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.
18 July 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Its imperial master, the U.S. regime, won’t allow Germany’s stooges and media to blame it, though the U.S. regime unquestionably caused it. On 27 September 2022, I headlined “How America Is Crushing Europe” and explained the economic decline in Europe and especially Germany by providing documentation mainly from U.S. and German mainstream media, which hadn’t yet gotten the kabosh from the CIA and BND on reporting such facts, because the empire hadn’t yet figured out what the acceptable cover-stories for the decline would be — such idiocies as that Russia had voluntarily cut Europe off from its gas and oil, and that Russia had blown up its NordStream oil and gas pipelines (instead of that the U.S. anti-Russia sanctions and adoption of them by the EU had caused the former, and that either the U.S. or Ukraine had caused the latter — the NordStream bombings). The official ‘explanations’ of those matters were insults to the public’s intelligence but continue even today because the reality of why Europe’s economies are declining cannot be told without quite possibly causing the overthrow of the existing Governments.
That article was republished in Swedish (along with a photo of me) but not, to my knowledge, translated anywhere else on the Continent.
The first of the news-reports that I cited there was the New York Times’s 19 September 2022 “‘Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark: Manufacturers are furloughing workers and shutting down lines because they can’t pay the gas and electric charges.” Then came Handelsblatt’s 25 September 2022“Premium Economic Policy: In the wake of the USA: More and more German companies are expanding their locations in North America”. It was the first news-report to point out that though Germany was suffering from this, America was benefitting from it.
My article continued:
Also on the 25th, the Irish Examiner bannered “European industry buckles under weight of soaring energy prices: Volkswagen, Europe’s biggest carmaker, warned last week that it could reallocate production out of Germany and eastern Europe if energy prices don’t come down.”
Also on the 25th, Oil Price dot com headlined “Europe Faces An Exodus Of Energy-Intensive Industries”, and mentioned especially that “the U.S. Steel giant ArcelorMittal said earlier this month that it would slash by half production at a steel mill in Germany and a unit at another plant, also in Germany. The company said it had based the decision on high gas prices. … ArcelorMittal earlier this year announced it had plans to expand a Texas operation.”
On September 26th, the New York Times bannered “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s: U.S. manufacturing is experiencing a rebound, with companies adding workers amid high consumer demand for products.” In total, “As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above prepandemic levels.” And this is only the start of America’s re-industrialization and economic recovery, because the hemorrhaging of jobs from Europe has only just begun. These German firms are getting in on the ground floor in America, leaving Europe’s workers behind, to swim or sink on their own (the ones that can).
Also on September 26th, Thomas Fazi at unherd dot com headlined “The EU is sleepwalking into anarchy: Its sanctions are crippling the bloc’s working class”, and documented that this hollowing-out of Europe’s economies is being experienced the most by Europe’s lower economic classes, who are the least capable of dealing with it but are being abandoned by the higher-wealth group, the investors, who are sending their money abroad, like banana-republic oligarchs do, and who might easily relocate themselves there too.
Then on 24 June 2023, I headlined “Now the Pay-off Comes from Blowing Up the Nord Stream Pipeline” and opened
On June 23, Jamison Cocklin headlined at Natural Gas Intelligence, “Venture Global Set to Become Germany’s Biggest Long-Term LNG Supplier” and reported: “Venture Global LNG Inc. has agreed to supply a state-owned German company with the super-chilled fuel for two decades as European offtakers continue to line up deals to replace Russian natural gas imports.” Upstream Energy simply bannered “Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier”. It’s a very big deal.
I pointed out that the prices under the contract were being hidden, and then I cited experts in the topic, and they said that it would be at least double what Germany had been paying for Russia’s pipelined (not condensed, canned, trans-Atlantic-shipped, then trucked or trained) LNG from America.
Nw on 18 July 2026, Alexander Mercouris, who likewise has long been predicting Germany’s (and Europe’s) “deindustrialization” to result from what the U.S. regime is doing to Europe, headlined at The Duran, “Volkswagen Collapse. 100,000 Jobs Cut as Germany’s Deindustrialization Hits Home” and said:
00:00
All right, Alexander, let’s uh talk
00:02
about uh Volkswagen and the uh problems
00:06
that the German car manufacturer is
00:09
having.
00:11
Deindustrialization —
00:13
looks like it’s hitting Volkswagen as
00:14
well as intense competition from China.
00:19
What are your thoughts?
00:20
>> Well, first of all, just to remind
00:23
everybody that back in February 2022,
00:27
when uh Germany announced that it was
00:29
suspending operations of Nord Stream 2,
00:33
we said that Germany was going to find
00:36
itself very soon, very quickly, in a
00:38
process of deindustrialization.
