Weaponizing Time: Elite Anxiety and the Fight for a Closing Window

 

Welcome aboard Worldlines! You’ve joined a space where we untangle the threads connecting geopolitics, societal issues, and modern history. As someone exploring how people and places shape our world, I’m excited to share research-driven insights that go beyond the usual headlines. For now, you’ll receive select analyses right in your inbox. But if you’re curious to look deeper—from detailed curated bibliographies to subscriber-only discussions—consider upgrading to full access. The first of a two-part analysis. Here, we dissect the ideological and historical roots of Western elite panic. Next, we examine its material base and the dangerous military doctrines it has spawned. Nel Aug 21   READ IN APP   Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) - This Romantic masterpiece embodies the fog that permeates contemporary geopolitics. Created during Europe's imperial scramble, the painting's obscured vision mirrors how Western elites both navigate and manufacture uncertainty in the multipolar age. Prelude: The Mist That Never Burns Off We stand at an inflection point where the very architecture of global order is being recalibrated. Dmitry Trenin, former colonel of Russian military intelligence, director emeritus of the Carnegie Moscow Center, and astute chronicler of an emergent multipolarity, frames this process in early July 2025 as he observed: “Many are now talking about humanity drifting toward a ‘third world war’... In fact, the world war is already here, even if not everyone has noticed or realized it. The pre-war period ended for Russia in 2014, for China in 2017, and for Iran in 2023... This is not a ‘second cold war.’ Beginning in 2022, the West’s war against Russia took on a decisive character.” Trenin's insight is clear: conflict now permeates the global system like fog, diffuse, omnipresent, obscuring the horizon. This article, however, looks beyond the visible eruptions (as critical as they are): Tariffs rise, joint war games hosted by Australia not seen on this scale before, and nuclear sharing arrangements from Washington to London are now announced in the press. Then there are the verbal nuclear tensions, or what KJ Noh, a geopolitical analyst specializing in the continent of Asia, recently called dangerous precisely because it signals movement up the escalation ladder:“The signals themselves are part of that ladder." And most recently, Washington has moved ships and troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela while placing President Nicolás Maduro on a wanted list. Such events and processes are serious symptoms. But what lies beneath all of this? Our focus will examine the subterranean frameworks of elite cognition, which have developed over time, that convert economic emergence into an existential threat. When Trenin speaks of a war “already here,” he describes a reality where development itself, technological leaps, infrastructure corridors, and resource sovereignty are seen as weapons by Western (elite) perception. The mist that grows out of these worldviews is obscuring the chessboard, and it is (partly) manufactured. This, then, is a dissection of that fog’s composition: Elite panic over narrowing resource access and fading ideological monopoly. Strategic ambiguity: a deliberate weaponization of time and uncertainty that forces rivals to hedge everywhere at once. Multi-Domain Operations (MDO): the doctrine that stitches finance, information, cyber, and kinetic force into one rolling, low-visibility offensive. Washington and its closest allies (or vassals) are not even trying to out-develop BRICS on civilian terms; they aim to bleed them, to overextend them, to underpower them: economically, diplomatically, kinetically—before the technological gap flips irreversibly. What we are observing is a desperate game of chance based on the assumption that military attrition can (at least) stall a tectonic shift in the current global order. That choice, rooted in an older colonial logic which framed “non-Western development” as inherently threatening, explains why every Russian drone or Chinese port deal is read as casus belli. The hourglass drains as Western elites weaponize time itself, turning uncertainty into their sharpest weapon through a fog deliberately engineered not to burn off; for in this manufactured mist, they seek to stall the very shift they cannot prevent. Introduction: A Changing World A quiet, palpable panic simmers beneath the official communiqués of Washington and Brussels. This elite anxiety defies conventional polling, not least because its subjects expertly evade scrutiny. It is deeper, almost existential: a dawning recognition among Western power centers, particularly the United States and its core dependencies, that their entrenched political, economic, and military hegemony is unraveling. Surface manifestations appear frantic, even disorganized, yet this panic fuels a far more perilous response: calculated, systematic escalation. The post-1945 order, engineered for transatlantic dominance, frays as BRICS consolidates influence, sovereign assertions multiply, and critical resources flow beyond Western control. For elites whose material and symbolic status depends on global primacy, this shift threatens more than markets or ideology; it undermines their foundational position in the world hierarchy. The loss is tangible: energy supplies, mineral wealth, shipping lanes, and the ability to dictate rules of trade and finance now resist their reach. Extraordinary profits shrink, military power projection falters, and coercive leverage over commercial agreements weakens. This anxiety has roots in history. To understand its depth, we must