. It's trapped by this need to keep the US Somewhat onside because US Support is so important in helping Ukraine to fight Russia right now. Europeans do want to be able to continue to buy US Arms for Ukraine's defense and give Ukraine access to US Intelligence. And even as Trump periodically pooh, poohs the idea that he'll respect Article 5 of the NATO treaty, there are still something like 80,000 troops, US troops in Europe, who are seen as a kind of guarantee of US Involvement precisely in the event of an attack by Russia. So it's just a very difficult situation.
- [31:39]
B
It is, because actually, we're having this exact same discussion about Ukraine. Now, the reason why Europeans want American troops based in Ukraine is exactly to provide the same security guarantee that they've been providing for European countries. And this is why America doesn't want to do it. And I think you can be somewhat sympathetic to that argument. I think you would have had the same hesitancy from Joe Biden because you're then just extending the security guarantee into an even more dangerous area of Europe. The idea is that Russia won't attack a country where American troops are based because that risks a war with the United States troops, U.S. troops.
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A
In a way, that's the true NATO frontline.
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B
Yes.
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A
Yeah. And, you know, the problem is lack of time. It's going to take 10 to 15 years to fill this military vacuum. The technology, the kit, even with the best will in the world that would replace the United States. And Europe may not have that much time. But your conclusion with the military question is that you've just got to start somewhere.
- [32:39]
B
You have to start somewhere. And I think also we can't delude ourselves into thinking that the US Is going to defend Europe. It looks very unlikely at this point. It may be. It will depend on the circumstances. If and when Russia invades the European Union. I do think that the military figures in Europe who are warning about the likelihood of that in the next year so are correct. I know not everyone agrees on that. Whenever I point out to people saying this on social media, I get a lot of pushback with people saying, oh, the politicians are lying to us about Russia wanting to invade. They'll never invade us. They can barely take Ukraine. Why would they invade the eu? Just as an anecdote, I had one conversation with an Italian person over the summer. He was saying, oh, I don't agree with all this support for Ukraine. And I was saying, well, the idea is that we have to support Ukraine, otherwise Putin's next step will be invading the European Union. He said, oh, that's ridicul. Will never invade the European Union. That's crazy. And I said, well, I think there's a very real possibility that he wants to invade the Baltics. And he said, well, maybe they'll invade the Baltics, but they'll never invade the European Union.
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A
Right.
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B
And that's where we are in terms of European knowledge of what the EU is, which is a whole separate conversation. But also a lot of people in Italy and Spain don't feel that the people in the Baltic states are one of them, one of us as Europeans. And that unfortunately points to a real failure in creating a pan European identity entity.
- [34:10]
A
Dave. Energy and ownership of the eu when it comes to energy. You explain how the Atlantic Ocean had been sort of a block on North American energy exports to Europe through, say, pipelines. But that's changed now that the U.S. is exporting so much liquefied natural gas away, or LNG, by ship. And you explain that this trade has helped Europe pivot away from Russian gas since the full scale invasion of Ukraine. But you also explain how this risks turning into another European dependency, this time on the US with all manner of negative consequences.
- [34:48]
B
Yeah. In the book, I trace how the European dependency on Russian energy developed starting during the Cold War. Actually, even for Western European countries, you know, the, the energy dependency on Russia, it's the one that European leaders like to talk about the most. Right. It's the only one that they can acknowledge, but it's only one. Europe is only dependent on Russia for energy, or was, I should say, whereas the dependency on America is multifaceted. But that dependency actually developed during the Cold War, starting with Austria. Austria was the first one to break the line in starting to set up pipelines. Then West Germany during the Austpolitik period, then France, then Italy. It went on the US obviously didn't like this, was discouraging it, but there wasn't really anything they could do. The reason that it started in the 1970s was because of the lack of confidence in the Middle Eastern oil, because of what happened with the oil shocks in the 70s. And so the US didn't have the ability to export energy to Europe instead of the Russian energy for two reasons. They didn't have a surplus of oil. Oil can be shipped on boats, but gas, gas formerly could not. Then they developed the technology to liquefy gas, what's called liquefied natural gas, lng, send it across the ocean and re gasify it at regasification facilities at ports. Now, because of the shale gas boom in the US and this new LNG technology, the US is able to export energy to Europe to replace the Russian energy. Energy for Europe, there's lots of different options to replace that Russian energy. Already a lot of lies about this in the US right now, but Europe has mostly phased out Russian energy. The proportion was 40% before the war. The proportion is 11% now. And what's remaining is actually kind of secret Russian LNG coming in from other sources, and Hungary and Slovakia, which have set a policy of continuing their Russian energy dependence. But now the US is trying to push for its own lng, really trying to extort Europe into importing its own LNG instead of using other solutions like increasing green energy or importing from other countries like Libya, like Norway, Algeria, et cetera.
