NATO is desperate on Russia, and delusional on China

NATO is desperately delusional on Russia, and getting more so on China, argue political economists Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson. With Glenn Diesen, they discuss Ukraine, Europe, Jens Stoltenberg.

The Western powers in NATO are desperately delusional on Russia, and getting more so on China, argue political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson.

They are joined by scholar Glenn Diesen to discuss the war in Ukraine, disaster in Europe, and farewell speech by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

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RADHIKA DESAI:  Hello and welcome to the 34th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I'm Radhika Desai.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  And I'm Michael Hudson.

RADHIKA DESAI:  And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weisser.

The world is poised at a critical juncture. It appears as if, notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts of the West, of the US, of NATO, and of the most mystifyingly suicidal governments that hold sway over the capitals of Western Europe, history is being made by those who resist them. The Palestinian people and the Russian Federation are presenting these forces with fait accomplis.

There is increasingly talk in the normally slavishly militarist Western media about the need for peace in both Ukraine and Gaza, a negotiated peace based on talking with the very enemies, Palestine and Iran and Russia, that they have been assiduously demonizing for the past year, in the case of Gaza, and for the past two years or past decade, if not longer, in the case of Russia.

In this context, the victory plan that President Zelensky seeks to lay before the President and Congress in Washington can only appear absurd. This is the context in which we propose to discuss a very interesting document, not because it is particularly important, not because it's likely to make history, but precisely because it is such a neatly packaged inventory of the worst delusions of the West, precisely the delusions that are being dispelled by Russia and Palestine and Iran, but precisely also the delusions that have brought the world so close to nuclear war, a war that the world can dodge only if Europe and the West reject these delusions.

I'm referring to the speech, widely dubbed as a farewell speech, of outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The speech focuses on listing five lessons of the last decade of his leadership of NATO, the very decade during which the absurd strategy of the West has incubated and hatched.

These lessons, if learned by the Europeans and they are directed chiefly at the Europeans, would tie Europe to the very side which is losing, the very side that seems hell-bent on provoking or starting nuclear war, and of course, the very side that essentially implies the self-destruction of Europe.

It can only leave the continent dying on that most unstrategic and unrewarding of hills.

To seek an understanding of the provenance and character of this viewpoint on the sources of such power that it has, and of course, of its contradictions and limits, we could do little better than discuss the five lessons that Stoltenberg proposes and expose their absurdity.

And to help us do this, Michael and I are today joined by someone who is in a small number of those who is most qualified to do so, Professor Glenn Diesen. Welcome, Glenn.

GLENN DIESEN:  Thank you so much for inviting me on, and it's good to see the both of you again.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Same here. We're really looking forward to this dialogue that we will have.

Glenn, as many of you know, is a Norwegian political scientist who has distinguished himself as a leading critic of Europe's recent political choices in the Ukraine conflict and in the run-up to it.

Glenn is a prolific writer of many books, and recently, that is since the outbreak of the special military operations in Ukraine over the last couple of years, he has published three. The first is Russophobia, Propaganda and International Politics. The second is called the Think Tank Racket. I love this. Managing the Information War with Russia. And the third is called the Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order.

So I thought basically that in this conversation, we'll just take each of the lessons in turn and discuss them and comment on them. But first, Glenn, perhaps you might want to start us off by telling us something about Stoltenberg as he was your former prime minister, the former prime minister of Norway.

I ask for these personal details because it gives us an insight into how the Atlanticist apparatchiks of Europe are made and honed. So Glenn, please start.

GLENN DIESEN:  Well, he's an interesting character.

When in his youth, he was actually leading a youth party which called for Norway to leave NATO. So he's taken a bit of a turn since then. He's also, yeah, obviously quite anti-Russian hawk, but he's quite ideological in his mindset. As we see from his speeches, everything is a struggle between good and evil, in which the security competition is not really an issue because it's simply good guys with weapons, which are good versus the bad guys with weapons, which is not good.

And the problem of having this good versus evil view tends to be that diplomacy is perceived as being dangerous because it legitimizes Putin. Negotiations is a reward for Russia, an appeasement with all these comparisons to the 1930s.

Instead, if it's a struggle between good and evil, we always see that peace depends on defeating evil, which is why Stoltenberg is renowned for his statements that weapons are the way to peace, which is almost a copyright infringement of George Orwell.

Anyway, see, yeah, he was our prime minister. And what is interesting that he led then Norway when we were bombing Libya, and there was some interesting controversy at the time because he was reaching out to the Swedes, which weren't part of NATO then, arguing that this was a good exercise for the air force to be able to join in on this bombing campaign. He later tried to correct this statement, but overall, this is a very warlike prime minister.

And for a small country of 5 million, I think Norway dropped about 10% of the bombs on Libya, so it's quite significant.

But he was rewarded for it as well, as he was then given, after being the prime minister of Norway, he became the general secretary of NATO from 2014 to 2024.

And this is kind of the model that you have. If you want to become the general secretary of NATO, you have to show your loyalty to the empire effectively.

This is why it's interesting now that Jens Stoltenberg is stepping down. You have now the former prime minister of Netherlands, Mark Rutte, who will take over. And again, I follow the Dutch media quite a lot as well, as I'm also a dual citizen, I'm also a Dutch citizen. And there the Dutch media says the same, that in his last months, his main objective was then to give full support to Israel, be very hawkish on Russia, and of course, join in on the bombing of Yemen. And this was described in the Dutch media as him getting himself and his own people into this international institutions, the Atlanticist. So NATO, obviously, with the NATO secretary general post being the top position.

Otherwise, I don't want to go for too long, but it's also quite interesting that he fits into the whole ideological leanings of NATO. For example, during the Afghanistan war, in which he presided over much of this war, half of it, you had CIA documents being leaked, saying that the best way to sell this war to the Western audience, which is getting a little bit cold on the war, was to frame it as a war for women's rights.

So he wrote an op-ed with Angelina Jolie to give it a bit of a freedom fighter, a Hollywood flair to it, in which the whole argument was, NATO is the main fighter for women's rights.

So it's, yeah, you kind of see where this is going. And I think this is the main way I would describe him, this ideological bent he has. As he also made a statement to the Norwegian media, he said that, you know, the world is becoming more dangerous and NATO is becoming stronger without recognizing that there's a clear link here, a causality that is, when peace breaks out, military alliances tends to lose their value. When you have war, that's when you find your internal unity and cooperation.

