When "Security Queens" Panic
Macron is threatening Russia--without NATO. This security queen is writing grandiose checks that his modest military cannot cash. Is he banking on the US flying in as Superman to save the day?
French President Emmanuel Macron gave an unhinged speech on Monday, 26 February to an audience of European nations. After being dressed down earlier by President Zelensky of Ukraine for Europe’s failure to deliver one million artillery shells (only 300,000 will be delivered)—Macron pumped the geopolitical pressure to the breaking point. To cover French failures to produce, Macron hysterically conjured Russia as a clear and present danger to invade all the nations in his audience. Macron masked his own military impotence by casting himself as their Messianic protector:
And in parallel, I can note that among most of the countries represented today, around this table, we can say through the voices of their leaders, of their ministers, dominant personalities, not to mention the many international organizations in which we take part, we can say that the consensus of the collective analysis was that, within a few years, we must prepare ourselves for Russia to attack the aforementioned countries. Clearly therefore the vision is there, the collective assessment is that the security of all of us is at stake. (My translation)
Indeed, we are approaching the 210th anniversary of Russian troops, led by Emperor Alexander I, triumphantly marching into Paris. Perhaps Macron is on to something? Maybe Russia is planning a reunion party along the Seine this year to re-enact their crushing 1814 victory over Napoleon?
Next year will mark 80 years since the Red Army last smashed German arrogance and sacked Berlin—why not a Russian reunion at the Reichstag in 2025?
Or just maybe Macron’s outburst was intended to distract from the intense criticism he has been under for failing to send arms to Ukraine.
The friction between Scholz and Macron over military aid for Ukraine is turning into something of an open feud.
German officials complain that, while Macron is willing to talk tough on Ukraine, he has not followed up with nearly enough action compared to what Berlin is doing.
Germany's Kiel Institute, which compiles national contributions to Ukraine’s war effort, ranks France as a clear laggard with €640 million in military aid compared to Germany, which has provided or promised €17.7 billion.
Instead of doing the hard work of producing and delivering weapons, Macron covers his power-poverty with the flamboyant rhetoric usually reserved for great powers: not geopolitical street hustlers like himself. As the Guardian reports:
Speaking after hosting a meeting of two dozen European leaders to discuss Ukraine, Macron painted a grim picture of a Russia whose positions he said were "hardening" both at home and on the battlefield.
"We are convinced that the defeat of Russia is indispensible to security and stability in Europe," he said.
Russia, he said, was showing a "more aggressive attitude not just in Ukraine but in general".
While there was "no consensus" on the sending of Western ground troops to Ukraine, "nothing should be excluded. We will do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia cannot win this war," he said.
Europe’s woeful failure to mass-produce the promised ammunition is partly responsible for the appalling state of the Ukrainian army in the Donbass. Apparently believing that Avdiivka was an impenetrable fortress, Ukrainian military officials responsible for building backup lines of defense apparently diverted those critical funds in other directions. As Ukrainian troops fled, they found nothing but open fields and modest cottages to shield them from Russia’s massive FAB-1500 glide bombs, that were plopping all around, like the first heavy drops of an approaching thunderstorm. As a result, in the coming months, Russian troops may penetrate deep into the Ukrainian operational rear and wreak havoc.
Today the Ukrainians announced that frantic work is currently underway to build a thousand kilometres of overlapping defense lines encircling Kiev. Defense belts are also under construction near Kharkov. Ukrainian informational offerings are highly instrumentalized and in the past had very low truth content. As Ukrainian propaganda shifts from Messianic exuberance to Apocalyptic doom, these more distressed narratives may be exaggerated to scare American congressional leaders as they consider sending more aid to Ukraine.
With Ukraine severely lacking in manpower reserves—not to mention the West’s impotent lack of arms production—once Putin’s forces do make a big breakthrough, it will not be long until much of Ukraine falls under the Russian yoke. Is Macron prancing around as a swashbuckling hawk now in order to avoid post-war blame for Ukraine’s coming defeat?
In a saner world, France’s (and Europe’s) obvious military weakness would drive Macron to humble his geopolitical demands. For example, during more frugal geopolitical times less than a decade ago, Germany and France guided Ukraine and Russia towards the modest Minsk II agreement. Not any more. Does Macron’s profound insecurity drive him to flash geopolitical opulence that he just doesn’t possess?
Deprived Catholic families in Belfast are known (and mocked) for splashing out on gaudy displays of affluence to celebrate their children’s Holy Communion. Life is bleak for the poverty-stricken in Belfast and so one can understand a poor parent’s desire to put on a big show on their children’s special day. It’s far more difficult to empathize with Macron doubling down on conspicuous displays of geopolitical consumption that he cannot afford.