- [37:06]
A
And let's talk a little bit about that extortion. Over the summer, the EU promised to pay $750 billion to the US in energy purchases. A lot of LNG is what's expected here in order to avoid higher tariffs on a range of European exports. That pledge was part of the July 27 surrender deal, as you call it in the book, that European Commission President von der Leyen signed with Donald Trump at his golf course in Scotland.
- [37:43]
B
A neutral grounds for sure.
- [37:45]
A
This being the deal that prompted Iraqe Garcia Perez, the head of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, to blast von der Leyen for burying Europe's strategic autonomy under a golf course. Ustes fuel Campo de golf. Los informes Dragi y Leta y nuestra Autonomia Estrategica.
- [38:07]
B
Just like his ex wife.
- [38:10]
A
Just like Trump's ex wife, who is in fact buried under a golf course. Under a golf course, but not in Scotland. Ivana Trump, the first wife of President Trump, has been laid to rest in an unusual location near the first hole at President Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Operating a cemetery on the golf course will allow President Trump to avoid paying taxes on the land. And this golf course surrender deal, it was part of what prompted Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central bank and former Italian Prime Minister, to say in August in Rimini that 2025 was the year that quashed any illusion that economic power alone would be able to guarantee any form of geopolitical power. So what happened in Scotland was not just a story about Ursula von der Leyen conceding that the United States would be able to impose a 15% tariff on exports from Europe, but also there was this extortion, if we can call it that, about energy, and not just energy.
- [39:20]
B
Then also there was an additional amount of promised investments in the US economy, altogether adding up to $1.35 trillion. Now, the people excusing, making excuses for these concessions make two arguments. They are similar to concessions made by Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada. And the argument is, well, these are nonsense numbers, so don't worry about it. They're just placating him by saying, we'll, we'll invest a million gazillion dollars in economy, but it's not actually going to happen. The Trump administration has made it clear that they do expect it to happen. And maybe, maybe they know that the actual number won't be reached, but they have. If they don't get this money delivered to them in tributary fashion, like a good vassal state would deliver to its imperial overlord, then there will be consequences. Donald Trump said he will kick in 35% tariffs on the EU if this money isn't flowing into the US the other excuse they make when it comes to the LNG is that, oh, we need to be doing this anyway because we need to replace the Russian energy. But that's not true. Actually. There have been studies after study showing that you can replace that Russian energy through a mix of renewable energy and imports from other countries. In order to receive all this lng, the EU is going to have to spend millions of euros on building the LNG import terminals. That's not part of the 750.
- [40:41]
A
750 billion, yes.
- [40:43]
B
Once you build that infrastructure, both the regasification facilities at the, the ports and the pipelines, connecting the ports to the general pipeline system, you have to use it. So the idea that this is temporary is nonsense, which the Commission is trying to say. This is a temporary measure. If you build the infrastructure, it's not temporary, it's permanent. For decades.
- [41:05]
A
Yeah, this promise to buy all that US LNG because of the infrastructure implications, the regasification ports in Europe and so on and so forth. What you write is that the US will end up being Europe's only external natural gas supplier within a few years. Years. That's number one. And then number two, it would imply a really long term dependency, imperiling hopes that renewable energy and efficiency improvements could really kick in.
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, there have been studies saying that the renewable energy alone could replace Russian gas imports. That's not pie in the sky thinking. That's borne out by the evidence because we have a lot of renewable energy in Europe right now. Even I remember at the time of the NATO summit in 202018 when Trump was railing against Germany's importing of Russian gas. Even at that time, Germany was using more renewable energy than Russian gas at that time. So it, it, it's there, but it will disappear if Europe is forced to import this LNG and use that.