So he had an interesting interview, by the way, because for 10 years, there was not a critical question to him from the media. Every question was how he stays so brave. You know, the questions we give to Zelensky and now two days ago, he had the first critical interview, which kind of shocked him. He asked, when is it over? When can it go? Very uncomfortable, because they asked questions such as, why stay in Afghanistan 10 years after they knew it was lost? And why prolong the Ukraine war when you know this war is also lost? What is the point of this? And why do you label China as the main threat to world's peace when they haven't fought a war in more than four decades? And comparing it to the US, and there was no real reaction. It was just, you know, this is our club. We are the good guys. They're the bad guys. As long as we win, there will be peace. So this is kind of the mindset, I guess.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Yeah, and Michael, please come in if you want to add something. But I did have a further question for you, Glenn. You've written a book about think tanks and their role in creating this disinformation. And on top of that, of course, we know that one of the ways in which the United States kind of is essentially getting Europeans to practically commit suicide is through its hold on their elites. So can you sort of shed some light on how these sort of things relate specifically to the life paths and careers of people like Rutte or Stoltenberg or other such people?

GLENN DIESEN: Well, I guess it's overall, it's the leader. If you're unpopular in domestic politics, you can still make it big in international politics.

You see in Europe, you have people like Wanderlein. They wanted her out of their own country, but she can get the top position in the EU. Look at Kaya Kalas. She was the prime minister of Estonia, also at the bottom of the opinion polls in their own country. But her fierce anti-Russian sentiments and obedience to Washington ensures that she would end up in the foreign policy position of the European Union. Now she's sitting there calling for breaking up Russia, arguing that we cannot have diplomacy with Russians because they're war criminals. So this is kind of the logic.

And well, in terms of the think tanks, I often describe them as being a symptom of a market fundamentalism to some extent, because it's effectively foreign policy up for sales to market forces. Because think tanks tend to respond to the problems of policymakers. They need to know a little bit about everything, which elected officials, they don't know everything. So think tanks, the argument for them is that they connect the officials with the expert community. So they produce information analysis and policy recommendations.

But the problem is, once you control information and that little network of people, this is huge power, which is why who would want to buy into this? Who has an interest in buying a market share? And of course, the main financer of all of these think tanks is the military industrial complex, essentially allowing them to buy foreign policy.

And as a result, we see that military solutions is the first choice to most conflicts.

And if you look at Afghanistan with Karzai, he was trying to make peace with Taliban. The Americans said, no, no, no, no, we will go for the military victory option. And the simpler market interest, because if war is your business and it's a huge business, a multi-billion dollar business, when peace breaks out, this whole industry can be threatened.

So, and this is what the think tanks, financing think tanks buy. You get the information, which goes to the politicians, the policy recommendations they should follow. And you get the actual staff, because most of these people are actually decision makers, which when they're out of office, they're sitting in this think tanks to remain relevant. And when when they go back into office, of course, they still remain on the payroll. And of course, you have the media as well as these think tanks also pushing all their articles into the media, in which they have more resources than regular journalists. So you can also manufacture consent from the public.

So there's a huge, huge influence among this, but this, yeah, this is the market model. And this is why you create little cliques of everyone who is on the, yeah, who is on the same payroll and essentially elevate the people you want up and you're able to push down the people you don't want there. So it's a very dangerous system.

RADHIKA DESAI:  No, absolutely. And I'd further add that, of course, in addition to the military industrial complex, I see at least three other types of big corporations that are very important in the United States and who also have a vested interest in military aggression around the world. And that is the information and technology industries, the health industrial complex, which both of which rely very heavily on patents and copyrights and that sort of thing on intellectual property rights. And there are the mining industries and finally, of course, there is finance.

So these are the key, I would say, industries that would have an interest in essentially trying to impose an American style order around the world. But yeah, fascinating.

Maybe we should go to the first of these lessons that we are going to examine. So let me just read you an abbreviated version of what Stoltenberg said was the first lesson is, he said, we have to be willing to pay the price for peace. The more money, the stronger our defenses, the more effective our deterrence, the greater our security.

It, of course, to some people, it sounds reasonable, but increasingly we are coming to a point where we realize that actually the way to preserve peace and security or to create peace and security is not to arm yourself to the teeth, but to be friendly with your neighbors. Who wants to start?

MICHAEL HUDSON:  Well, I think that Glenn has described the personality, certainly of Stoltenberg, and he's shown that that personality is really a standardized personality for whoever is going to start NATO.

You mentioned the Estonian prime minister. What's so striking here is I spent quite a bit of time in the Baltics and they really were traumatized by the Russian occupation, just as the East Germans were as a trauma. The surprising thing is that Norway wasn't occupied. Stoltenberg was this way not because of any personal suffering at the hands of the Russian.

Instead of traumatized by the Russians, he's in love with America and his career has been singled out by the American backers, through the NGOs. You pointed out how these people are promoted within Europe to promote people who are in love with America and look at the United States as a leader.

I think that the head of NATO, and just like the heads of the German government, the politicians in Europe, are those who've been promoted by the National Endowment for Democracy and others.

So I think when you look at what Stoltenberg has done, it's not really free market, it's something quite different. When he said, you just said, Radhika, we have to be willing to pay the price for peace.

Well, what's the price for peace? It's war. It's a bonanza for U.S. arms exports. And if Europe is going to be pressed into now replenishing all of the arms that it's sent to Ukraine with arms exports, well, who's going to make these arms?

Well, now that Europe has turned away from importing Russian gas and energies needed to make steel and steels needed to make armaments, this means primarily a purchase of, obviously, U.S. military products.

His second issue was, freedom is more important than free trade.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Glenn, you might want to add your own thoughts on the first point. That is, we have to be willing to pay the price for peace.

GLENN DIESEN:  Well, first, I'd just like to add to what Michael said. He's very correct because he was a former Norwegian prime minister. And he often tends to spin this logic that the Russians never liberated Europe in Second World War. They simply replaced the occupation.

But this is quite interesting because that was not the experience of Norway. We were under Nazi occupation. And the Red Army actually came in the north of the country in the Finnmark region. And they liberated this region. And once it was liberated, they buried their dead and they went home. This was it.