According to Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico:
Several NATO and EU member states are considering the possibility of deploying their troops to Ukraine as part of bilateral agreements, said Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Slovak newspaper Pravda reported on Feb. 26.
Fico’s announcement came following a meeting with the coalition ahead of European leaders conference in Paris to discuss supporting Ukraine.
While Slovakia itself would not take such a step, it would respect the decision of countries willing to send troops to Ukraine, Fico said.
Slovakia will not provide military aid, as “the conflict in Ukraine cannot be solved militarily,” the PM said, adding that Slovakia intends to focus on offering civilian and non-lethal aid, along with continuing assistance to Ukraine in demining efforts.
The response to Macron’s demand for “strategic autonomy” was immediate and overwhelming. It turns out this mini-Napoleon was not going to order NATO to march on Moscow. Many other nations, including the US, announced their refusal to send troops to Ukraine. But the door to war with Russia is still open for Macron. With NATO refusing to intervene in Ukraine, several European nations are considering launching a war against Russia outside of their NATO membership. This means, on paper at least, Russia can freely strike back with missile launches against these belligerent nations and not risk any Article 5 declarations, since NATO’s collective defense does not cover NATO members’ solo military adventures.
So far only France and The Netherlands have publicly backed this idea of going it alone and waging war on Russia outside of the NATO framework. In such a conflict, The Netherlands may quickly lose her port in Rotterdam and critical chip-making machinery at ASML factories risk being destroyed by hypersonic missile attacks. While France is also target rich, perhaps Russia sinking her flagship Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier would be enough to get the message across?
Such a war between go-it-alone European states and Russia would not necessarily turn nuclear as a proper NATO—Russia clash instantly would. It’s not at all clear how Dutch and French troops would transit to Ukraine (or Russia). Neighbouring nations would be loath to let an invading army pass through, or to allow an air force to overfly their territory lest they be accused by Russia as being belligerents as well—naked of their NATO umbrella. At the very least the French and Dutch military convoys would be targeted. While it’s highly doubtful Russia all alone could defeat a collective and united NATO in a conventional war, Russia smashing a few go-it-alone European nations one or two at a time might just be achievable.
As Macron’s mouth is writes checks that his military cannot cash, his grandiose statements are justified by the need to maintain “strategic ambiguity.” Ambiguity is only effective in situations that are actually ambiguous. Communicating "nothing is excluded" is meaningless when Russia themselves know exactly what the French military cannot accomplish. Russian military analyst “Elder Edda” on Telegram reviewed France’s net military wealth:
If you understand the capabilities of the French armed forces from the point of view of “what they can do in Ukraine,” then what is striking is their completely insufficient weight to solve any combat missions. The four armoured and mechanized brigades, with some attached units, comprise a total of 23 tank, mechanized, artillery and engineer battalions (referred to as regiments in French staffing).
Having a total of 500-odd units of medium and heavy armored vehicles, including 200-odd tanks, as well as about 100 self-propelled artillery units with a caliber of 155 mm, not counting various auxiliary equipment, air defense, reconnaissance and engineers, they roughly correspond in “weight” to one well-equipped Russian division.
A fairly large contingent of light infantry, air-mobile and amphibious units, equipped mainly with light armored vehicles and artillery, includes 30 battalions, which speaks primarily of the expeditionary “colonial” nature of the army, which has not been prepared for serious battles on land for a long time.
Assessing the French potential in such battles, that is, in a large land war, I will say that with the exception of the aerospace part, France today would lose to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Even now, after the failure of the counter-offensive and heavy losses in equipment, the Ukrainians have significantly more armour and guns, and there is no need to talk about combat experience. At the same time, the level of readiness of the French equipment is not high even in peacetime, amounting to 60-65% on average, and for some types of equipment falling to 40% or lower.
What then are the French going to do, given that with such readiness they will not be able, even if they decide, to send more than one “heavy” and one “light” battalion group to Ukraine? Of course, we are not talking about war, and the maximum that comes to mind here is an attempt to intervene in some key points that Paris would not want to “give over to Russia.” A French garrison in Odessa? They have already tried this, as we remember, just a little over a hundred years ago.
Elder Edda’s final comment refers to the French occupation of Odessa in the final year of World War 1. During the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik-led October revolution of 1917, France did manage to capture Odessa. But they spent the next 15 months split between Ukrainian nationalists, who wanted independence, and White Russians, who wanted to restore the Russian Empire. As the Red Army approached Odessa in April 1919, the French high-tailed their way out of Odessa, grabbing as much loot as they could carry, since they were the Russian Empire’s primary creditor.
Macron’s outburst comes on the heels of recent humiliations the French have suffered at the hands of Russia. According to Ukrainian Telegram, in January Russian airstrikes on a hotel in Kharkov killed at least 60 French soldiers and injured many more. A week later its widely rumoured that France sent some officials to a ceremony to collect the bodies and those nasty Russians rudely struck the ceremony, killing even more French officers. These events occurred in a context where France is hysterical about getting kicked out of her former colonies in the African Sahel and being replaced by Russian forces.