00:41
That is exactly what has happened. This
00:44
announcement from Volkswagen that
00:46
they’re going to start sacking 100,000
00:49
of their employees around the world, not
00:50
just in Germany, I should say, but this
00:53
is going to bring the fact that
00:55
deindustrialization is taking place in
00:58
Germany, it’s going to bring these home
01:01
to the German people like nothing else
01:03
that has happened up to this moment, and
01:06
it is proving enormously controversial
01:09
and is causing a lot of angst in
01:12
Germany. Now, I think before we proceed,
01:15
just a few things to say about how
01:18
important the car industry
01:21
in Germany Germany is and Volkswagen’s
01:25
absolutely central importance in it.
01:28
Germany was the place the country where
01:31
they invented the internal combustion
01:35
engine. Germany, in other words,
01:37
launched modern car manufacturing.
01:42
It has been Germany’s most iconic
01:44
industry, certainly since the end of the
01:47
Second World War, and it’s not just an
01:51
industry that puts together cars. I
01:54
mean, there is an enormous
01:56
um
01:57
back,
01:58
you know, back heartland, if you like,
02:01
of German industrial companies, small
02:04
family businesses, Mittelstand
02:06
businesses, that act as compo- component
02:09
suppliers, and are there forming part of
02:14
the supply chain that goes to make
02:17
German cars. So, this is a very
02:20
important industry. It is also very
02:22
psychologically
02:24
important to to the Germans. And when
02:26
the Germans um, think of their country
02:30
as a major exporter,
02:33
it is first and foremost as an exporter
02:37
of what Germans for a very long time
02:40
have assumed are the world’s best cars.
02:43
And Volkswagen is one of the big three.
02:47
Uh, in fact, it is one of the three
02:49
German companies that makes cars. The
02:51
biggest, of course, is Daimler Benz. The
02:54
second is Volkswagen. The third, which
02:57
is much smaller, is BMW, which, by the
03:00
way, in terms of the German car
03:03
industry, is a relatively new company
03:07
into I mean, it really became
03:09
significant as a car manufacturer,
03:12
volume car manufacturer, in the late
03:14
1960s. So, this is a huge shock. And it
03:18
just brings home, at a particularly
03:21
delicate political moment in Germany,
03:26
the extent of the decline. Now, the
03:29
Germans, the German media, the German
03:32
political class, are all saying that
03:36
this is because of competition from
03:38
China. This is now the new narrative.
03:41
And um,
03:43
the two of us, as people from the Greek
03:46
world,
03:47
will find some of the arguments, and if
03:50
you like, excuses, that are coming up
03:54
in Germany now, uh explaining this
03:58
decline of Volkswagen, really very
04:01
interesting. You know, it’s said that
04:03
China
04:04
um is overfocused on exports, that China
04:08
engages in unfair competition,
04:12
that um
04:14
the way the the Chinese are running an
04:18
excessively
04:20
big current account surplus.
04:24
Just a few years ago,
04:26
many people in Europe were making
04:29
exactly the same criticisms of the
04:31
Germans, and the Germans used to respond
04:34
by saying that all the people were
04:36
saying is that Germany and its
04:38
industries were too efficient. Now,
04:42
that, if you like, the boot is on the
04:44
other foot, and it’s Germany’s
04:46
industries that are in decline. The
04:50
Germans are making the same set of
04:52
arguments that used to be made against
04:55
them, and which they always responded
04:58
very negatively to.
05:00
…
——
What’s happening in America’s European colonies now is that the U.S. imperial regime needs Europeans no longer just to fear and hate (the largest European nation) Russia and not to import from it, but to fear and hate China and not to import from it. By not importing from Russia — the world’s richest nation in natural resources, and the cheapest source in Europe for them — Europe inevitably will become (and is becoming) less competitive than the rest of the world. For Russia the necessity is to find non-European economic partners to replace those in Europe. The U.S. imperial regime is forcing the rest of the world into an “Either you’re with us or you’re against us” straightjacket, not Stalin’s and Truman’s Iron Curtain bifurcating between The East and The West, but instead purely the U.S. imperial regime’s doing it in order to warn peoples everywhere that if you don’t do as we say, you are our enemy and we and the IMF and the World Bank and the entire post-WW2 U.S.-designed international system will squeeze you until you too become a colony of the American empire. China knows that it is an even bigger target for the billionaires that control the American empire and will, like Russia in natural resources, become compelled to increase the percentage of its exports that will be going to the countries that haven’t yet — by either coup or invasion — become taken over by the U.S. imperial regime. So, with this bifurcation, the fates of both Russia and China are becoming forced by the U.S. regime to become one shared fate, or else to become themselves captured by the U.S. regime. I have elsewhere, on 28 August 2011, headined “Why RussChina Will Probably Be the Dominant Nation Beyond the Year 2100”, and opened:
China is already a serious contender to become the world’s dominant nation because of its Governmental system and because that system has produced by far a larger number of highly intelligent and well-educated people than any other nation has. China’s most-basic asset is its having the world’s largest population; and, to this, its Governmental system has increased (added to) the effectiveness of that population, so as to make China already the world’s #1 nation regarding human resources.
