Configuring the European-wide hostility towards Russia has been the long-standing project for Europe since at least the 1990s. The US security cadre long embraced the eastward expansion of Europe as a key post-war objective — firstly to combat communism in post-war Europe; and secondly, the expansion of NATO and then the EU served to lock EU states into a US-led security architecture. This structural engineering caused the EU’s foreign and security structures to become dysfunctional, caught as they were in the “headlights” between the “New European” takeover of “Old Europe” (as US Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld taunted in 2003 at NATO headquarters in Brussels), effectively undercutting any attempt to have an autonomous EU foreign policy.
Enlargement to the east effectively also hollowed out the EU’s political project — the idea had been that the EU could become a “global geopolitical actor” as a counterweight to American unipolarity. The EU therefore was transformed into little more than a large regulatory trade zone with little policy cohesion and no clear supra-arching vision of what it meant to be European.
With the American-inspired flooding of the Union with new accession states, whose security and foreign policy loyalties lay more with Washington than with the interests …read more
Source:: Ron Paul Institute