by Amal Zadok
US policy today is not just “supporting allies” or “defending democracy.” It functions as a strategy that keeps Europe dependent, weakens its economic base, and erodes the social achievements built up since the birth of the European Union. At the same time, Russia’s leadership confronts NATO expansion and Western use of Ukraine as a real existential threat, and this reality has interacted with US and EU choices in a mutually destructive security spiral. Together, these dynamics risk turning the EU from a potential independent pole in a multipolar world into a subordinated periphery of the United States, while locking Russia into a permanent confrontation that justifies ever tighter Western structures around Europe.
From partner to protectorate
In the early decades after 1945, Washington encouraged European integration as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and as a way to stabilise and industrialise Western Europe. As Europe grew richer and more cohesive, and as the European Community evolved into the EU with its own currency and ambitions of “strategic autonomy,” US attitudes shifted from sponsorship to management and, increasingly, control. The United States wanted a strong Europe inside a US‑led system—not a Europe capable of independent strategic choices, energy partnerships, or monetary power that might rival the dollar.
The turning point came when European choices started to cut across US preferences: independent Ostpolitik, deep energy links with Russia, talk of an EU defence identity not subordinated to NATO, and the launch of the euro as an international currency. From that point, Washington’s core aim was effectively that Europe must never become an autonomous centre of power. It would remain militarily reliant on US hardware and guarantees, energetically tied to US‑controlled sources, and monetarily constrained inside a dollar‑dominated financial system in which the euro is, at best, a junior partner.
Russia, NATO and the security dilemma
This story sits inside a wider confrontation with Russia. From Moscow’s point of view, NATO’s eastward expansion after the 1990s and, especially, the prospect of Ukrainian and Georgian membership signalled the arrival of a hostile alliance on Russia’s immediate borders. Russian elites, across different currents, came to see NATO not just as a military structure but as the spearhead of a Western project to encircle, weaken and potentially dismember Russia. In that reading, the Maidan revolution, Western military assistance to Kyiv, and the steady integration of Ukraine into Western economic and security frameworks looked like steps toward turning Ukraine into a proxy platform aimed at Russia’s heartland and political system.
Many Western governments insist that NATO is a defensive alliance and that countries like Poland or Ukraine freely choose to seek protection after their own traumatic experiences with Russian power. But even if one accepts that, interests and capabilities matter more than rhetoric. To large parts of the Russian establishment, NATO’s moves—backed and driven by Washington—constitute a real existential threat. That reality has been used by the Kremlin to justify the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine and a broader confrontation with the West. In turn, those invasions have validated the worst fears of NATO’s eastern members and given the US justification to harden and expand its military, energy and financial footprint in Europe.
A classic security dilemma has formed: each side claims to be reacting defensively to the other, but the net effect is an arms race and a hardened bloc system. For Europe, the tragedy is that this spiral locks the EU ever more tightly into dependence on the US as protector and energy supplier, while eliminating the diplomatic space that might have allowed Europe to act as a bridge rather than a front line.
Killing cheap energy, then selling the “solution”
Before the latest escalation, the German and broader EU growth model rested on abundant, relatively cheap Russian pipeline gas feeding highly competitive industrial sectors like chemicals, metals, glass, fertilisers and machinery. That industrial base underpinned employment, exports and the tax revenue for Europe’s welfare states. For Washington and for NATO hard‑liners, this model looked like a strategic vulnerability: it tied Europe’s prosperity to a Russia they saw as a long‑term adversary and created incentives in Berlin and elsewhere for accommodation instead of confrontation.
Russia’s decision to escalate in Ukraine—and the Western response of sanctions, embargoes and the effective shutdown of most Russian pipeline flows—destroyed that model in a matter of months. Whatever one thinks of Moscow’s responsibility for the war, the outcome fits US strategic and economic interests almost perfectly. The one supplier capable of delivering huge volumes of cheap gas by pipe to Europe has been removed. Into the gap steps US liquefied natural gas.
US officials and industry lobbyists openly present US LNG as a strategic asset and a historic opportunity to lock in the European market for decades. Long‑term contracts, new terminals and supporting infrastructure create a structural dependency on LNG whose prices are higher and more volatile than those of pre‑war Russian pipeline gas. European analysts warn that this risks recreating the old dependence—only now on Washington. Energy‑intensive industries close, relocate or shrink. Households live under permanent energy‑driven cost‑of‑living pressure. The surplus that once supported generous social security is eaten away by higher input costs and subsidies designed to manage, rather than resolve, the crisis.
Choices made in both Moscow and Washington thus converge: they break Europe’s attempt to balance security and economic efficiency through diversified energy sources, and they channel Europe toward an Atlantic‑centric, US‑dominated energy order.
Forced rearmament on American terms
Overlaying this is a dramatic push for rearmament. The 2 per cent of GDP NATO guideline, once a benchmark, has become a political cudgel. Under Trump in particular, but not only under him, European states have been told bluntly: spend much more on defence—3, 4, even 5 per cent—or risk abandonment. In practice, the fastest way to meet these targets is to buy off‑the‑shelf from the United States.
