After enthusiastically selling the war since its inception, the mainstream media in Europe may be beginning to change its tune.
As the undeniable failure of Ukraine’s much-anticipated counter offensive begins to sink in on the old continent, another crack in the media narrative around the conflict has appeared — and what’s more in one of Europe’s newspapers of record, Spain’s El País. On Monday, the newspaper published an op-ed (behind paywall) by José Luis Cebrián titled “Defending Ukraine to the Death… of Ukrainians.” The article raises serious concerns about the real objectives of the war, the way it is being waged and its impact on the European Union, much of which is encapsulated in the article’s sub-heading:
“The war is a proxy war between NATO and Russia that has roots that predate the invasion whose immediate consequence has been the subordination of the EU project to the objectives of the [NATO] military alliance.”
This one sentence makes three points that are hardly news to NC readers but may be to many loyal El País readers: first, what is happening in Ukraine is not a David versus Goliath struggle between an aggressive superpower and a small but plucky neighbour, as newspapers like El País have been claiming for the past year and a half, but rather a proxy war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers; second, its roots long predate Russia’s Special Military Operation of February 2022; and third, the EU project has essentially been subordinated to NATO’s military goals, which are essentially Washington’s military goals.
A Very Influential Man
Granted, the article is an opinion piece, meaning it does not reflect the newspaper’s official editorial line. But Cebrián is not your average contributing op-ed writer. He is the co-founder and honorary president of El País, as well as former CEO and chairman of Grupo Prisa, the Spanish media conglomerate that owns the newspaper. He is also vice president of the Asociación de Medios de Información, a Spanish media lobbying group. According to Wikipedia, “Cebrián has been considered by various international media as one of the ten most influential Spaniards in Spain and Latin America for 44 years (from 1976 to 2019).”
He is also, as Wikipedia notes, “the only Hispanic academic member of the Bilderberg Club and the only Spanish-speaking member with executive functions in that organisation.”
In other words, anything Cebrián writes in El País, the newspaper he helped create, holds weight. It also means that the message conveyed in this op-ed, which represents a stark departure from the prevailing media narrative of the last 18 months and is based on a speech Cebrián recently gave to the participants of a program organised by Madrid’s Complutense University and the Institute for Strategic Studies, comes from the very highest levels of Europe’s media establishment.
Now, a few choice excerpts (comments in brackets my own):
We are facing a transcendental issue for the future of Europe upon which the political class has avoided any debate in recent electoral campaigns, despite the implications for the security and development of our country.
In order to analyse the effects of the war, it is necessary to look at its causes (NC: what a smart idea!! If only El País and other influential media had done this 18 months ago!), both the deep-rooted and the more recent ones. I began (my speech) by evoking John L. O’Sullivan, an American journalist who in 1845 proclaimed the “manifest destiny” of the as yet inexistent US empire. Said destiny was to spread throughout the continent, “allotted by providence for the development of a great experiment in freedom and self-government.” This is how he justified the annexation of Texas, Oregon and California, before the United States seized more than 50% of the territory of Mexico and intervened in the Cuban and Philippine revolutions against the Spanish crown.
After describing the westward expansion of the fledgling United States and the early spasms of the US empire, Cebrián proceeds to plot the US’ passage through two world wars, for which, he says, Western Europe owes “the people and government of the United States” a “debt of gratitude.” But he also discusses the US’s many military misadventures, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Libya and Sudan, and their heavy toll, including 500,000 deaths in Iraq alone.
Mackinder and Brzezinski
After that, Cebrián brings in Halford Mackinder’s World Island theory — the idea that “whoever rules the continental heartland (of Eurasia) controls the World Island, and whoever rules the World Island controls the world.” He then recounts how the former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski used that theory to push for NATO expansion right up to the borders of the newly formed Russian Federation. Most controversially, the plan included incorporating the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia into the military alliance (two glaring red lines for Russia’s political and military establishment):
[Brzezinski] recognised that Russian public opinion and broad segments of Ukrainian society considered the shared origin, and therefore destiny, of both countries inviolable. Against this backdrop, there was at least one verbal agreement between the United States and Moscow that guaranteed that Kiev would not join the Alliance, as an unwritten condition for prompt German reunification.* Brzezinski argued that the new European security framework should be based on a close alliance between France, Germany, Poland (his native country) and Ukraine. That would be the way to dominate the heart of Eurasia and by extension control the world. This is the path we are on…
In 2013, the White House sponsored the Euromaidan coup and popular revolution against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president. Moscow’s response was to invade Crimea in 2014. That same year Jens Stoltenberg was appointed Secretary General of NATO, who has pursued out an opportunistic policy of publicly arguing for cooperation with Russia while deploying forces in the countries of central Europe, despite concerns, flagged by Kissinger among others, that no government in the Kremlin would allow the installation of potentially offensive bases 300 kilometres from Moscow.
Russia, A Country in Decline
Russia, Cebrián then says, is a country “in decline,” with a shrinking population and gross domestic product, before adding that “it remains the world’s leading nuclear power.” This is a bizarre statement given that Russia’s autarkic economy has weathered 18 months of all-out war against it from both the US, the world’s [declining] economic superpower and the EU. It also just overtook Germany to become the fifth wealthiest economy in the world and the largest in Europe on PPP (purchasing power parity) terms.
This, I suppose, goes to show that even as Europe’s elite begins recrafting a new narrative around the Ukraine war — which is beginning to happen as that same elite finally realises that Ukraine has zero chance of recapturing its lost territory while the damage to Europe’s economic health continues to mount — they will continue to downplay Russia’s strengths. The fact that Russia’s largely autarkic economy has withstood all 11 rounds of EU sanctions against it far better than the EU’s own economy is by the by…
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Nick Corbishley 