revisit the contrasts between today’s multipolar challenge and the Cold War era it superficially resembles. I. From Cold War Containment to Material Erosion Comparisons to the Cold War reveal the distinction. Back then, the Soviet Union offered an ideological rival but did not jeopardize the core material underpinnings of Western power. Global resource flows remained secure, and technological leadership was largely intact. Containment was brutal but feasible: as Lindsey A. O’Rourke documents, the U.S. executed 64 covert and six overt regime-change operations between 1947 and 1989. China’s rise is qualitatively different. It reshapes the channels through which global capital and resources move. Unlike the isolated Soviet experiment, China embedded itself in supply chains while simultaneously building parallel systems of trade, finance, and infrastructure. Economist Yi Wen captures the transformation in The Making of an Economic Superpower: “China's development experience showed to the world that the centuries-long Western-style 'natural' and lengthy market-fermentation process can be dramatically accelerated and re-engineered by the government, by its acting as the market creators in place of the missing merchant class—yet without repeating the Western powers’ old development path of barbaric primitive accumulations based on colonialism and imperialism and slave trade.” What this model challenges is not merely Western ideology but the very narrative of exceptionalism that has justified elite power for centuries. An Existential Model Shift This alternative model disproves Western exceptionalism. Prosperity no longer appears tethered to liberal democracy or free-market capitalism, undermining both ideology and material dominance. As historian Adam Tooze observed in his June 2025 address at the Center for China & Globalization: “When large-scale development happens, it's obviously a huge human benefit, but it also utterly changes the power balance.” In green technology, for example, China “has completely broken the envelope” with ultra-high voltage transmission, creating “the global electrostate… proudly bearing the China State Grid label.” Tooze concludes: “Power is entailed, and dependency is entailed… We need to talk détente. We need to talk mutual coexistence.” Technological change does more than solve shared challenges; it reshapes geopolitical hierarchies. Western elites face a comprehensive reordering of the systems that sustained global primacy since 1945: resource access, financial mechanisms, and the technological edge that underpinned military dominance. Digital hegemony remains contested but not yet lost; time remains to attempt victory in the technological-military race—a fact evident in the growing fusion of military-tech corporations and war-driven state actors. Strategic Ambiguity and Elite Survival Within this context, strategic ambiguity—deliberate, public unpredictability—and synergetic multi-domain operations—integrated military, economic, and psychological pressure—emerge less as tactical maneuvers than as survival mechanisms. They aim not at outright victory but at maintaining the appearance of control. Born from supremacist frameworks and amplified by deepening inequality, these doctrines were first described not as Western innovations but as alleged Russian or Chinese “efforts to remain below the threshold of armed conflict,” as one 2020 Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin article put it. Ironically, they forecast the very doctrines NATO and U.S. planners would refine for themselves. As Emmanuel Todd has noted, projection often reveals more about the accuser than the accused. What we are witnessing is a desperate gambit: ambiguity and integrated pressure deployed to manufacture friction, delay an irreversible transformation, and preserve privilege against the momentum of history. With this backdrop, the article turns to the deeper structures and historical continuities that explain how elite anxiety has transformed into a doctrine of permanent, low-visibility conflict. II. The Ideological Foundations of Elite Panic A world in flux disrupts not only geopolitics but the mental architecture of those who believed history had ended in their favor. As geopolitical economy analyst Warwick Powell observes, the slow decline of Western hegemony brings into question the entire philosophical edifice that justified its global dominance: “The question of civilizational dialogue is becoming more pressing because the monologue of a singular, linear European developmental story is no longer sustainable… We are now confronting a new dimension of the ‘empire’s abyss’—its narrative framework, or its mental model of how the world works, no longer reflects its former ideological ambitions.” The story Powell names, colonial liberalism, rests on a hierarchical view of human development: that freedom, civilization, and rational governance unfold along a European timeline, measured by proximity to Western norms. Religious and secular strands meet here: Hegel and Mill, missionary and merchant, university and gunboat. The belief in a civilizing mission still informs foreign policy, even when cloaked as “democracy promotion” or “humanitarian intervention.” This architecture adapted with the slow process of decolonization. Where the metropole once ruled by decree, it now governs by standards, benchmarks, and conditionalities. Where the empire once drew borders, it now sets rules for trade, finance, data, and “responsible” technology. And when material realities threaten the story, the story is rewritten as a threat assessment. (Which in turn informs actions.) Racial Militarism as Prehistory Jasmine K. Gani, a scholar of international relations in a