The result is a surge in European defence budgets, with a large share of the new spending flowing into US weapons systems: combat aircraft, missile defence, precision munitions, command‑and‑control architecture. This deepens Europe’s technological and operational dependence. Many of these systems cannot be fully maintained, upgraded or used independently without US software, spare parts and political consent. It is rearmament, but not autonomy.
From a macroeconomic perspective, some of this spending stimulates local production and jobs, but a significant portion leaks abroad as imports. At the same time, higher defence outlays add to public debt and crowd out other priorities. Governments will have to finance this either through higher taxes or through cuts to social programmes, infrastructure and climate‑transition investments. The more the war in Ukraine is framed as an open‑ended civilisational struggle with Russia, the easier it is for elites to justify this shift and to silence dissent in the name of “security.”
Again, Moscow’s choices and Washington’s strategy intersect. Russia’s actions are used to justify a transformation of Europe’s budgets and procurement patterns that locks the EU into US‑centric military structures for decades. The more the EU is psychologically and institutionally oriented toward Russia as a permanent enemy, the less space remains for any future European security architecture not dominated by NATO and the US.
Monetary subordination and the caging of the euro
The euro was meant to give Europe monetary sovereignty and a currency capable of balancing the dollar. In practice, the combination of internal EU design flaws and external pressure has kept the euro within a dollar‑dominated framework. Fragmented fiscal governance, limited joint debt issuance and capital‑market fragmentation restrict the euro’s international role. Repeated crises—sovereign debt, pandemics, energy‑driven inflation—undermine its attractiveness as a reserve currency.
From the US side, powerful tools reinforce dollar primacy: sanctions regimes that weaponise access to the dollar system, extraterritorial financial rules that intimidate European banks and firms, and the sheer depth and liquidity of US bond markets. Efforts by the EU or by countries like Russia and China to build alternative payment systems, reduce dollar exposure or trade outside US‑controlled channels are treated with suspicion and sometimes punished. For Russia, this has led to attempts to “de‑dollarise” and diversify reserves, but Western sanctions in response to the Ukraine war have also frozen Russian assets and forced other states to think twice about challenging the dollar architecture.
Europe finds itself squeezed. It has its own currency, but in the decisive moments—sanctions, crises, financial flows—it still operates inside a system whose ultimate levers are in Washington. Russia’s confrontation with the West becomes another reason to tighten that system further, making it harder for the euro to evolve into a fully independent pole.
Social destruction as the hidden cost
The combined effect of these energy, military and financial dynamics is a slow erosion of Europe’s social model. Energy‑intensive industries lose competitiveness or vanish. Public budgets come under strain from higher defence commitments and crisis‑management subsidies. Inflation, especially for essentials like housing and energy, erodes real wages. Youth unemployment or underemployment rises as industrial and mid‑skill jobs disappear, leaving younger generations with precarious, low‑paid work and limited prospects.
Health systems, already stretched, enter into crisis: senior citizens and people with chronic or complex health conditions face longer waiting lists, reduced services and growing out‑of‑pocket costs as governments struggle to finance universal care. The social fabric frays: trust in institutions declines, protests over living standards, housing and healthcare multiply, and political extremes gain ground by channelling anger toward Brussels, migrants, national elites, or foreign powers. What made the EU attractive—relative equality, robust welfare states, good public services and intergenerational solidarity—is undermined from within, even as leaders insist they are defending “European values” against Russia and other adversaries.
Here, impartiality requires recognising that this destruction is co‑produced. US strategy uses crises to deepen Europe’s dependence and maintain American hegemony. Russian strategy, driven by its response to a real existential threat and by long‑standing imperial reflexes, has helped trigger and intensify those same crises, even as Moscow forges and consolidates strong partnerships across BRICS and the wider Global South.
Far from being truly isolated, Russia has redirected trade, finance and diplomacy away from the Atlantic world and into a dense web of relations with China, India, Iran, much of Asia, Africa and Latin America: it sells discounted energy to India and others, deepens industrial and military cooperation with China, signs long‑term resource and infrastructure deals across the Global South, and uses BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and new payment arrangements to reduce exposure to Western pressure. In practice this means that the US–NATO–EU strategy of “isolating” Russia has largely failed outside the Western bloc: it has severed many of Russia’s links to Europe and North America but pushed Moscow into a parallel ecosystem of non‑Western partners who see in Russia a counterweight to US dominance, a source of cheap commodities, or a useful political ally against Western double standards.
European elites, for their part, have often chosen alignment with Washington over building authentic strategic and economic autonomy, while failing to protect their citizens—young and old—from the predictable social costs. Seen from this wider angle, the pattern is stark: a security confrontation between the US‑led West and Russia creates the conditions in which Europe’s autonomy, prosperity and social achievements are sacrificed, while Russia is re‑anchored in an alternative non‑Western orbit rather than disappearing from the world stage.
A fierce political argument can therefore say, without losing nuance, that US grand strategy is structured to keep Europe subordinate and dollar‑bound; that Russia’s reaction to NATO expansion is grounded in a real existential threat and has been channelled into building a broader non‑Western alignment instead of simple “isolation”; and that European leaders have so far failed to break this logic in defence of their own societies, accepting a role as a weakened Atlantic appendage in a world that is, in fact, becoming more multipolar.
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©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.
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