Russia is an adjoining nation which has, by far, the world’s largest landmass. Here are the world’s ten largest-landmass countries:
https://www.infoplease.com/world/geography/largest-countries-world-area
The top ten largest countries, in square kilometers.
|
Rank |
Country |
Area in sq. km |
|
1 |
17,098,242 |
|
|
2 |
9,984,670 |
|
|
3 |
9,826,675 |
|
|
4 |
9,596,961 |
|
|
5 |
8,514,877 |
|
|
6 |
7,741,220 |
|
|
7 |
3,287,263 |
|
|
8 |
2,780,400 |
|
|
9 |
2,724,900 |
|
|
10 |
2,381,741 |
The drop between #s 6 (Australia) and 7 (India) is a very sharp 58% decline down to a nation that has only 42% as much land. From #7 on downward below #6 are, by stark contrast, only gradual declines.
Roughly speaking, the size of a nation’s natural resources (such as fuels, metals, rare-earth elements, etc.) is proportional to the given nation’s landmass-size. Russia is consequently the nation with the largest natural resources, just as China is the nation with the world’s largest human resources.
The billionaires who control today’s dominant nation, which is the U.S., understand this. They understand that in order to REMAIN the world’s dominant nation, the U.S. Government will need to grab Russia, or China, or (if that turns out not to be possible) grab its own adjoining country of Canada. Since U.S. and Canada already speak the same language and adjoin each other, CanAmerica would be the likeliest outcome of that.
Consequently, RussChina will probably be contesting against CanAmerica to be the world’s dominant country. Because RussChina would likely have both the world’s largest population and the word’s largest landmass, RussChina would probably be #1, and CanAmerica #2.
Look at a globe of our planet. There is enormously more land near the North Pole than near the South Pole: North of 45 degrees latitude is Canada, virtually all of Europe, and all of Russia, and, of course, Greenland, while south of 45 degrees latitude is virtually nothing at all (other than Antarctica, which is the fifth-largest continent, nearly twice the size of Australia and larger than Europe, and having an area of 14,200,000 kilometers, which is almost as large as Russia; so, Antarctica might be the most thriving place of all just prior to global burnout). Both in the northern hemisphere, and in the southern hemisphere, deserts are increasing at an alarming rate, and agriculture is dying, so billions of people will be trying to migrate northward toward Canada, Russia, Greenland, and northern Europe. Consequently, as global warming accelerates into global burning, and as droughts and forest-fires and floods consequently increase and agriculture collapses in the more-equatorial nations, billions of people will be clamoring to migrate either into RussChina or into CanAmerica (the two leading countries), both of which will consequently become multi-ethnic so that nationality in the future will have less and less of an impact upon one’s culture.
CanAmerica will be receiving lots of migrants from south of the border with Mexico; and Russia will come to be dominated by migrants from RussChina’s south, in China. Migrants into RussChina from other countries will, of course, not be granted automatic acceptance. Unfortunately, billions of people who will be trying to migrate into RussChina, and into CanAmerica, will be turned away. …
——
I have, on occasion, used the term ChinUssia instead, especially because nowadays the assumption is made that China has a brighter future than Russia, and that America has a brighter future than Canada. My timeline extends farther than is of concern to most theorists. On 19 May 2024, I headlined “China & Russia (ChinUssia or RussChina) Announce Their Foreign Policy”, and presented the 16 May 2024 “Joint Statement between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation on Deepening the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination for a New Era.” It mainly concerned bilateral relations, and three times it used the key phrase “win-win” — and, though nothing was said negatively against their common enemy which is determined ultimately to control them both, that phrase (“win-win”) is anathema to ANY empire; and, so, they were ever so gently committing their nations to a shared “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination for a New Era,” which “new era” extends to the entire world. The more that the U.S. imperial regime continues along its imperialistic path that started on 25 July 1945, the stronger the mutual bonds will become between Russia and China.
—————
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.