historical perspective, shows that European militarism surged not from a sense of superiority alone but from civilizational anxiety, insecurity about rank when “an ascendant Muslim Orient” pressed close in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The response was twofold: material expansion and discursive boundary‑making. In her words: “This (insecurity) created an imperative to (re)assert a hierarchy through military expansion and derogatory stigmas about their rivals’ military capacity… an insistence on the Orient’s military and intellectual weakness was baked into European militarism. This racial militarism initially compensated for European self‑doubt and insecurity, later provided chauvinistic self‑knowledge, and finally offered moral justification for colonization.” Gani notes how proximity sharpened anxiety: ideologues often placed “Oriental” peoples relatively high, just below Europeans, so closeness had to be pried open with stigma. American ethnologist John Wesley Powell (1888) had already identified military strength, organization, and a capacity for destruction as traits of an “advanced, civilized community.” The equation held: to be modern was to monopolize organized violence at home and project it abroad. Read with Max Weber, the story is familiar: the monopoly of legitimate organized violence becomes the hallmark of the modern state, while the ability to project that violence becomes the hallmark of a “civilized” one. Rising militarism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries then “played a central role in embedding racial hierarchies in the European imagination,” which were materialized in colonial administration. Gani, thus, supplies the prehistory; what follows is its codification. Colonial Liberalism’s Strategic Reincarnations John M. Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics traces how early IR formalized this racial worldview. Between 1860 and 1914, two branches coalesced: racist‑realism (Mahan, Mackinder), seeking to contain the capable non‑white, and liberal racism (Pearson, Kidd), promising uplift that faded, when needed, into exterminatory projects. The “standard of civilization” ranked Europeans at the top (with Western hyper‑sovereignty and denial of Eastern and Southern sovereignty), “yellow barbarism” in the middle, and “black savagery” at the bottom. Hobson catalogs the fears that animated both branches: “yellow demography,” “tropical climate,” “racial inter‑breeding,” and the “enemy within” of an “unfit” white working class and shows how they influenced and, consequently, organized conquest and policy. In contemporary policy we can still recognize three lanes that reflect these worldviews: Liberal internationalism: civilize the periphery through “democracy promotion” (e.g., EU’s Eastern Partnership). Liberal realism: contain, then civilize via sanctions and proxy arming (e.g., AUKUS, export controls; sanction first, train later). Siege realism: contain the “barbarian at the gate” through rearmament and walls (e.g., TikTok bans, tariff schedules). These mental frameworks lead to routinized practices, embedded in law, procurement, and media. The names have changed; the organizing grammar has not. Still, there was a short historical exception. The Cold War Exception The Cold War represented a temporary deviation from this pattern, not its negation. Western elites viewed the USSR as an ideological rival rather than an existential threat to their domestic and global roles. During the post-war order, for forty years, western elites bought social peace to their countries: rising wages, cheap petrol, subsidized university places. Why? Because the USSR's very existence, combined with strong labour unions, made concessions cheaper than repression of inner opposition. Once the Soviet Union folded, the bargain expired. Profits recovered, inequality climbed, and social programs atrophied. The US functional and governing elites succeeded in containing the "threat" through forceful interventions (Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia), covert operations (El Salvador, Chile, Burkina Faso), and less coercive means in European countries. This allowed for détente and elite compromise (Nixon's China opening). The global opening to globalization rested on the idea of a civilizing mission through commerce, which "failed" specifically concerning China. But what about today? A Doctrinal Exhibit: Russian Perspective and Operational Framework (2020) A recent example of this grammar appears in the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin article Russian Perspective and Operational Framework. The paper warns that Russia employs a “whole‑of‑Russia” approach that blurs competition and conflict, and civilian and military spheres. It begins by admitting a categorical error that reveals the underlying framework: “We misapplied our own worldview to Russia and assessed Russia as European after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seeking to bring them into the NATO tent in the fight against violent extremism. We were disappointed when Russia acted as a distinct Eurasian nation state, wholly apart from Western Europe, that rejected a progressive NATO encroachment toward Moscow.” The authors then re‑cast a diverse policy repertoire as a single campaign: “While it may appear the Russians are conducting a broad range of discrete actions across the Eurasian landmass, it is actually a campaign across the theater. The Russians are employing new technologies and techniques to accomplish traditional tasks, which often obfuscates their intent or purpose.” Conceding that Russian actions are largely positional, they nevertheless fold everything into one category: “Russia remains opportunistic, but