- [42:11]
A
Dave, the environment, climate, climate and ownership of the EU by the US A question sort of comes up in your book. Does the US now have a veto over EU environmental legislation? And this is really important in the context of an EU law, now a very famous one, despite its very, very jargon like name, which is the Corporate Sustainable Due Diligence Directive, and for the real aficionados, the csdd. This law requires companies to prevent and mitigate negative human rights and environmental impacts in their own operations, their subsidiaries, their entire global value chains. And it has faced blowback from European industrial interests like Total energies, but also US titans like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow, Koch Industries, JP Morgan. Such was the opposition in the US that a bill was even introduced in the Senate to quote, prohibit entities integral to the national interests of the United States from participating in any foreign sustainability due diligence regulation, including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive of the European Union and for other purposes. Now that bill in the Senate never got passed, but that gives you an indication of just how motivated US corporate interests are when it comes to steamrolling European environmental legislation.
- [43:51]
B
And they won because the CSDDD was gutted. And it was specifically listed in that surrender deal in July, along with several pieces of legislation that the joint statement after the deal between the EU and US listed as items that the EU was going to revisit because of the law. It was a clear offer in that deal to say, okay, we as the EU are going to change our legislation because you, the US asked for was.
- [44:21]
A
Part of the surrender deal. At the Scottish Golf course and the csdd, this legislation has been very dramatically watered down. There are fewer companies covered by it and there is no liability for violations.
- [44:36]
B
It's essentially gone. The original intent of the law, the new version does not even resemble what was intended.
- [44:46]
A
There's been a lot of work done by somo. This is a non profit group which got a hold of a bunch of leaked documents showing how a so called competitiveness roundtable brought together companies like Chevron, Exxon and Koch Industries to get this sustainability law massively diluted. These companies pushed to involve the far right in Europe in efforts to undermine the law and they mobilized non EU countries to get involved. To quote from the SOMO report on this SOMO being so M. O, they're based in the Netherlands, quote, EU officials appear not to have known what they were up against. But the documents obtained by SOMO show a high level of organization and strategizing with a clear facilitation Teneo, a US Public relations and consultancy company, end quote. And we've also seen White House spokesperson Caroline Leavitt openly talking about a US Pressure campaign against that law. So this seems a textbook example of again US corporate interests getting MAGA in the US and neo fascist and ultra conservative parties in the EU involved to undermine environmental protection protection.
- [45:58]
B
But they've also had willing collaborators among Europe's center right, the European People's Party. So as you know, last year we had this competitiveness report delivered by Mario Draghi. It made a lot of recommendations saying the single market wasn't complete. It was saying that the problem is that companies have to deal with 27 different markets and that the solution is to break down national barriers. How did the conservative governments in Europe react to that? By focusing only on one part of the report which is looking, looking at red tape, bureaucracy for companies that is inhibiting Europe's competitiveness. They don't want to talk about the report's recommendations in terms of making ever closer union and all of this. They only want to do the competitive.
- [46:38]
A
Or debt pooling or creating larger pools of money to do the kind of massive investment that a real European industrial policy would require.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah. And German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz has cherry picked from this report showing up at the European Council over the summer saying that basically reducing red tape is the number one concern that Europe should be dealing with right now. And so all of this appeasement to Trump has been wrapped up in this so called competitiveness agenda, really muddying the waters. And a commission official told Politico a couple months ago that this was all pre planned. This was a result of last year's European Parliament election, even before Trump was elected. We were going to try to water down laws or make Europe more competitive by reducing bureaucracy. But we're going to present this to Trump as if we're doing it for him in order to placate him. But the argument by this unnamed person at the Commission was that, but don't worry, we're doing this because we want to. They can tell themselves that all they want. It's very, very suspicious that Europe happens to be doing exactly what the US is demanding of them. And our lawmakers are convincing themselves and gaslighting all of us that they're doing this because of a competitiveness agenda. Europe thought of this all on its own. I mean that beggars belief.