So Stoltenberg tends to revive this Polish experience. And of course, if I was Polish, I would probably be more bitter, but that was not ours. So they're trying to paint over this one.

But also, I guess the key problem in any alliance system is you have an incentive to keep on instigating conflicts and you don't have an interest in pursuing reconciliation over the past. Because again, if you're from the Baltic states, you have good reasons to be bitter and vengeful about being under Soviet control or the Russian control or part of the Soviet Union, of course.

But this is the problem. They have all the incentives. Now, if you want to grow up in the ranks, if you're going to pursue reconciliation, you're not going to have any position in the Atlantic system. If you want historical vengeance, you will float straight to the top. And this is part of the problem.

And overall, my main argument is that you have to pay for peace. All of this makes sense because every country needs deterrence. However, deterrence have to be also balanced with reassurance, because this is the security competition. Yes, you want to protect yourself from others, but you don't want to provoke them.

And especially, again, this was just to point out that he's Norwegian again. This was our main policy during the entire Cold War. We were part of NATO, which deterred the Soviet Union. However, we refused to have any foreign troops on our soil. We didn't want American and British activity in the high north, because that's where we have the border with the Russians. So we want to balance deterrence with reassurance. This was based on common sense.

We didn't do this as a favor to the Soviets. We did this in order for national interest. We recognize countries act based on security competition. So we don't want to provoke them in a way that makes them react to preserve their own security in a manner which undermines our security. So this was common sense. But again, common sense, I think, is all gone.

RADHIKA DESAI:  This is a very great segue into, I think, a couple of the things that I want to say. First of all, you know, your contrast between how Norway handled things during the Cold War and how it's handling things now is a really important and interesting one.

It's very clear that the level of political leadership across the West has taken a nosedive. I mean, when you can have politicians like Liz Truss or Trump or Boris Johnson, or even Keir Starmer and Biden and what have you. I mean, these people are simply, they're really, they do not rep, they do not have any political gravity. They're a bunch of bullshitters that will say anything they like.

And this really, it's not surprising that this corresponds with the moment in the history of Western countries, where practically all the major political parties have been taken over by the professional managerial classes.

The conservative parties are no longer represent, no longer composed primarily or represented in parliament primarily by business people or people who have interest in business and so on. Nor is the Labour parties or left of centre parties represented by people with union backgrounds or working class backgrounds. No, that sort of thing has entirely disappeared and the entire political class is composed of these people who are, like I say, professional bullshitters.

So and this is how you get what we have right now.

And that has made the American capture of European political classes all the easier. And of course, vis-a-vis think tanks, you know, the fact that these people can regularly attend meetings and conferences of these think tanks, which are essentially there, you know, to go back to the old NATO adage about, you know, adumbrated by the first secretary general, I forget his name, Lord Ismay, that the purpose of NATO is to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Russians out. That is to say, Americans in Europe, the Germans down in Europe and the Russians out of Europe.

And this is exactly what they've been able to achieve all the more easily, because during the Cold War, there was considerable fight back and even well past the Cold War period.

Basically, Europe has periodically demonstrated a desire to have its own independent foreign policy. Think of people like de Gaulle. Think of the fact that they actually forced Johnson to decline to fight another election. They forced the United States to break the dollar's link with gold. They went out of NATO command, the French did.

In the 1990s, they sought to create their own independent foreign policy. And after that was essentially ruined by the Americans, sabotaged by the Americans, they tried again in the 2000s, you know, as recently as about five years ago, Macron was calling NATO brain dead. He was calling for a European security policy.

And Angela Merkel clearly pursued a policy of getting cheap energy from Russia. That's why the Nord Stream pipelines got built. A second one was being built, or in fact was completed and was just awaiting approval.

So all of this shows us that once upon a time, and you know, it's not surprising, it's a no brainer. Europe is to prosper and prosperity relies on energy. Where should it get its energy from? From Russia, of course.

And now, thanks to this crazy political class, Europe is being asked to turn around. And I would say that this impossible position in which Europe is put can have only one of two outcomes. I mean, either there will be sections of the bourgeoisie, for example, as represented, whoever it was who was behind the Merkels and the Schroders and so on, who will come to the fore and say, OK, enough, you know, we're not going to do this anymore, especially after these forces of militarism and Atlanticism are getting a drubbing in the elections, like we saw in Germany recently, or there will be popular forces that will arise, perhaps like Sarawak and Knax, Sarawak and Bundes, or hopefully not like the AFD, but they are also there on the scene and they will be the ones to say this can no longer go on, because as we know, what cannot go on will not go on. So the question is, how will it end?

So yeah, I mean, this idea that you have to be willing to pay the price of peace, actually, the pieces can be very cheap if you actually know how to live side by side with another power. And, you know, it is historically the Russians, sorry, the Europeans that have invaded Russia, not the other way around. And I think that's something that could be kept in mind.

GLENN DIESEN:  If I can just add quickly, I think you're correct, because this I identify this lack of political imagination and weakness as being a key problem, because if you go back to the early 90s, when NATO began to talk about expanding and going out of area, the US wanted to go invade Iraq in the early 90s, this, at this point, there was a huge resistance among the Europeans, but then, and also for years, we talked about European sovereignty, but it's all gone now,.

A good example is actually from Norway, because of our territory, we are good for America's missile defense, because you want a surveillance of the Russians and intercept missiles, which go over the Arctic. And in 2008 and 2009, they had all this WikiLeaks, which came out this post, which revealed that, you know, what are we going to do with the Norwegians, they're afraid that this is going to disrupt the nuclear balance, and this is not in their interest. And the American ambassador here could simply, he wrote back, well, if we frame it as alliance solidarity, they can't possibly defend their position anymore. And then they did, and, you know, they talk about how did they talk to the think tanks and NGOs and the journalists and politicians, and then they reported back to Washington. Yeah, now the Norwegians are doing as they're told, effectively. So this is all we have to do. And that's what we're doing. That's what they're doing now as well.

We used to have a policy, it's not in the interest of foreign troops on our soil. It's too provocative. Now, we're going to have 12 American military base in our country. And how are we going to sell it to our own people? They see, you know, our media and government, they say, we can't call it, it's not military bases, it's dedicated areas. You know, the Americans have sovereign control over this. And also, it's not aimed for confronting Russia and the Arctic. If you flip over to the American media, they say, yeah, this is military bases. It's to confront the Russians in the Arctic.

