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NATO is anti-Europe, and only billionaires benefit from wars.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.

26 July 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_OLhQDeaKA

“NATO Pushes Europe Toward Total Collapse – Countdown to ALL-OUT War Has Begun | Dr. Jan Oberg”

25 July 2026

00:00

JAN OBERG: You have a total military production

00:02

dependence very strong at least of the

00:05

US because we’ve always stupidly

00:08

believed that the US was there for us.

00:11

The US is here for the US, and the idea

00:15

with NATO has never been to protect

00:17

Europe. The project called NATO

00:21

is a US project to secure that if there

00:24

is a war it will be in Europe and not on

00:26

US soil. That’s forward defense. This is

00:29

the idea of deterrence. This is American

00:31

nuclear weapons in Europe. It is to have

00:33

the fight here. The West

00:36

which is 12% of humanity is going down.

00:40

We are now the last empire. That empire

00:43

is getting weaker and weaker, more and

00:44

more desperate and cannot tolerate that

00:48

there are different views. I mean the

00:51

more weak you are, the more intolerant

00:53

you are.

00:56

LYANNA PETROVA: Welcome to World Affairs and Context

00:58

everybody. I’m Lyanna Petrova and today

01:00

I’m honored to welcome back a fantastic

01:03

guest Dr. Jan Oberg. Jan is a Swedish

01:05

peace and conflict researcher, author

01:08

and co-founder of the Transnational

01:10

Foundation for Peace and Future Research,

01:12

which is an organization I absolutely

01:14

admire and I follow on Substack and on

01:17

Twitter or X. I highly highly recommend

01:19

that all our viewers subscribe to it as

01:22

well. Jan, welcome back to the program.

01:24

Thank you so much for joining.

01:26

>> OBERG: Oh, it’s a great pleasure for me being

01:28

with you. I think you’re doing such good

01:31

and important and highly relevant,

01:33

urgently important work. So, I hope I

01:36

can contribute to it. So, we have some

01:38

synergy from sitting here. Let me just

01:40

add to your introduction that um the

01:44

Transnational Foundation is completely

01:47

independent of government

01:51

funding and corporate funding. We are

01:53

only people financed, and we are all

01:55

volunteers, 50 people around the world.

01:58

I just want to say that because there’s

02:00

very little really truly free research

02:03

and public education left in the western

02:05

world in this area.

02:08

>> PETROVA: Absolutely. And thank you so much for

02:09

clarifying. I think it is very very

02:11

important to know that because there is

02:12

a big difference between the research

02:15

produced by government funded uh think

02:18

tanks and and institutes and those that

02:20

are independent like yours. Yeah,

02:23

absolutely. Um recently I came across

02:27

two outstanding articles that you

02:28

published on your Substack and um you

02:32

discussed um basically you focused on

02:34

the European Union’s transition to war

02:36

economies and I think this is the most

02:38

important topic of of of

02:42

today because this touches upon every

02:45

single aspect of our lives and it

02:47

increasingly feels as though Europe as a

02:50

whole is heading toward a major military

02:53

confrontation.

02:54

that we haven’t seen since World War II.

02:57

Um, Jan, would you give us a sense of

03:00

what you are observing across the EU in

03:02

terms of economic and security policy

03:04

transformations?

03:07

>> OBERG: Well, I chose a perspective that has not

03:10

been discussed as part of this

03:12

rearmament in Europe, which comes as a

03:16

very unfortunate consequence of the

03:18

stupid NATO expansion that was responded

03:21

to in an counter-productive way by by

03:25

Russia invading Ukraine and both parties

03:29

being happy to use the Ukrainian

03:32

people for their battle. Um and that

03:35

perspective was the economic one.

03:38

[clears throat] I was motivated by the

03:40

fact that you’ve heard secretary

03:42

generals of NATO, you’ve heard the

03:44

Danish prime minister, you’ve had a lot

03:46

of European leaders say that it’s a one

03:49

it’s one way to get the wheels running

03:52

in the European economy is to invest in

03:55

the military and switch to a war

03:57

economy. There’s all I mean it’s not I

03:59

don’t think the term war economy has

04:01

been put into any official document but

04:03

that’s what they do from a civilian

04:05

peacetime economy to converting it to a

04:08

military basically like the military

04:11

should be uplifting the rest of the

04:13

economy, and then I was reminded of the

04:17

fact that in the 70s and 80s we were a

04:20

number of peace researchers and

04:22

economists

04:23

who worked with the issue of what was at

04:27

that time called conversion and that was

04:29

the idea could you convert the military

04:32

industry to civilian industry and get

04:35

a beneficial effect of that, for

04:38

instance there was the Swedish diplomat

04:40

or disarmament minister Inga’s big study

04:44

in the United Nations of this and I sat

04:47

at the time at the Danish government’s

04:49

security and disarmament commission and

04:52

the whole thing about what is the

04:53

relationship between military

04:55

investments and civilian investments

04:58

is something that we should discuss now

05:01

because I can tell you now at that time

05:05

and today there does not exist any

05:09

study, any piece of research, any book,

05:13

any dissertation that proves that you

05:16

get more beneficial um effects of

05:20

military investments than you do from

05:22

similar civilian investments in the

05:25

economy. So if you want to waste money,

05:28

go for the military. If you want to

05:30

waste and get less employment effects,

05:34

innovative effects, spillovers to the

05:36

civilian sector, uh worse hospitals,

05:39

less cultural life, less welfare for the

05:41

people, keep on militarizing your

05:43

economy. It’s: there is nobody who has

05:46

proved the opposite of what I just said.

05:49

Interestingly enough,

05:52

those who say this today are not

05:54

research institutes. We are the only one

05:56

here in Sweden, not in the only one in

05:58

Sweden, we the only one in Europe, who

06:00

have published this analysis saying

06:04

these things.

06:06

No other research institute have done

06:08

it. Not CRI, not PO, not the other peace

06:11

research, not those you would expect

06:12

knowing about economy and military and

06:16

beneficial or nonbeneficial effects of

06:18

it. It’s the banks

06:21

and the bank studies you will find if I

06:24

remember correctly the one is from the

06:26

Danish National Bank and I think the um

06:29

European bank too are clearly saying

06:33

that there are less effects from

06:36

military investments than there would be

06:38

from comparable equally large civilian

06:41

investments. So if you want to I mean

06:45

Europe is in deep economic crisis.

06:48

Germany is falling apart as everybody

06:50

knows. Volkswagen is probably going to be

06:52

taken over by China. You have written

06:55

you have you’ve given a lecture in your

06:57

own program which is excellent about

06:59

these things which I was happy to

07:01

repost. Everybody knows that we are in

07:04

crisis, and there are competitors such as

07:06

China and Russia to a certain extent and

07:09

the US is giving us all these kinds of

07:11

problems with Trump and tariffs and god

07:14

knows what. We’re now choosing European

07:17

leaders are now choosing something that

07:20

they must know if they are not ignorant

07:23

beyond uh permissible

07:26

will make the economy less growth

07:29

oriented, less welfare oriented, less

07:32

innovative in the civilian sector. And

07:35

therefore I call the subtitle of my

07:37

article “Are they ignorant or do they lie

07:41

deliberately?” because they cannot all

07:43

these leaders basically everybody has

07:45

said it is that state leaders they

07:48

cannot not know from their experts if

07:51

they lose any um from their banks etc.

07:54

They cannot be ignorant about the fact

07:56

that I’ve just told you there is no

07:58

study that proves that what they [Europe’s leaders] say is true.

08:01

——

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of this site. This site does not give financial, investment or medical advice.

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