their actions are strategically defensive… The dichotomy between hybrid and conventional is a false one—Russia does not distinguish or compartmentalize warfare as the West does… Instead, when understanding Russia, and China, we should simplify their actions to one—warfare.” Having simplified, the conclusion follows: “unacceptable risks to NATO” and the need for “enhanced forward posture.” Thus, the barbarian‑containment frame persists without explicit slurs. Yet, port investments, gas contracts, or lithium deals are read as “below‑threshold warfare,” i.e., casus belli by other means. The significance lies less in tactical analysis than in assumption: non‑Western development is intelligible primarily as a threat. A civilizational coding—“Eurasian,” “not European”—anchors a worldview in which whole societies are construed as engaged in permanent, whole‑of‑nation warfare. That reading licenses a mirror response: continuous sanctions, information operations, posture changes, technology denial, and proxy support woven into a single operational fabric. Civilizational Essentialism in the Mainstream: Media as Ideological Conduit Once lodged in doctrine, the grammar travels from staff papers to the TV studio, where it tries to acquire popular legitimacy. Consider two appearances on Germany’s Markus Lanz, one by military analyst Florence Gaub (2022) and another by journalist Katrin Eigendorf (2025). Gaub offered the template: “We must not forget that, although Russians look European, they are not Europeans—at least not culturally. They have a different relation to violence, a different relation to death. There is no liberal, postmodern view of life where each person individually designs their own life as a project. Life can end early.” Eigendorf hardened the line: “I believe that, fundamentally, the understanding of what war is is different in Russia… This is the DNA from which what we are experiencing today has grown… The military has always been part of Russian DNA.” The pattern is consistent: an entire population is rendered war‑minded, death‑accepting, and collectively implicated in violence. “DNA” language pushes the argument toward biologized cultural determinism, a direct echo of early twentieth‑century eugenic thinking that Hobson catalogs. The move mirrors the military paper’s injunction to “simplify… to one—warfare.” As complexity collapses, the range of legitimate policy narrows; sanctions and collective punishment become thinkable as moral necessity. Emmanuel Todd’s aside captures the projection at work: “Russia is our Rorschach test.” However, the danger is not rhetorical excess alone. This discourse prepares the public for policies that treat entire societies as legitimate targets. Diplomacy shrinks, escalation reads as prudence, and “peace” becomes a synonym for capitulation. III. Temporal Panic Historian Paul Chamberlin reminds us that empires are governed by clocks (as they are by territory and resources). In the 1930s, a crowded world of empires generated enclosure anxiety: most of the globe was already partitioned; the United States rose meteoric in the West; the Soviet Union consolidated in the East. Leaders in Rome, Tokyo, and Berlin drew a blunt lesson: to matter, you must have an empire, and time was short. As Chamberlin puts it, aspiring powers felt they had “a short window of time to build themselves up and to seize… imperial territories” before they would be “at the mercy” of rival hegemons. Wars ignited not solely over abstract ideology but over access and order: who controlled territories, sea lanes, and resource flows. Britain and France fought Germany not because it was Nazi in essence, Chamberlin notes, but because it invaded Poland, threatened the existing structure; in Asia, Japanese encroachment on Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines triggered conflict. The lesson for today is the question of tempo. When U.S. planners speak of “shrinking windows” with China, they voice an old imperial anxiety in modern terms: act now or be constrained later. Present resonance: Washington now thinks in terms of supply‑chain sovereignty and chokepoint stewardship, not per se territorial expansion (even though this had been voiced by Trump around the question of Greenland and Canada). BRICS de-dollarization, nationalization of critical minerals, and the rerouting of energy corridors are perceived in Washington as threats. The fear is not just that ideology spreads; it’s that access hardens against leverage. Chamberlin’s observation that Britain went to war over territorial encroachment finds echoes in twenty‑first‑century practice, where interventions and sanctions aim less to promote democracy than to arrest realignment of control over pipelines, ports, and payments. The proxy template persists: 1940–45: The US leverages British imperial infrastructure while Soviet and Chinese forces absorb the continental blow; it chooses when and where to fight. 