So they don't even tell the truth to their own people where it's weakness. We don't have any political imagination, besides living in this Cold War relic of this military bloc. So we rather stick with it and then act surprised when the counter reaction comes.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Well, I mean, gosh, and you're just reminding me that another really interesting thing about the type of people that have become political leaders and are telling lies to their own people that precisely, like I said, the professional managerial class and globalism, which is really a kind of sanitized version of Atlanticism, is the spontaneous ideology of this class. What can I say?

But let's perhaps move, maybe we'll start with you, Michael, because you wanted to say something about the second lesson, which is that freedom is more important than free trade. And Stoltenberg says, "not so long ago, many allies believed that buying gas from Russia was a purely commercial matter. That was wrong. Russia used the gas as a weapon to try to coerce us and to prevent us from supporting Ukraine. We must not make the same mistake with China, depending on Chinese rare earth metals, exporting advanced technologies and allowing them, allowing foreign control of critical infrastructure weakens our resilience and create risks."

Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  Well, we're really in doublethink territory here. What it means by freedom is giving up European sovereignty. It means joining the U.S. Cold War, and the main victim, of course, has been Germany and European industry. And of course, the dead Ukrainians thrown into battle, hoping that somehow all of this is just going to cause Russia heavy costs.

So the free trade that's being given up is trade with the most prosperous growing market in the world. China, Russia, and the other countries that the neocons are imposing sanctions on precisely because they are growing and becoming more self-sufficient. And that growth is what the United States strategist sees as a threat to their ability to dominate them.

So if the United States is against growth abroad and says, no, all the growth has to be concentrated in the United States, then the role of NATO is to essentially subordinate Europe to the United States.

So freedom means supporting the United States as the bastion of freedom, just like the United States is supporters of the great democracies that it promotes, Ukraine and Israel.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Sure. Very important. Glenn, please go ahead.

GLENN DIESEN:  I keep hearing the same argument as well. My question is how and when, because keep in mind that when the war began then in February of 2022, it was the West that put sanctions on Russia, it was the West that cut themselves off Russian energy and whatever could be used left was blown up with the Nord Stream, which the Americans now blame on Ukraine. But I think it's hard to imagine Washington not having anything to do with this attack.

So, but also this idea of using economic connectivity for coercion, this has become our hallmark of the collective West.

For God's sake, we seized and stealing, we seized, froze 300 billions of Russian sovereign funds and are actually stealing, stealing this money as well.

And we make all this moral arguments, but of course, imagine the rest of the world beginning to steal American sovereign funds and give to any of the countries it invaded. So it's completely absurd.

Same as with China, there used to be sanctions on China and argue that, you know, they have human rights abuses. This is what we have to do. But now it's pretty much out the window. They're speaking very openly about the real purpose. They're saying very clearly, we can't compete with the Chinese anymore. You know, they, we have our financialized economy, they have an actual industrial economy. We have to effectively begin to sabotage them if we're going to be able to win this economic war.

And the whole world, the reason why the whole world reacted to this over the past two and a half years was not to join in against sanctions against Russia for being rogue. They've seen how the West has used their economic tools to go after not just Russia, but also China and well in Iran, you can go after many countries in addition to the secondary sanction.

This is the whole attraction to BRICS. This is why even American friends from Turkey to India, they're all joining, well, India was already there, but Turkey wants to join BRICS simply because you can't be too dependent on their technologies or their industries, you know, transportation corridors, their banks, their currency. They weaponize this, and this is not great for America either, by the way.

And lastly, you know, it's just, this is all so very, very, very absurd.

I mean, the main lesson from the gas should be in the, you know, the accusation of Nord Stream. As if the initial argument still holds up, because in the beginning, when Nord Stream was blown up, we all pointed to the Russians, oh, the Russians must have done it, they must have done it. And then we use this to escalate the war in Ukraine, we use this to militarize the Baltic Sea.

Also this was an argument for why Sweden and Finland should join NATO. But now, of course, we have all this leaked documents, and also the Wall Street Journal articles, recognizing that, yeah, well, the Americans are trying to blame the Ukrainians, but at least the United States is admitting that they knew about this attack several months before it happened, and they tried to stop Zelensky from doing it.

So what they're already admitting to is the fact that they knew it wasn't Russia, but they lied to the whole world. So they could use this deception, this lie, in order to escalate the war in Ukraine, in order to expand NATO further, in order to militarize the Baltic Sea.

So how can we suddenly now flip it and say the Russians cut off energy? It doesn't really make any sense at all. But, you know, I think we're looking at common sense in the rearview mirror.

RADHIKA DESAI:  So yeah. Well, I mean, the irony is that, of course, gas is still flowing to Europe from Russia, via Ukraine, of all things, so that, you know, this idea that somehow it is the Russians who are doing this and weaponizing energy, it's completely ludicrous, as is the idea that China would do the same.

China does not want to do anything of this sort. It is essentially, you know, if it ever does, so it will only be as a retaliation against various Western sanctions, which in fact, has already happened.

But anyway, I just wanted to say that, you know, what's really interesting about this point that, you know, we should not be so much in favor of free trade, etc. And everybody will think, oh, well, look, you know, the United States is going against, you know, Stoltenberg is advising people to go against free trade and globalism and all that.

But really, the issue is that the West was in favor of free trade, precisely when it could assume that free trade will only reinforce and dig in Western competitive and technological superiority.

The moment that this became difficult, free trade has to be jettisoned, and all sorts of other means have to be used to try to, to essentially somehow reinforce the position of Western corporations and Western technology in the world.

But of course, this is a failing, failing battle. And of course, all the sanctions that the West has imposed, all the "friendshoring" that the West has done this, its attempt to try to isolate Russia, China to a lesser extent, and so on, have actually only strengthened these countries.

China and Russia continue to be strong Russia's, the Russian economy is literally thriving under sanctions. And I would say that this is, you know, it's, the result is not going to be any different if this the West keeps it up.

So it's really, again, only a question of when enough people in the West will realize that, actually, first of all, they have to accept that they are no longer, they can no longer monopolize capital and technology in the world. And that given that it's, it's important for them to, to settle down to the idea that they are no longer overwhelmingly superior, that they can no longer dictate what happens in the world. And therefore, the best way of dealing with the rest of the world is not to try to dominate it, but to enter into cooperative relations with them.

