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
…
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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.
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.