As Germany’s Prime Minister recently admitted, and what everyone already knew, Western troops are in Ukraine manning Western air defense and artillery systems. There was no time to train Ukrainians on the myriad of weapons NATO deploys. The French troops killed in Kharkov were likely manning the French / Italian SAMP-T system. Also French has technicians are on the ground there to maintain and use their Cesar artillery systems. German and British soldiers man the Patriot missile systems in Ukraine, while French and British officers help Ukraine launch air-to-ground missiles towards the Crimea.
Perhaps in revenge for the slaughter of French troops, last week a HIMARS attack on Russian troop concentrations killed perhaps a hundred in the Kherson region and then NATO “double tapped” and killed the first Russian responders with a second salvo a few minutes later. War is hell.
The Unbearable Weakness of European Arms
In the days following Macron’s outburst the German media triumphantly announced that their navy had shot down a “Houthi drone” in the Red Sea.
The next day the story changed.
Just a week earlier the sandal-wearing Houthis managed to shoot down a $3 million Reaper drone with homemade artisanal missiles. Not only did the German missiles fail to down the vulnerable Reaper, the German navy soon announced that they had exhausted their supplies of two of the three types of missiles their frigate uses.
Britain’s naval woes also continue. After a string of humiliating breakdowns, where their naval assets were unable to participate in NATO exercises due to technical failures, the once proud Royal Navy announced they would have to scrap one of their aircraft carriers.
Britain continues to run her mouth at Russia as if her geopolitical power potential was what it was in her early 19th century glory days. Why do these puny military chihuahuas keep barking at the Russian bear? Why do European nations—who refuse to invest in their military, who refuse to embrace cultural ways that will enhance their fighting potential, who openly target and devalue the very demographic strata that are most likely to serve and die for their nations—act so entitled on the international stage?
The only strategy that makes any sense is if Macron is playing a Bay of Pigs gambit in Ukraine. Bay of Pigs was a CIA-led undermanned invasion of Cuba in 1961 designed to overthrow Fidel Castro. But as paramilitary Cuban exiles floundered on the beaches, President John F. Kennedy rejected emotional pleas to send US air power to turn the tide. JFK felt the CIA was forcing him into a war he didn’t want to fight. Many observers claim JFK was in part assassinated in revenge for his “betrayal” of the anti-Castro Cubans who bled-out on Cuba’s picturesque Playa Girón.
And so if Macron sends a suicide squad into Ukraine to get pummeled by superior Russian firepower, there would be similar calls for US armed forces to play a Messianic Superman to save the day on Eurasia’s austere steppes. How would a future President Trump respond to French pleas for a helping hand on the beaches of Odessa?
From Welfare to Security Queens
Macron, along with other European factions, are acting like entitled "security queens." This term is a play on first Reader’s Digest and then Ronald Reagan's meme of "welfare queens" from the 70's. Welfare queens were female tricksters who supposedly milked the welfare system by having lots of kids while pulling up in Cadillacs to the supermarket to buy sirloin steaks while the frugal proletariat could only afford ground chuck. Reagan tarred these welfare queens as entitled parasites. By exploiting a generous welfare system, they lived well above their means. This naturally provoked a strong feeling of resentment among tax-paying working class voters. Reagan’s welfare queen meme, which ironically has strong Marxist undertones in its hatred of the lumpen-proletariat, helped him get elected as President.
By analogy, a security queen is a European leader who refuses to pay the price—both economically and culturally—to maintain a proper level of geopolitical security on their continent. Instead of producing proper armies, a security queen milks the American taxpayer and expects deplorable Americans to risk life and limb so that European leaders can act butch at international events. Security queens engage in conspicuous warmongering, making threats against Russia that they have absolutely no chance of backing up.
Not only do security queens underfund their armed forces--they also engage in outright culture wars against the demographics most likely to serve as soldiers. America is of course guilty of this as well. Globalist attacks on rural farmers and the rampant deindustrialization decimating working class Europeans--not to mention mass immigration—are some of the ways security queens destroy their own military potential. Military recruitment in Germany has gotten so bad that they are trying to find fighting men within the global multitudes. Paradoxically, the primary cultural target of security queens is the very idea of a nation, which of course is the only idea young men will die for.
Security queens in Europe refuse to accept the modest and frugal foreign policy they have deserve--which would entail not encroaching on Russia's sphere of influence. Despite their lack of the most basic means of power projection, European grandiose entitlement, egged on by US neocons, propels them to make reckless threats against powerful enemies like China, Iran and Russia.