But of course, this would require American elites to have a plan B, which at the moment, it doesn't look like they have.

So, yeah, any, any further thoughts on this second point before we go on to the so called third lesson?

GLENN DIESEN:  I think a key problem is that we're stuck in narrative politics, because we want to say that we're disconnected from the Russian economies, but we often buy then gas or oil through intermediaries. So the Russians sells them to country B, let's call them India, and India calls it, sells it back to Europe. So the Russians get the same money, but the Europeans buy the heavy markup. And this is why Germany's energy intensive industries are melting down, because they're not getting competitive price anymore.

And furthermore, the Russians, because they want to make sure that the Asian countries don't buckle under pressure, they're selling them at a discount, so further augmenting the competitive advantage of the Asians.

And all of this counter projects like friendshoring, trying to shore it from India instead. Well, what you're doing now is the Indians are sourcing a lot of products from China. So now, this BRICS cooperation is tightening even further, and the Americans have to pay the middleman.

So it's, so none of this makes any sense at all.

But I very much agree with your argument. I think that often, if you see when free market, free market arguments are made was obviously in the mid 19th century with the repealing the corn laws, and of course, when the United States established a dominance as well, it's often an interest in the dominant economy to advocate for free trade, because once you're hegemonic dominant, your mature industries of high quality and low cost will then outcompete and saturate all the markets with infant industries of the low quality and high cost.

So I think that so, you know, being a bit of an economic nationalist myself, I don't object to the idea of scaling back, maybe a bit on free trade, but this idea of putting sanctions, economic coercion, you're isolating yourself because the rest of the— saying globalization is over, but it's really not look at BRICS, we're just reorganizing into new institutions and new building a new economic architecture.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Yeah, no, I that's a very good point. And by the way, I should also say that I'm something of an economic nationalist as well. And so my own way of dealing with that is, of course, you know, there are immense advantages to be had from increases of scale, and so on. So in that sense, you know, trade is good. So then what's wrong with free trade?

Well, the way I put it is, you should not be for free trade, because free trade is often destructive of growth, because it can, for example, lead to huge employment losses, and so on, in a vulnerable economy. But what you want is more trade, and more trade can be had, provided it is not free trade, but it is managed trade so that all the participating countries, whether it is bilateral or multilateral, can enter into bi- or multilateral deals, or even, you know, universal deals, which are based on them on the mutual advantage. And I think so long as you've got economic managers looking after mutual advantage, you can benefit from trade, but obviously not from free trade.

If we can go to the next point, so Stoltenberg says, the third lesson is that military strength is a prerequisite to dialogue.

And then he continues, "I do not believe that we can change Putin's mind. But I do believe that we can change his calculus. By giving Ukraine more weapons, we can make Putin realize that he cannot get what he wants by force, and make it costly that he will have to accept that Ukraine has a sovereign and democratic right to persist as a sovereign democratic country. The paradox" Stoltenberg concludes "is that more weapons for you, the more weapons for Ukraine, we are able to deliver the more likely it is that we will reach a peace and an end to war."

Talk about Orwell, Glenn, you mentioned Orwell first, so I'll let you go first.

GLENN DIESEN:  Well, this is a we need a powerful military in order to have diplomacy. This is a nice way of saying might is right, isn't it? This is when, you know, we always have this different words, as Orwell would say for each, for each thing. So when others are, you know, aggressive, we're principled, and I think it goes along the same way here, this is, we're negotiating from a position of strength. Some would call it to attempt to dominate.

And I think there's been a key problem. We haven't we had a dominant position ever since the end of the Cold War. But this is why we constructed a Europe without the Russians. That's why we call European integration of decoupling, creating a Europe, which doesn't include the largest country in Europe. European integration means Russian neighbor has to choose between east or west. This is a this this has been also the consequence, I think a balance of power would have allowed for mutually acceptable post Cold War settlement, which we never had.

And again, this was the main argument from the entire Clinton administration. If you look at the US Secretary of Defense under Clinton, Perry, his main argument is, well, the reason why we betrayed the agreements for pan European security deal after the Cold War was the Russians were weak. Why? Why would we accept any constraint on ourselves? Why would we uphold all of these agreements? Let's expand NATO. Yes, of course, Russia gets upset. They everyone recognized this in the administration, according to Perry, but no one cared because they're weak.

And just last I think it also this is based very much on this. This lie and falsehood that Russia's invasion was unprovoked. It's very difficult to oppose this in the West, because if you oppose it, they say, well, if you said it was provoked, and you legitimizing it, you're supporting or justifying it. But if invasion, if the invasion was unprovoked, that means it was simply opportunistic militarism. That means Russia's cruising or shopping for new territory.

And if this is the narrative, of course, then it makes sense to increase the cost of this invasion. And compared to the benefits, so Putin will change his mind.

But this is not the case. This was we knew that Russia considered this to be an existential threat. So with every escalation, the more weapons we send, the more Russia will escalate as well.

So this whole, the whole narrative is based on this false premise of the invasion being unprovoked. And I think this has been the most important lie, I think of the whole of the entire war.

RADHIKA DESAI:  And that's why they keep referring to Russia's full scale invasion, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  I think that the NATO fight against Russia, the Ukraine cannot be settled peacefully.

So when he's talking about the strong army, it's not an army that's trying to actually win a war. The aim is to drag the war on as much as possible. Because the United States, neocons have spilled it out.

They said, we want to believe that waging the war will bankrupt Russia, because their economy is so inefficient, that a little bit of war spending will just push them over the brink, and they'll run a big budget deficit, they'll have inflation.

And secondly, dragging on the war will turn the, Americans believe, will turn the population against Putin, to bring about a regime change.

It's amazing how people can believe without any sense of history. Every country in history that's attacked rallies around the leader, because they want to, they don't want to be attacked. And Goering in Germany, in Nazi Germany, said that, well, you can always mobilize any population behind you by saying that you're defending yourself.

So the idea that somehow the NATO attack on Russia can make the Russian population saying, well, gee, we don't want to be attacked anymore. We give up. Yes, do whatever you want. Kill all the Russian speakers, Ukrainian and establish a Nazi state and we refight World War Two.

I mean, this is the nuttiness of what the Americans believe. And they've been able to drag the Europeans along with it, who seem to have forgotten as much about what World War Two is all about, as the Americans have.

