“How the USA conquered Europe”

Extract from the book “Fatal Friendship” by Werner Rügemer*

(21 February 2025) (CH-S) In the following “Swiss Standpoint” documents the first chapter of the book published in 2023 by the German journalist and non-fiction author Werner Rügemer. Particularly in the current state of upheaval, it is worthwhile for a better understanding of what is happening to look at historical aspects of the connections between the USA and Europe from different angles.

This is an analysis by a German publicist who has been dealing with historical, social, economic and political developments and grievances on both sides of the Atlantic since the 1980s.

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The First World War was the first big global business: the allies became dependent and were turned into markets and investment locations. More and more new wars followed, with more and more new enemies. The book “Fatal Friendship” is dedicated to the Australian journalist Julian Assange.

Friendship, doom, possible death

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy,
but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

That was the conclusion of Henry Kissinger, former head of the State Department and long-standing advisor to several US presidents. In the 1970s, he and President Richard Nixon courted the People’s Republic of China, recognising it diplomatically and promoting it economically.

As long as China was economically weak and the super profits of Apple, Microsoft, Ford & Co. were high, China remained a friend.

When China gained strength industrially and technologically, raised wages and created widespread prosperity for the previously poor, and had success with an alternative form of globalisation that was not accompanied by military force – then, under the friendly, smiling President Barack Obama, it became an enemy of the system and a mortal enemy. It was vilified politically and medially, economically sanctioned and surrounded militarily.

This is how friends become mortal enemies – just a few more examples:

• Soviet Union: Wall Street bankers drooled over even more profitable investments with the onset of the revolutionary upheavals in Russia in 1917 and courted the new governments.
  After the failed military intervention of an alliance in which the USA also participated, Ford, General Electric, Radio Corporation of America, Harriman & Co. invested – the Soviet Union gained in strength industrially, and in other ways, the prosperity of the previously poor grew.
  In 1933, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognised the Soviet Union. But for Ford & Co. the Soviet Union became a mortal enemy. In a strategic move, they armed the Hitler Wehrmacht. Now the Soviet Union was to be destroyed.

• Cuba: In Cuba, the US initially supported the democratic rebellion under José Martí against the colonial power Spain at the end of the 19th century. After the victory, the national uprising was abandoned, and the USA installed dictators – a practice often employed in the US’s “backyards” in Latin America and Asia.
• Vietnam: At the peace negotiations in Versailles, the US peace preacher Woodrow Wilson rejected the Vietnamese liberation movement under Ho Chi Minh. Then, during World War II, the USA briefly supported Ho Chi Minh in the fight against the Japanese occupiers, only to declare him an enemy of the people immediately after the war, to arm the French colonial power against Ho Chi Minh and then to take over the much more brutal war of extermination itself.

State Department: claim to every corner on earth

Since the US state was established in 1787, the changing friend-foe relationships have been based on an understanding of itself that still applies today: the USA is the only important state not to have a foreign ministry, but a “state department”, a state ministry. Thus, the nearest and the most distant territories on earth are possible US territories, spheres of influence and domination in the “national interest”.

The claim to sole and all-powerful authority is biblically supplemented by “God’s own Country” and “God bless America”, by the “chosen nation”, also by “America First”, “American Century” and “New American Century” and the “American exceptionalism” or also we are the “only world power”. All this belongs to the genes of the US state.

First in the “backyards”, then in Europe and worldwide

Thus, the small strip of the slave state on the east coast of North America, which had been declared a democracy, was gradually expanded first through conquests and annexations in North America (except for British Canada, which could not be conquered), including genocide against the indigenous peoples.

Later, it was the turn of the Latin American, Caribbean and Asian “backyards”. Since the First World War, and up to the present day, it has been Europe and the whole world – through the pincer grip of investments, loans, the military, secret services and fake PR.

