Heinrich Schütz Enjoyer 🇩🇪🇷🇺🇵🇸

"It would have been impossible to do Operation Epic Fury without having Europe as a power projection platform." That's Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, admitting that 5,000 planes have taken off from European bases in support of the US-Israeli war on Iran since February 28th. This is what I wrote about in my NATO 3.0 essay. This is what I said in the two interviews I did this month — one with Dae-Han Song for @NoColdWar , one with Felix Marquardt @Feleaks and Alexis Poulin @Poulin2012 for The Modern Elephant. And it is what the structural analysis predicted. Not even predicted. This is what the structural analysis is describing as a process that has been under way for around a decade (if not more). I must admit that what frustrates me a little is that this is now treated as breaking news. For months, European leaders said publicly that they were not involved in the Iran war. And many analysts took those statements as fact. They reported on the political discourse as if it described the actual situation. Indeed, as if this was about the "transatlantic split" between the US and Europe. As if... But the actual situation was and is determined by the infrastructure. NATO has defense planning cycles that run years in advance. Infrastructure, logistics corridors, pre-positioned equipment, legal frameworks, command arrangements, all of it is set up before any political decision is made (and more so with that which I call the Bunker State). When a war begins, the bases are already there. The runways are already certified. The fuel is already stocked. The airspace is already coordinated. The legal status of forces agreements are already signed. A European head of government can stand at a podium and say "we are not involved." And it can be true that they meant it. But, it just doesn't matter. The structure does not require their consent to function. This is hyperdependency. In other words, the ability to say no has been transferred, incrementally, over decades, through treaties, basing agreements, interoperability standards, procurement contracts, command integration, and technological dependency. (Yes, also through things like Nord Stream.) What remains at the national level is the rhetoric of sovereignty. What remains at the structural level is the reality of integration. I wrote about this. I traced the mechanisms — NATO Front Door, NATO Edge, PEARL, the Baltic air defense transfer to US command authority, the US general taking operational command in the German army. I showed how the 5% GDP pledge at The Hague was implemented at Ankara as a binding financial and industrial architecture. I argued that Europe was being converted into the factory and the attritional node, while the US retained the command layer. And now Rutte has confirmed it, in his own words, with a number of 5,000 planes. I will admit something. My work gets little reach. I am mentioning this because it shows me that the gap between what is happening and what is being discussed is widening, and the analysts with platforms are still working from frameworks that doesn't allow them to see the structure and the processes taking place. If the people who write and talk about geopolitics cannot see that European involvement in the Iran war was structurally guaranteed, then they won't be able to see what is coming either. They will keep reporting on political statements as if they were descriptions of reality. They will keep being surprised. Three pieces, if you want the argument in full: NATO 3.0: The Transatlantic Cage and the Rise of the Bunker State: the essay. The structural analysis of Ankara, the division of labor, the bunker state, the multi-layered cage. No Cold War with Dae-Han Song: on the mechanisms, the elite co-optation, and the vulnerabilities of the US-led empire. The Modern Elephant with Felix Marquardt and Alexis Poulin: on the colonial origins of NATO, the reorganization of empire, and what disentanglement would require. Links below. Read them if you want to understand the next thing before it happens or if you want to understand the processes that are already taking place. Share them if you think the analysis is worth the reach it hasn't gotten. Thank you.