2022–25: The West uses Ukraine as an attrition sink against Russia (with the EU as subsidy sink and shock absorber); in the Indo‑Pacific, cultivate standoffs that keep Beijing reactive (e.g., Taiwan Strait transits, South China Sea patrols). Operationally, the continuity is stark. The 1940 Plan Dog memorandum set “Germany first” and envisioned using British imperial bases as launchpads. In September that year, the Destroyers‑for‑Bases deal exchanged decommissioned U.S. ships for 99‑year leases on British colonial sites across the Western Hemisphere. Maritime power, logistics, and amphibious proficiency allowed Washington and London to hold the initiative while the Soviets and Chinese fought largely on the defensive. By early 1944, Allied fear was no longer of Axis victory but that the Soviets would win too quickly and dictate peace: one motive for the rush to Normandy. The modern analogue is often about China: if Chinese tech‑industrial capacity races ahead, it will write the standards and close the window on coercive leverage. That temporal panic shapes today’s escalatory bias. Colonial Violence Repatriated Chamberlin is blunt about method. Anglo‑American “strategic bombing” prior to spring 1944 largely meant bombing civilians. The permissibility of such campaigns was incubated in the interwar colonies, where bombardment of Ethiopian towns or artillery against Damascus was coded as “savage warfare.” With World War II, that repertoire migrated home. In a “savage war,” the restrictions on “civilized” war do not apply; entire populations become targets; resettlement and reprisals follow. The same cognitive ladder that renders non‑Western societies “outside” the laws of civilized war makes population‑level targeting thinkable again. The category slides easily forward into the present. Today, population‑centric punishment frequently arrives through financial siege (broad sanctions that collapse wages and medicine imports), infrastructure strikes (grids, bridges, ports), and information throttling (de‑platforming and media bans). These are the late‑modern lineal descendants of the “savage war” toolkit: civilian pain is treated as leverage rather than as a constraint on policy. IV. Pointillist Empire: Light‑Touch, Heavy Leverage Out of this convergence emerged a lighter imperial form. As Daniel Immerwahr argues, post‑1945 America did not annex vast territories like empires of old. Yet, it built an archipelago of bases, paired with naval and air supremacy, financial chokepoints, and technological standards: a “pointillist empire” that could be everywhere, and, when signalling was needed, brutally exemplary. Amphibious reach, carrier groups, global airlift, and the ability to strike atomically or conventionally from dispersed nodes preserved initiative without formal colonies. Cultural and informational infrastructures, Hollywood, NGOs, and development banks completed the grid. This form is most vulnerable where multipolar sovereignty closes chokepoints and re‑routes flows. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 36 — “the terrific boomerang effect” of colonial violence. Closing Notes: Transition to Part II Methods refined abroad return to organize life at home (from the Western viewpoint); languages coined for an empire reappear as common sense. The feeling of time running out is not a novelty in imperial statecraft, but it is once again the principal accelerant. Where the metropole once feared territorial enclosure, it now fears sovereignty by other means: development banks with their own standards, lithium nationalization, energy corridors that bypass favored hubs, payment systems that ignore the dollar. The pointillist empire of bases meets a world busy rerouting the map. The response still follows an old grammar. Strategic ambiguity and the logic of multi-domain operations supply the administrative nerve of a “savage war” mindset updated for the 21st century: whole societies are read as civilizational threats, so whole societies become fair game through sanctions that collapse wages and medicine imports, through tech denial lists that strangle industrial lifecycles, through information campaigns that fix an enemy’s “DNA.” The media essentialism of Gaub and Eigendorf, along with the doctrinal simplifications in staff papers, provides a license for a strategy that must believe in the barbarism of its targets to justify permanent pressure or worse. In that fog, the wager is simple. Not to win in any decisive sense, but to win time: to keep the attrition plateau intact until some outside relief (a technological leap, a rival’s crisis) restores room to maneuver. It is governance by delay. What is happening in material terms? Which doctrines, budgets, and pipelines knit the fog together? Where might the plateau crack: fiscal saturation, alliance fatigue, or a lurch into escalation when other strategies stop working? Part II takes up those questions. We shift from worldview to machinery—qualitatively, by reading the texts and artifacts that do the work: Strategic ambiguity as tempo control: how “talks,” pauses, and feints choreograph strikes, force costly hedging, and keep rivals reactive. MDO’s finance-to-fires pipeline: how sanctions, export controls, cyber actions, and limited kinetic moves are sequenced as one operation. Multipolar resistance: how China, Russia, Iran, and non-aligned partners build endurance, and how their own clocks shape choices. If this essay clarified anything or made you ponder, add your voice. Comment, share, translate, argue with the premises. The debate over how time, technology, and ideology are being weaponized belongs to all of us, not just to think-tanks and late-night panels. Leave a comment Support Independent Analysis If this first installment on elite anxiety, strategic ambiguity, and the politics of time proved useful, please consider helping me keep this project going: Subscribe to this Substack for more long-form, qualitative analysis of geopolitics and political geography. Upgrade to paid Share the essay with friends, colleagues, classes, or on social platforms—debate thrives when ideas circulate. Share Join the discussion below: add corrections, sources, counterpoints, or leads for Part II. Leave a comment If this piece helped, consider buying me a coffee—thank you. Democracies fray when scrutiny fades. By subscribing or sharing, you help sustain independent journalism that cuts through noise and dogma. Contact: Bluesky: @themindness.bsky.social X: @noirnen Leave a comment Stay curious, Nel

Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony - article original + traduction automatique en Français

 

From Nord Stream’s sabotage to NATO’s 5 % arms push: Inside the Networks Fueling Transatlantic Madness

Nel

Jun 28, 2025

Hotel “De Bilderberg,” Oosterbeek (Netherlands), before the inaugural Bilderberg Conference — 30 May 1954. Photo: Anefo / Nationaal Archief (public-domain, CC 0).

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Prelude: The Lansing Memo Comes to Berlin

Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, dictated the 1924 “ambitious young Mexicans” memo. You know the line: open our universities to their élite, drench them in American values, and they’ll govern Mexico for us: better, cheaper, and without a single Marine. The method rings depressingly true today.

One hundred years after Lansing spelled out the blueprint, Germany has become its most perfected specimen. When Olaf Scholz’s cabinet greenlit the destruction of Nord Stream 2, an act of economic self-sabotage with no plausible strategic benefit for Germany, and Merz, now Chancellor, pledged never to use it again, they were betraying Germany. At the same time, they were fulfilling a biographical destiny forged out of their limited horizons, manufactured in Ivy League seminars, Pentagon workshops, and the velvet-lined chambers of the Atlantik-Brücke.

This is the story of an elite cohort trained to regard Atlanticism as synonymous with "Western civilization" itself. The costs: collapsing industrial output, energy poverty, and the specter of conscription, are borne by everyone else.

Introduction: The Madness and Its Method

Germany, an export titan that once closely guarded its economic sovereignty, now sacrifices its energy infrastructure, bankrolls long-range missiles (including the co-production of long-range weapons with Ukraine), and reverts to war-preparedness (so-called Kriegstüchtigkeit) as a virtue, while rehearsing mobilization plans for a NATO-Russia clash that would, first and foremost, churn German soil as the Operationsplan Deutschland lays out. This is a strategic realignment on a deeper level as a result of ideological automation. How else can we explain the enduring gap between public sentiment and elite decision-making?

A 2024 poll shows that 60 percent of Germans oppose further weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Yet Lars Klingbeil, SPD co-leader, vice-Chancellor, and Finance Minister, proclaims that for Germany to be “war-ready,” the Bundeswehr would need to be more attractive for potential conscripts, e.g., through the possibility of getting a driver's license for free from the federal government. Additionally, the coalition presses on with so-called strategic ambiguity.

These are the symptoms of a peculiar madness unfolding in Berlin. A nation that rebuilt itself from the ashes of war and division now willingly marches toward conflict with a nuclear-armed neighbor. The madness, however, follows a method.

Consider NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s recent proclamation at the 2025 summit:

"NATO is the most powerful defense alliance in world history—more powerful than the Roman Empire, more powerful than Napoleon’s empire… We must prevent Russian dominance because we value our way of life."