- [47:58]
A
And there are other examples of US pressure, notably in the case of green shipping rules. National delegates from Europe at the International Maritime Organization meeting in London in October were reportedly threatened. And this is something that you put in your book as, as well.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah, that's very scary, the implications of that. There were reports that the European negotiators at that IMO conference in London were threatened with military repercussions if they continued pushing for a mechanism to control the emissions of boats of shipping shipping on the seas.
- [48:35]
A
In that case with the International Maritime Organization. There were also reports of threats of family members of European delegates kind of losing their visas, I guess, visas to visit the United States. It's super shocking. It's an example of the Trump goonocracy undermining global climate policy to promote fossil fuel interests, to promote American shipping interests. And actually in your book you also flick at tactics that could be coming next year in 2026 when it comes to something called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. This is the EU's tool, CBAM, to put a fair price on carbon emitted during the production of carbon intensive goods that are entering the EU and to encourage cleaner industrial production in non EU countries. So what are we expecting?
- [49:27]
B
Yeah, so this border levy, it's called the CBAM for short, is kicking in on 1st of January 2026 and it is an essential component of the bedrock of European climate policy, which is the EU Emissions trading system. The reason it's needed is actually because when the EU ETS was set up, it was assumed that the US was also setting up a cap and trade system. That's because in 2008 both presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama were promising one. So the EU put theirs in place, assuming, well, you've got Both parties in their platform saying they're going to introduce their own cap and trade system. So we can confidently say that this, the system will be built around interacting with the US system. Well, Barack Obama ended up being the one elected because the Republican Congress set an agenda of rejecting everything that he put forward. They rejected the thing that they themselves had proposed in their campaign in 2008. And Obama quickly threw away the climate legislation because he didn't want to spend political capital on it. He wanted to preserve political capital for health care. That left the EU ETS all on its own. And we've been dealing with the repercussions of it that for 15 years. The problem is if European companies are faced with the price on carbon while American companies are not, they face unfair competition from the American companies and from companies all over the world. So that's the idea to deal with that. So far we've had these free allowances given out within the system to carbon intensive industries. Those are being phased out over the next years as the CBAM is brought in in order to maintain competitiveness and also crucially to prevent carbon leakage. That's the phenomenon for where industry would leave Europe and go to other places in order to avoid the costs of doing business in Europe because of the price on carbon. If the US is successful in killing or delaying seabam, it destroys the EU ets. That destroys all EU climate policy because the entirety of the EU's climate work has been around the EU ETS. If the EU ETS collapse, global climate efforts are gone.
- [51:41]
A
Tech, I want you to read the opening paragraph to chapter six of your book.
- [51:47]
B
Sure. So this chapter is in the economic dominance section. If you live in Europe, you use American digital services every day. You wake up in the morning and turn off your alarm on your Android or Apple phone. You open the Microsoft or Mac operating system on your computer. You send some correspondence on Gmail. You log into Facebook or Instagram to post a photo of your breakfast. You order a product for delivery on Amazon. At work, you use a Microsoft operating system and you Google the topics you're searching for. You order an Uber to take you home from work. At night, you veg out on the couch watching Netflix or Disney before streaming some YouTube videos. As you drift off to sleep, all of that data is being stored on the clouds of American companies and your information is still going to the United States despite a new EU law, the General Data Protection Regulation, forbidding such transfers.
- [52:39]
A
So there's this question about why none of these companies is European. But this is Also raising huge questions about security risk for Europe and Europeans, including their personal privacy. And if the US cuts off access, then Europe really has no backup.
- [52:58]
B
Exactly. So we got a little taste of this when Amazon's cloud services went down a couple months ago. It was pretty brief, but you know, all of a sudden we couldn't access, a lot of people couldn't access their banks, I couldn't access my home alarm system. It was a little taste of what could happen. Now that was an accident, but I think the question was is what if some of these services are shut off on purpose? You could totally disrupt the entire European economy.
- [53:24]
A
And you share the story of Karim Khan, the top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. What's that story and what does that tell us?