With the help of coups and civil wars, dictators were installed or promoted. In Europe in the first half of the 20th century, this looked like this:

• The first fascist dictator, Mussolini, who had destroyed the growing democratic and labour movement, was showered with loans and became a political star in the USA.
• Generalissimo Franco, who had staged a coup against the Spanish Republic, was supplied by US arms and oil companies and received military support from Mussolini and Hitler – until they won the war together.
• Hitler became a media star, also with the help of Hollywood. The US Olympic Committee, together with those of England, France, Japan, Finland and South Africa, saved the 1936 Olympic Games for Hitler in Berlin against the international and Jewish boycott movement, and armed the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.

Outside of any international order

Part of the claim of being the “only world power” is that the USA repeatedly proposes international orders but undermines the respective established institutions and builds its own international anti-order alongside them, in violation of international law and human rights.

After World War I, for example, the USA proposed the League of Nations, but then did not join it, but instead concluded individual treaties with all the war participants after the Versailles Treaties and supported fascist dictatorships in China, Italy, Greece, Germany, Japan and Spain. The USA will do the same with the UN after World War II.

The USA will now wage wars of its own choosing whenever it wants. If the UN/Security Council decides to go to war, fine; if not, the USA will wage the war alone or with a self-made alliance of “willing” vassals.

Towards the end of World War II, the anti-communist Churchill had his military chiefs draw up the plan “Operation Unthinkable”. According to this plan, US and British troops, reinforced by parts of the Wehrmacht, were to conquer the Soviet Union immediately after the armistice with Nazi Germany. However, in view of the strength of the Red Army and public opinion in Great Britain, this was abandoned. But the intention remained. It was and is being pursued by other means, under the leadership of the more far-sighted, more powerful USA.

During the First and Second World Wars, US banks and corporations funded the wars of their “allies”. Then, at the end of the war, the US military was able to achieve comparatively easy victories in the exhausted war zones. And under the flag of friendly “help”, the victorious power was able to devote itself to the lucrative “reconstruction”: promoting US investments, penetrating the market with US goods and building US military bases.

As begun in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a seemingly friendly (Western) Europe was also forced to carry out a deadly task: with the doctrine of nuclear first strike, the USA made Europe a site of a possible nuclear war against the Soviet Union. This remains true to this day.

As hawk-eyed as it is short-sighted: professional self-oblivion

In 1935, the artist Mabel Dwight created a lithograph depicting the Wall Street bankers who had made huge profits from the First World War and its many millions of dead as the “Merchants of Death”: they “hate the ideal of democracy, but they rejoice in the loose reins and freedom it gives them”. Because of the profits, according to Dwight, these merchants of death are “extremely perceptive, yet incurably short-sighted”.

With professional PR, such as the Committee on Public Information (CPI) in the First World War, and with the elite universities and mass media they finance, US capitalists have highly paid, formally highly qualified professionals and scientists: they stage every war, however cruel, as a paragon of democracy, humanity and the will to peace.

In this way, the winners of war – and, of course, those who harm the environment, etc. – and their accomplices constantly confirm and reinforce each other’s beneficence.

They are so hawk-eyed for every lucrative opportunity presented by wars, environmental and health damage – and at the same time so shortsightedly unaware of the human and social consequences: professional self-oblivion.

* Werner Rügemer, born in 1941, studied literature, philosophy and economics in Munich, Tübingen, Berlin and Paris. He received his doctorate from the University of Bremen in 1979. From 1975 to 1989, Werner Rügemer worked on the editorial board of the educational journal “Demokratische Erziehung”. Since 1984 he has also been involved with radio and TV features, mainly for WDR. Werner Rügemer has been a freelance author since 1989. He has since published a large number of articles as well as several books, including “Cross-Border Leasing” (2004), “’Heuschrecken’ im öffentlichen Raum” (2008, 2012) and in English “The Capitalists of the 21st Century. An Easy-to-Understand Outline on the Rise of the New Financial Players”. Tredition 2019 as Paperback, Hardcover and E-Book ISBN 978-3-7497-1163-5.

Source: Werner Rügemer. «Verhängnisvolle Freundschaft. Wie die USA Europa eroberten». PapyRossa Verlag 2023. ISBN 978 3 89438 803 4

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)