Again, although the only way to settle it militarily is that, well, Russia's won, but Russia's not in any hurry to settle this war militarily. And the reason is pretty obvious. Why is Russia going so slow when the Russian population isn't saying, gee, don't fight the war. They're saying we want you to do something, fight back more.

But I think President Putin realizes that the longer this war takes, the more tensions are building up within Europe against the war to say, wait, first of all, Nord Stream has hurt us. Second of all, all of the US promotion of war industries hurt us. And [third], it's the whole idea of spending our European budget on the war on on Americans war and on American armament, and on basically taking over the cost of the war if Mr. Trump wins, is led to the last three German elections, showing that the population of Germany, and I think also of France are against the war.

This has no effect whatsoever on the European Union leaders, von der Leyen, etc. That there's been a complete, essentially disconnect and disempowerment of the European voters. Because you look at the German elections, what's happened? No change at the top at all. Same thing in the French elections. Macron is still still there supporting the US supporting the war.

So I think Putin is saying that this is an inherently unstable situation. On the other hand, he said, we don't expect to have a reassociation with Western Europe, NATO Europe for another 30 years, it's going to take a long time for them to wean themselves away from the United States. And that looks like a long decline of, of Europe, as long as it remains a subject not only to the United States, but to the wars of the United States and turning NATO from a defensive alliance into an offensive alliance, all the way from Ukraine to the China Sea.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Well, I only make a tiny correction to that. NATO was never a defensive. It was always an offensive alliance, right from the beginning, from the day the United States entered the scene, because originally, Britain and France were going to make a sort of mutual security pact, but then the Americans came in and said, All right, we're going to create a bigger pact, and we're going to be part of it anyway. So it was always an instrument of American imperialism.

GLENN DIESEN:  Very, very quick point on that. Sorry, because there's a whole premise that you can't negotiate with Russia, you have to strongarm them. By the way, this is the argument they made when they started sending weapons two and a half years ago, we want to give you a Zelensky better hand at negotiation table. And now two and a half years later, when will the negotiations begin.

But the whole premise is wrong. Keep in mind that when we tried to topple the government in Ukraine back in 2013-14, it was, you know, the Ukrainians and Russians came to the Europeans said, Listen, can we have a trilateral agreement instead of forcing Ukraine to choose which will lead to war? And the EU said no, the Russians were for it.

And then when we pressured them anyways, the Ukrainians accepted a unity government, which the Europeans guaranteed, the Russians were fine with it, we ended up betraying that agreement, and instead backing the coup.

And then you had the Minsk agreement, the Russians supported it, Donbass will be reintegrated into Ukraine. As the main negotiators, the Germans and the French later admitted they're the one who sabotaged it. They just bought time to arm the Ukrainians.

And then of course, you have the Istanbul peace negotiations. As everyone, the mediators, the Ukrainians, all sides have admitted the Russians were willing to negotiate on everything except neutrality, they can't accept NATO in Ukraine. The Americans, they convinced Zelensky not to do it. In Zelensky's own words, some Western states wanted a long war so they can exhaust Russia even at the expense of, of destroying Ukraine. And this was an economist interview in March I mean, I think that makes no sense.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Absolutely. I mean, the way to summarize, I think, our discussion of this third lesson is simply to say that, you know, there is an interesting reason why Soltenberg uses the word paradox. People always use the word paradox when they want to cover up a self-contradiction. And what's a self-contradiction? He says military strength is a prerequisite for dialogue. On the face of it, that's a perfectly unobjectionable statement.

But what he then hangs on that statement is essentially that we are not going to talk to the Russians unless they are defeated, which means essentially we're not going to talk to the Russians. We're going to talk to some other entity, which will presumably take over after the defeat of the Russians. And that's what that's what it amounts to.

But let's let's go to number four. Let me just read read that. And I find this one really interesting because in one level, it's a kind of mea culpa. But in another level, it's it's really, really atrocious. So let's read it.

"Now to my fourth lesson, says Stoltenberg, military power has its limits." And then and then he goes into a discursis on how NATO failed in Afghanistan and concludes as follows.

"So the lesson learned, he says, is that the purpose of any future military operation outside NATO territory must be clearly defined and must be honest about what we can and cannot achieve."

My question here is, why is this reserved only for out of area operations? Why should you not apply the same test to operations within within this? And in any case, the Ukraine operation is kind of not exactly within NATO territory. Ukraine is not in NATO. So why aren't you applying the same test there?

Glenn, why don't you go first?

GLENN DIESEN:  And it's none of this really makes any sense. But it is also the experience of NATO and the West for the past 30 plus years and every war we have, we enter without an exit strategy. There's a tendency to reject when you have a workable peace offer like you had in Afghanistan, which Karzai was pushing and we essentially instead go for full war instead.

But I think in Ukraine, it's becoming so much more dangerous because we keep talking about victory. But what would victory over the world's largest nuclear power even look like, especially when this nuclear power believes it's fighting for its existence?

There must be clearly defined objectives and be honest about whether or not they can be achieved.

And I don't think in the stretch of the imagination, they have learned any of these lessons.

Because what are the objectives in Ukraine? Because as we discussed, they had a possibility for peace. And as you pointed out, Radhika, the objective is only victory. And we can frame it as peace agreements as well. But this is when the French went to China to help them, ask them, help us push for peace in Ukraine. And so yes, we would love peace. Okay, let's cut off all economic supplies to the Russians.

But this is not peace. This is, you're going for, you're going for defeating Russia. That's not peace.

So again, we're twisting all the words to actual meanings. And we even the last peace summit we had in Switzerland, didn't invite the Russians. The Polish president showed up and said, well, peace means that Russia has to be broken into 200 smaller countries.

This is not, in what way is this peace? So anyways, I'm deviating a bit from the point. But no, I wish they could have been more honest about what you can and can't achieve. But only outside the territory, it's a good point.

But this was also a key reason, a key problem of military alliances. We lost the reason to exist after the 90s. This is a problem when peace breaks out, the market value of a military alliance collapses. And that's when the, that's when NATO actually had this buzzword in the buzzphrase, I guess in the 90s, which is "out of area" or "out of business". We have to go out and do something in order to get involved. And this is what will give us a new purpose. And yeah, I guess they have it.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Michael, do you want to add anything?