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, so there are sanctions now on these top ICC judges because of the arrest warrant that's gone out for Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. And these justices have reported that they, they can't just, they can't do basic services, they can't open a bank account, they can't email, they can't. They're getting a little taste of what all of us could experience if the United States decides to shut off these services to entire countries. Right now, these are European individuals being sanctioned and they're finding that they cannot live their daily lives. What if the sanctions are applied to entire countries, the countries that the US Government apparently thinks are committing civilizational suicide? What if this is applied to all of France, all of Germany, all of the European Union? What would we do?
- [54:21]
A
Another factor here is that there's no real subtle framework to keep transferring all this data on these apps and in these cloud services to the US While being compliant with EU privacy law. This is a constant argument, but it's about to get worse again, I think.
- [54:36]
B
Yeah, this has been a back and forth between the us, Between Brussels and Washington for years now. And there's still no resolution on this. Because what's happening is the EU passes a law saying that the privacy of users data needs to be respected, but the data is all being sent to the United States. The United States is refusing to abide by the law. Courts in Europe say, well, if the US isn't enacting these privacy guarantees, then the data can't be sent to the U.S. but Europe doesn't have the ability to provide process the data. It has to be sent to the US because there is no European alternative. And so then they have to invent some kind of fudge. Eventually the courts say no. That also doesn't work. And we've just been in this constant dance.
- [55:19]
A
And now you have a situation where the Trump administration is destroying parts of the American judicial system. And that is going to raise new questions about the protection of data in the United States and the judicial safeguards.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah, detail about that will be there. This so called Schrems 2 system that was designed to replace Shrems 1, which the court found didn't adequately protect users data. And because the committee that's supposed to be guaranteeing this has now had interference from the Trump administration, it is inevitable that the courts will rule that this is no longer valid. The question is, you know, Trems 2 was designed by the Biden administration to try to work with the Europeans to develop this fig leaf. The Trump administration is not going to develop a few fig leave. So what happens then?
- [56:07]
A
And I should point out here, now that we're talking about tech, that there's also the involvement of highly sensitive companies from the military and security point of view. Companies like Musk's StarLink, Anduril, the AI and robotics defense contractor, which has had funding from Peter Thiel's investment vehicle. Thiel being the Trump supporter who cast doubt on democracy. Also there's the company Palantir, the data defense company that Thiel himself founded. There's this project led by a professor, Professor Francesca Bria, which is called the Authoritarian Stack. And that project finds that there's a real and present danger for European governments that are relying on these companies. These tech companies run by American oligarchs whose ideology often openly undermines democracy. Anduril, for example, is working with Germany's Rheinmetall in getting US designed drones and missiles integrated into European military platforms. Palantir this year struck a partnership with NATO to use Palantir's Maven smart system to assist in battlefield operations using large language models and machine learning. The thinking is that this is very problematic from a dependency point of view because once you go with this US tech and you do make this point in the book Transformation back to European Sovereignty, because of the standards that are set and the kind of path dependencies, it's probably irreversible.
- [57:44]
B
Yeah, you have a few cities that are trying to do this because it's not just us as individuals who are depending on American technology, it's also our governments and our government offices. So you have some cities that are trying to declare themselves sovereign cities by switching to open source software instead of American software. Lyon is one example in France, I believe. But it's proving extremely difficult because Once you set up entire systems on this American technology, it's very hard to switch from them. I have read a lot of studies that say the difficulty is exaggerated and there's. There are vested interests that want to make you think that it's more complicated than it is. I don't know. I haven't tried to do this myself, but it is. I know that the cities that are trying to do this are reporting that it's been very difficult.
- [58:30]
A
And the EU has been working on its suite of tech regulations for the last few years, but those are now under assault. And again, that's been part of the U.S. story. There have been interventions, including now Vice President J.D. vance saying U.S. support for NATO would be at stake stake if Europe enforced its digital rules against the likes of Elon Musk. But then there's also US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who's tried to use the lure of easing steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe if it reconsiders its digital rules. I mean, this is. What do we call this?
