The EU had its own calculation, and if their initial gamble had played out correctly, it would have been hailed as a masterful gambit by their Fourth Reich descendants.
To be specific, the EU had always wanted to plunder Russia and take its raw materials. In fact, did nobody else remember that the 2013 Maidan coup in Ukraine was directly caused by the EU wanting to destroy Russia’s domestic economy by flooding the Russian market with cheap European goods through Ukraine’s free trade agreement?
When the Ukraine war started in 2022, they saw the opportunity to colonize Russia by leveraging US sanctions. They had mistakenly thought that the combined US + EU sanctions (the two most powerful economic bodies in the world) would instantly destroy Russia’s economy whose GDP was smaller than Italy’s. Turns out Russia was far more resilient than that.
By August of 2022, merely months after the war started, Germany already wanted to resume Russian gas supply. Then in September, the Nord Stream pipelines exploded. They were outplayed by the US.
My friend, I remind you that it took two world wars for Capital to resolve the contradiction of its overcapacity problem in the early 20th century. It ended with the near total annihilation of the European industrial capacity and gave way to the rise of the US and the USSR.
We avoided another great war in the late 20th century because the US voluntarily de-industrialized itself (to crush its domestic labor unions) by switching to a trade deficit strategy and exporting its manufacturing base to the Global South, and the USSR also voluntarily dissolved itself and got rid of its vast manufacturing capacity.
We are now overdue for another world war because China and the EU both want to run a trade surplus strategy, and with the US running a global tariff strategy that stifles consumption (thus overcapacity on the flip side), that can only mean a mercantilistic fight that, if not resolved in peace (through reduction or redistribution of productive capacity voluntarily), will have to end with a war (physical destruction of the industrial base).
One of them will have to lose, or in the case of a war, likely both (and may as well be the entire world). The US as a financial empire will want to see both of them fight to the death and benefit from the fallout (just like it did during WWI).
Recall that after WWI, the US demanded repayment of the war debt of the Allied nations, which had not been a tradition prior to the 20th century. The US changed the game here, and the financial strain imposed on the post-war European nations led them to squeeze the defeated Germany even further, paving the way for the rise of Nazism and the militarization effort.
This has all the marks of the militarization of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.