MICHAEL HUDSON:  Are we on to number four already?

RADHIKA DESAI:  Number four. Yes.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  What can I say that, except that the limit, the end of military power is World War III. And as Glenn said, atomic war.

President Putin has said, who wants to live in a world without Russia? So that's really what Glenn was just saying. Nothing to add to that.

It is as if the United States is trying to provoke Russia right now into doing something that will lead to some kind of an atomic response, just as it's doing in Gaza and Lebanon. It's as if they're trying to create some huge military response before the election that America or NATO will be attacked and somehow the Americans will rally around their country, just as the neocons believe that the Russians will not rally around their country. It looks like they're really trying to provoke people and they don't seem to care.

To them, it's like, OK, if this game is over, we'll play another game. But the game's over then. That's what we're faced with.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Well, and I also read a certain type of racism here, you know, when they talk about how we have to be careful in out-of-area operations and the way in which he talked about why they failed in Afghanistan.

Basically, it's part of this whole discourse of Europe is a garden and the rest of the world is a jungle and so on, is that they couldn't hack it in the jungle and so we have to be more careful.

And the second thing I wanted to say is that, you know, you could say that there are two ways of putting the same points that I think both of you have made, which is that in the 1990s, after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, some people say that, you know, maybe NATO had lost its raison d'etre, that they should have dissolved NATO and so on. So that's one way of putting at it. So NATO is kind of now having lost its original raison d'etre. It's now sort of becoming inflated and sort of, you know, becoming uncontrollable and uncontrolled.

But there's another way of looking at it, which is that if you consider the fact that NATO was created much before the Warsaw Pact ever came into existence, NATO was created in 1949 as a result of discussions that were going on throughout the post-Second World War, since the end of the Second World War, that the American desire to contain the Soviet Union as it was then was already evident in the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because they wanted to show the Russians what terrible weapons of mass destruction the Americans possessed, so as to essentially cow them into fear.

So if you take into account all of this, and you take into account the fact that the Soviet Union only created the Warsaw Pact after Germany joined NATO in 1954, then you begin to see a very different picture, which is that NATO was constantly straining at the leash during the Cold War.

And what kept it leashed was the Cold War, was the existence of a powerful adversary that it could not easily contest. And the moment this powerful adversary ceased to be, NATO came into its own and into what it was always originally intended to do.

So I think, again, I just wanted to say that.

But we are sort of running out of time, so let's deal with the fifth and final lesson, and then we'll bring our conversation to an end. So let me just remind us of what it is.

So to quote Stoltenberg, he says, "so to my fifth and final lesson, the most important one, we must never take the bond between Europe and North America for granted. Isolationism will not keep anyone safe. Investing in the transatlantic relationship is the only winning way forward. Europeans must understand without NATO, there is no security in Europe."

I would turn it around with NATO, there is no security in Europe, but there it is. Go ahead, anyone.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  Well, the transatlantic relationship is isolationism. It isolates Europe from the most rapidly growing parts of the whole rest of the world. That's what, so we call that an internal contradiction.

The Financial Times just today reported that German growth forecasts are downgraded again, and they said there's no idea when it'll recover from its pre-COVID levels of 2022.

The discussion about Germany's downturn is now related to COVID, not to the Nord Stream, to circle back to what we've been saying. There's just a way of blinding, diverting the discussion away from what the real problem is.

For Europe to isolate itself from the whole rest of the world and join the United States means that it's most definitely a junior partner.

GLENN DIESEN:  Yeah, no, I think this whole dichotomy between either you have a military block from the Cold War or you're isolationist, it's a very strange way of framing it, but it's also a very common one, of course.

The key problem of these alliance systems are that they tend to always, they uphold the hegemon, so it's not always good for the weaker parts, be it in this case, the Europeans, because when you have an alliance, what you uphold the hegemony often by dividing the world into dependent allies and obedient allies, by the way, and weakened adversaries.

You see, this is why it's always been an interest to keep some tensions between the Germans and the Russians. This is why you want to keep tensions between the Arabs and the Iranians, and ideally between the Chinese and the Indians.

This is how you dominate, and I think it's just a wrong lesson of history, because after the Cold War, one of the biggest curse of the Cold War was how can we overcome this block politics where we always, security competition intensifies.

This is why we had the Helsinki Accords in 1975. This is why we had the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe. This idea that we had to overcome it. This was also George Kennan's main argument when the decision was to expand NATO. He said, why are we doing this? We had finally an opportunity. Instead of saying, which bloc will it belong to, we can create something new which mitigates the security competition.

But in Stoltenberg's mind, no, no, the stronger the military bloc, the better. This was the opposite lesson from the Cold War, and we had this great opportunity to overcome bloc politics, but he's now defining security as a strong military bloc as possible.

And just as a last point, I just want to say I agree with Michael as well. I think the Europeans are isolating themselves, because in a multipolar world, you want to pursue a multi-vector foreign policy in which you connect with all the major powers. You want to diversify your dependencies, both security and economic.

The whole world is doing this. The Saudis, they want to go with China, Russia, USA, connect with everyone. Turks, all countries want to do this now. The only part of the world which isn't doing it is the Europeans. And they're just limiting themselves to the US. They cut themselves off Russian energy, now they will cut themselves off the Chinese technology and commit themselves only to the United States.

And when you have this asymmetrical interdependence and the Europeans get excessively dependent, they will not have any strategic autonomy or political autonomy at all. And this is the main curse of the Europeans.

So why are they doing it? Well, they're following the logic of Stoltenberg. They're afraid that America, with its relatively reduced resources, will now focus more on Asia, which America will. So we would like them to stay in Europe, but we have to increase our value to the Americans, our stock value, if you will.

And this means to subordinate ourselves completely, make greater value of NATO by ensuring that we do as we're told and isolating ourselves from the rest of the world.

It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do in a multipolar system. You want to diversify. We're just isolating ourselves to one actor, which isn't planning to stay here anyways. They're going to Asia. So it's beyond absurd, but we don't have rational arguments. Everything is liberal democracies versus authoritarianism. Yeah, it's very, very sad to see the direction.

And yeah, to sum up this delusion, yeah, listening to this farewell speech of Stoltenberg is an interesting speech from that point of view.