- [59:07]
B
It's extortion. That's what we call it. But you know what I trace in the book? That these efforts to, to use American pressure to adjust EU legislation aren't necessarily new, but those instances were pretty rare. Now it's every day. Never before has there been an explicit connection from the US Government between the military protectorate and EU policy. That is a first for the Trump administration to be directly threatening that. So a lot of this stuff has been implicit for many decades. Decades. And you know, Europeans are kidding themselves if they think that they had sovereignty before this. I mean, they are. They have existed for decades in a system which is dependent on America. And so if America steps in and says, you need to change this law, you change the law. There is not real sovereignty, particularly when you're looking at individual member states. That being said, the US has been somewhat, we could say, of a benevolence, benevolent behemoth and trying not to do that too frequently up until now. Now it is so flagrant that you can only conclude now that every piece of EU legislation needs to be run by Washington. And Washington says yay or nay on anything we pass here.
- [60:28]
A
This is a great conversation to be having with you, Dave. Not only have we known each other for quite a while as, as Brussels based correspondence with American backgrounds, there's an.
- [60:39]
B
Irony here that it's two Americans here discussing this topic. I'm very aware of that and I was very aware that some people might react badly that I, as an American, am writing this book I do like to point out that in both of our cases we have lived half our lives in America and half our lives in Europe. It's not like I just parachuted in and started diagnosing all of Europe's problems like some American journalists have a tendency to do in this town. This is based on 20 years working here in Europe and covering these topics.
- [61:09]
A
I do think it's incredibly useful to be diagnosing some of the pathologies that afflict Europe's ability to be a more self confident project, the EU's ability to really become a supernational entity that can be a model for the 21st century and to look at that through the lens of imperial power emanating from the United States.
- [61:39]
B
And it's something I talk about in the last chapter of the book where look, obviously there's a lot of things I really dislike about my home country. But one difference that I've noticed that I think Europeans could learn from or benefit from is just the self confidence gap. And this is often said by Americans very pejoratively about Europeans, and I don't mean it to come off this way, but Europeans would benefit from having some more self confidence and believing in themselves. The tools are all there to solve these problems. The European Union gives Europeans the ability to be sovereign and to fight back against this American dominance. The problem is that Europeans have not wanted to use those tools, they've shied away from it. And I think that's a question of a lacking self confidence. And that's what we need to build here.
- [62:22]
A
We, we also get into the cultural dimension, the idea that Europeans are somehow not really as aware as you argue they should be about this ownership that they're subjected to by the United States. And for you, there's a story behind this that kind of goes back to Hollywood.
- [62:46]
B
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot written about Europe's military dependency, some written about Europe's economic dependency. But this question of cultural dependency is really the new aspect of my book because I have not seen anyone really look at this in a systemic way. Because the argument I'm making is that the cultural dependency, which is a big focus in France with the phrase cultural imperialism. It's a phrase I've tried to avoid in this book because I think it comes with a lot of baggage. But I'm explicitly linking the cultural depth dependence to political decisions. And that's why I start out with the cultural dependence as the first section of the book because it's the oldest. I actually trace it from the end of World War I, when the Hollywood studios colluded with the US State Department in order to have a monopoly on film screenings in Europe, because obviously the film industry in Europe had been decimated by the war. And the film industry in Europe, even though it was the early leader in cinema, which I traced in the book, was not able to recover that. That's something that dates from 19, from the 1920s. And then you had the big whammy in the 1950s, first with movies, then with television, then with music, and then with social media and also with news media. Those four areas are the areas in which America really culturally dominates in Europe.
- [64:05]
A
You know, you really do explore how the European mind is owned by the Americans through these different vehicles, through these different vectors, through the news media, through movies, through even video gaming, what have you. And you make the argument that, in fact, it's kind of become so ubiquitous that people are lulled into thinking, well, how could United States possibly be against us?
- [64:40]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, when you think about it, Europeans are inundated by American culture from the time that they are born, their entire lives. There is no way that that could not have a psychological effect on people. And it's something that I think is very subconscious. When I do talk to Europeans about this, you get the impression that subconsciously, many people almost feel like they live in the United States, that they. They are, or at least on the outer fringes of an American empire. And I think that's what's made it so hard for Europeans to accept that the US Is now a threat. Because there is some psychological dissonance going on here. Because if you're sitting at home every night and watching Friends reruns and listening to Beyonce, you kind of don't understand how that same culture, that same place that has nurtured you from childhood, could suddenly mean you harm, could suddenly be your. Your enemy. You know, they talk about US Elections as if they are elections for this continent. And in many ways they are. But nobody stops and questions, wait, why is that? And if they start talking about, oh, what do you think the Democrats should do in Iowa in seat 38B or whatever I say, I don't want to talk about this with you. Let's talk about what you can do here in Europe to make these decisions by American voters less impactful on you. Let's talk about your national politics. Oh, I don't really follow it. Let's talk about EU politics. Yeah, for sure. They don't follow that. You know, Europeans certainly know more about American politics than they know about EU level politics and in many instances they know more about American politics than they know about their own country's politics or their own country's governance. That's a serious problem. And I think that if we have any hope of liberating the European mind from American control, Europeans need to start paying attention to, to Europe, paying attention to their neighbors. That's both in terms of news and in terms of culture.