Breaking Dependence: A Path Towards European Military Prowess
Europe is addicted to security welfare from the US. To be sure, the US promoted a culture of security dependence on Europe to keep a foothold on the Eurasian world-island. The US created incentives for Europe to “live large” geopolitically—to have aspirations way beyond what they were capable of delivering on an actual battlefield. In the back of these tough-talking European minds was always the idea that Uncle Sam would fly in like Superman to pull European security chestnuts out of any fire.
With the US facing multiple global challenges, from the Middle East, to Korea and Taiwan, Europe is no longer high on the American list of priorities. The dilemma for Europeans is that their militaries are based on their traditional nation-states but increasingly political power is being transferred to the supra-national European level. In order to accomplish this power transfer, the EU wages a cultural jihad against nationalist culture and expression. The nations of Europe are taught to hate themselves, their traditions, and their indigenous people. This is self-defeating as the only possible institution to convince young people to fight and die for is the nation-state.
No young Europeans are going to sacrifice and die for the cold and soulless collection of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
The dilemma for the EU is that it is indeed the highest level of political power and is therefore the logical place where a European military structure should be conceived and commanded. Can the dyed-in-the-wool globalists of the EU convincingly launch an information campaign promoting enough blood-and-soil European-level nationalism to convince Europeans to die for them?
Worse, just as in the US, the demographics which traditionally man a military—the working classes and rural folk—are under constant attack in Europe. After farmers are stripped of their land in the name of climate change, are they really going to push their sons to fight and die for these very same bureaucrats. As factories close and working class families are immiserated due to the lack of cheap Russian energy, are they really going to rush their teenagers into Euro-army basic training to cause even more havoc to their lives?
Germany has come up with an innovative idea. In order to continue their cultural jihad on indigenous rural and working class Germans, the ruling clique there is trying to recruit foreigners from the global multitudes to don the Iron Cross and fight the wars that the Germans plebes refuse to fight.
Germany has disclosed a proposal to allow foreign citizens outside the European Union (EU) to join the military known as Bundeswehr.
The proposal was revealed by the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, stressing the importance of trying to enlist an additional 20,000 troops in the face of threats from Russia.
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However, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Bundeswehr has increased its recruitment efforts to meet the new target of 20,000 extra troops.
According to The Telegraph, speaking on the possibility of the scheme, Pistorius said, “We would not be the first armed forces in Europe to do that.”
If Germany succeeds with this, it will join Denmark, Spain, and Slovakia which also allow foreigners into the army after meeting certain conditions.
The US has also turned its back on the rural whites and Appalachian hillbillies who were traditionally the demographic backbone of US infantry forces. In recent years the US military has quixotically turned to the cultural left to recruit fighters for her glorified colonial policing actions in the Middle East. As a result, not only are recruiting targets now being missed by more than 20,000 soldiers, the tragic self-torching of a sensitive young man in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC may be a sign that this rejection of the more traditional pools of fighting men is leading to a breakdown of US military potential.
Weapons procurement would equally be problematic at the European level since the UE doesn’t have the power to collect taxes and has only recently started issuing large amounts of debt. There is no doubt that Europe is a sub-optimal military area, consisting of dozens of nation-states that have long and proud traditions. Co-ordination, duplication, chains of command—there are a myriad of problems to solve for Europe to go it alone. Up until now it has been so much easier to punt on all these complications and let Uncle Sam run the show.
But just as Ronald Reagan launched welfare reform under the supposed banner of breaking the culture of dependence and poverty that entrapped so many poor Americans, it seems the US ruling class is now starting a similar geopolitical tough-love program with Europe. Reagan and then Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms don’t seem to have reached their publicly stated goals, since US poverty is higher than ever and money is even more concentrated into wealthy wallets.
But while there are huge challenges, there is no reason that Europeans cannot get their heads together and make the reforms necessary to get their geopolitical power projection house in order. The twin spectres of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump may just haunt European leaders enough to nudge them onto a sustainable path of geopolitical power accumulation.
As explained in Grieving Ukraine, there will first need to be a complete overhaul of European economic and cultural choices. Embracing production and working class values is the first step. The decades-long Globalization-fuelled class war against working and rural Europeans will need to end. Otherwise, Macron’s delusion might just come true. Those posh Euro urban elites may face a ravaging Russian horde all on their own—or more likely an open rebellion by those domestic groups most damaged by EU malfeasance.
Very good read (again). Funny you mentioned about the lack of income / taxes for the EU. I just read a good piece by Tom Luongo how the EU is trying to get around that by issuing bonds (SURE bonds during Covid, and now possibly a 100b euro bond for weapons). But for that they’ll need to demonstrate that they have an income source, so they may find a way to introduce taxes …
Great essay, it crystallised a lot of what I've been thinking. Do you hail from the North (Northern Ireland, Ulster, the 6 counties ect) yourself? That's a pretty obscure reference to the travelers.