RADHIKA DESAI:  Yeah, you feel sorry for, I think, the Europeans. You know, there is actually a website somewhere, and it's called "Led by Donkeys". And I think that this is probably what the Europeans think, that that's what's happening to them.

But I just wanted to make two quick points. You know, the word isolationism, which, of course, originates in the discourse about American foreign policy. We are told that in the interwar period, America was isolationist.

It was nothing of the sort. American elites were always wanting to essentially intervene in Europe, etc.

The word isolationism is only used when they want to convince the public, which is, of course, naturally isolationist. They don't want war. They don't want to involve themselves in problems that are far away from them. They want to look after their own business. So it is essentially used to address the public, to say, you know, we don't want that.

Stoltenberg is doing the same thing. He's basically addressing European public opinion, which is basically not in favor of this war, and asking them to essentially sort of, you know, be willing to let be led by donkeys like him.

But the second point as well, which is, I think, a very important one, which is, you know, the United Kingdom for a long time has been claiming that it has a special relationship with the United States. And of course, those who know better, those who have read their history have tried to point out that the United States has always treated the United Kingdom as a vassal. That, you know, that special relationship is really just a euphemism under which the United States seeks to subordinate, humiliate, instrumentalize, and otherwise use the United Kingdom and whatever it has. And I think the same today applies to Europe as well. I mean, in some senses, it always did.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that, as I noted in my book, Geopolitical Economy, the United States involved itself in both the wars precisely when they came to the point where the wars in Europe could no longer profit it unless it sort of said it was going to war as well and therefore be able to lend money to European countries in order to fight these wars.

And then, as Michael pointed out in his Super Imperialism, it was the refusal of the United States to essentially turn those loans into grants, as, for example, Britain had done with Austria in the case of the Napoleonic Wars, if you're going to war with allies, rather, if you're fighting alongside allies, you don't then ask for your money back. There should be equal sacrifices, et cetera.

So the United States refuses this. So essentially, the United States has, from that time onwards, from the early 20th century onwards, sought to intervene in Europe only for its own profit, to use Europe only for its own profit. And this is just a couple of instances of what is a long story of the same type.

And I think that until recently, European elites knew that. They were wary of that. They were aware of their dependence, to some extent, on the Americans. But they were also willing to assert their independence.

That may seem to be gone at the moment, as I think you said, Glenn. But quite frankly, I don't think Europe, if it is to survive in any recognizable form, has any other option but to come back to some version of this realization.

That's why reading Stoltenberg's speech is so important, because it's such an instructive list of all the mistakes that have been made by European elites, isn't that so?

OK, I guess if nobody wants to add anything else.

GLENN DIESEN:  No, I agree with you, because I just feel that when we talk about alliances, we often confuse it as having the same interests as opposed to overlapping interests.

I always remember this interview by Boris Johnson, where he's trying to mock Russia because they don't have sufficient technological sovereignty. Actually, they have a good digital ecosystem. But he said, oh, in the West, we have Amazon. West, we have Google.

It's like, no, the Americans have. And the assumption that we're one entity.

And I think this is the weakness and why there is also no political imagination to diversify for national interest, because it's the assumption that we are joined at the hips with the United States.

But my point is much like that there's a willingness to fight to the last Ukrainians. There's also a willingness to fight down to the last euro.

And the fact that the United States blew up the European critical energy infrastructure should be a very good indication that, yes, it was good because it made us dependent on the Americans, even though we're weakened.

And I don't think it's helpful to ignore the fact that we're, as you said, vassals.

This is interesting. In the summer of 2023, when the Ukrainians were being slaughtered as counteroffensive, some Washington Post articles arguing, yes, too bad they're casualty averse. They should be storming more heavy.

But there's also this interesting report where they said that overall, this war has been a windfall. We've been depleting the Russians without using any resources. NATO is growing stronger, more united. We're expanding.

And it kind of showed everything is very instrumental. And the assumption that, as you said, same with the British, the idea that we are the subject here instead of the object. I think we're deluding ourselves.

Not because the US is evil or anything, but they will look after their own interest. And Europe is a means to an end. And I think we're going to learn that the hard way, unfortunately.

MICHAEL HUDSON:  Well, there's a segue to what you just said, Glenn. And that is that the United States is now extending what was a war against Russia into a war against China. And as you know, there's been a lot of discussion in Russia and Europe. They've been complaining that China and European trade is unbalanced, that China is exporting much more to Europe than vice versa.

And I think China's response is, well, we'd love to buy more products from you. There's a Dutch company (ASML) that makes ultraviolet etchings of chips. We'd like to buy that. You're not allowed to export to us anything that we want. And even if you export clothes to us, the United States could say, oh, that cloth could be used to make military uniforms.

So Europe is blocked by the United States more and more from trading with Russia. We're seeing a repetition of what happened with Russia now being applied to China.

And if German and other European countries lose the China market, then look at what's going to happen to the euro's balance of trade and the foreign exchange value.

There's going to be downward pressure on the euro's exchange rate, an outflow of euro money to the United States to buy arms and other goods. Dependency on the United States will be a chronic downward pressure on the euro that will increase the price of imports and increase inflation.

You're going to have the class war back in business.

GLENN DIESEN:  Yeah, just sorry. I don't want to drag it out, but just one point after the United States blew up the pipeline and the energy intensive industries of Germany began to melt down, their industries were struggling more and more.

How did the Americans come to the rescue? They came with the Inflation Reduction Act and started lobbying German companies to come across the Atlantic. We have much cheaper energy, four times cheaper, actually, or five.

So again, you mentioned before the first Secretary General NATO, that the mission is to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. This is still the mission, maintain and make sure that these other centers of powers don't come back together. So it's very foolish. I wish we would start to talk about the national interest again. That's the problem with people like Stoltenberg, I think. They get stuck, elevated to these international organizations like NATO, and they no longer look at the interests of the Europeans anymore. And yeah, I think that's the curse.

RADHIKA DESAI:  So I guess our comment on Stoltenberg is that Mr. Stoltenberg, with friends like the United States, Europe does not need enemies. I think this is the sum total of what we said. Thank you very much, Glenn, for joining us. And we hope to have you back sometime soon. It's great talking with you. And yeah, see you soon. Bye-bye. Oh, and I should say to our viewers, please like and share this video if you liked it.

And yeah, subscribe to Geopolitical Economy Hour. Thanks and goodbye.