- [66:27]
A
And this is where you make your argument that in fact Europe should, and the French in particular, embrace English in order to hasten the creation of a more sort of European identity through cultural products, everything from TV series to music and indeed news media.
- [66:51]
B
Yeah, and this is the part of the book I think many French people will not like because France has led this quixotic crusade against the English language here in Brussels, in the EU institutions, but also more widely in Europe for many, many years. But it's really done harm actually because, you know, 52% of EU citizens can speak English. That's incredible. That's a first for this continent. You know, people talk about, about French being the lingua franca in previous eras, only for the elite. I mean, we're talking about just the kings and queens and senior politicians and academics who could speak French. Right now. We have a common working language for common people. That's really important and it's really important in terms of culture. And so I argue in the book that the French, although, you know, like we already talked about, the French, have been very foresighted in a lot of this, dauntless, these dominance issues. But I think that their methods of trying to combat American cultural domination have been misguided because they focused so much on the linguistic question, just fighting the English language, when actually the English language is an opportunity to create real pan European culture. Right now, pan European culture is American culture. The only culture that Europeans have in common with each other is what they all collectively consume from America. America we need to try, and this is one of the recommendations I make in the final part of the book where I outline the steps to gain EU independence. We need to make European culture more European. I'm not saying we should boycott American culture or that we should completely exercise it from the European body politic. That is A, not possible, but B, not even desirable. We want cultural interchange. It's good. What we don't want is a one way flow only from America America out through its various tentacles into each European country. We want flow between European countries. And that can only happen by using Europe's common language, which is English.
- [68:42]
A
What are you going to say to those who say, oh, you know, Dave, he's just a European federalist. And all of these recommendations are aimed at dissolving national identities. He's even getting rid of our languages now and creating some sort of strengthened European Union that would allow them to say, okay, this is an EU superstate. We don't want to go back to some sort of totalitarian structure where we're ruled from a foreign capital. That's very resonant, actually, for a lot of people in Eastern Europe. They relate to that kind of language. One can foresee some of this backlash to some of your suggestions. Suggestions. And I'm sure that you have retorts.
- [69:26]
B
Yes, at the ready. I am ready with my retorts. Because, yes, of course, I get this counterpunch off. And look, at first and foremost, I would say, yes, I am a federalist. I don't shy away from the F word like so many people do. I believe that federalism is the only possible way to make Europe sovereign and independent from the United States and Russia. But I also think that we can build our own European version of federalism. Federalism or Confederalism, if that makes people more comfortable. Where we preserve national identities, where we preserve national cultures. You know, states have a checkered and largely unsuccessful history of attempts to erase culture. Right. So even if we wanted to do that, we probably couldn't. And I certainly don't want to do that. If these national cultures are so weak that they could be erased by simply having a federal structure in Europe, then they weren't very strong to begin with. I think they are strong, actually, and that they can withstand a federalization process where we collaborate with each other politically, where we share with each other culturally, but everyone still keeps their own culture and their own identity.
- [70:31]
A
The fear mongering is way overdone.
- [70:33]
B
Yeah, but the other point to make is we live in a globalized world. This is happening either way because right now those national cultures are being erased by American culture because young people are now speaking English with each other. They're using English words. You have people consuming American social media every day. They're hearing English every day. I mean, wake up. It's not the European Union that's a threat to national cultures. America is a threat to national cultures.
- [70:58]
A
Which the French far right will.
- [71:01]
B
They probably agree with that.
- [71:12]
A
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