The historical illiteracy or obfuscation (depending on how we interpret Rutte’s statements) is staggering. Napoleon, like NATO today, justified continental domination as liberation. His invasion of Russia, a catastrophic failure, was framed as a preemptive strike against "aggressive" Tsarist expansion. The parallels write themselves.

Historian Jeff Rich, dissecting NATO’s Operation Spiderweb sabotage campaigns inside Russia, observed:

"NATO is the power base for elites who act in lockstep with U.S. geopolitical projection. When Rutte compares NATO to Napoleon, he forgets that Russia ultimately liberated Europe from that empire. Perhaps Russia will liberate Europe from the United States after this war."

What I’m trying to say is that this is not a conspiracy. It is institutionalized hegemony, operating through what Gramsci called the "cultural leadership" of a ruling class. But where Gramsci analyzed national elites vis-a-vis their fellow citizens, we now confront a transnational caste: German politicians like Jakob Schrot (more on him shortly), Dutch technocrats like Rutte (who recently called the current US president Trump “daddy” at the NATO summit that cements 5% defense spending), and French Eurocrats whose biographies, education, and career incentives align not with their citizens, but with the imperatives of keeping the project of US American unipolarity alive. The actions of these elites on the geopolitical chessboard are not just irrational; the governing elites are simply loyal to a different reference group

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I. The riddle: Why are European elites torching their own house?

As we begin to see, the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. It is far more banal and far more effective. The answer also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions. It also lies in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.

Elite Knowledge Networks

Inderjeet Parmar (2019) terms this the soft machinery of elite knowledge networks: “flows of people, money, and ideas” that institutionalize consensus from Washington to Berlin. The Fulbright Program, the German Marshall Fund, Atlantik-Brücke, the Munich Security Conference, and the Bilderberg Meetings are formative ecosystems. They sort, school, and elevate those who can carry the worldview forward.

Critically, these networks are not passive forums. They are “American elites’ essential power technology”: a mode of knowledge production and personnel selection that is spectacularly successful at reproducing a pro-U.S. worldview globally. Elite socialization in itself is not a benign process. It hardwires assumptions, defines what is politically imaginable, and naturalizes asymmetry.

The World Order

The liberal international order, which underlies these elites’ worldviews, far from being universalist, is built on a double logic. As Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, candidly admitted in 2017 during the first Trump administration, the very purpose of Euro-Atlanticism is to prevent a post-West world order:

Tomorrow I am meeting President Trump and I will try to convince him that euroatlantism is primarily cooperation of the free for the sake of freedom; that if we want to prevent the scenario that has already been named by our opponents not so long ago in Munich as the “post-West world order”, we should watch over our legacy of freedom together.

Within this system, inclusion is selective. Japan and South Korea, despite their loyalty, were never treated like Western Europe. And rising powers are either domesticated, coaxed to conform, or contained as threats. This logic is foundational: if incorporation fails, containment must follow.

Yet containment begins with minds, not missiles. The ideological assimilation of foreign elites is the first line of imperial defense. Thus, the maintenance of hegemony relies less on coercion than on soft incorporation. Elite knowledge networks, embedded in university programs, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks, act as vectors for this soft power. They socialize, recruit, and certify rising leaders.

Elite Integration Machines

As Parmar notes, these networks define what counts as “thinkable thought” and “askable questions.” The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, RAND Corporation, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for American Progress are elite integration machines where, through these processes of integration and socialization, a certain type of knowledge becomes power. Thus, a Fulbright or Atlantik-Brücke lapel pin becomes an all-access badge to Brussels and DC and the surest way to “belong.”

Yet this ecosystem is not the whole planet. A 2016 study by Eelke Heemskerk and Frank Takes, mapping 400,000 board interlocks, shows that the densest transnational elite cluster still resides on the North-Atlantic axis. The Asian corporate elite, by contrast, forms a separate, far less entangled community, structurally poised to build its own power base and perhaps an alternative, Sino-centric capitalism. The more Asia’s networks remain self-insulated, the greater the risk (in Euro-Atlantic elites’ eyes) of a genuine “post-West world order.”

In other words, Western think-tank pipelines are about pre-empting that divergence and protecting their elite sphere.

European elites are not merely influenced by the United States. Through this system, they are formatted, professionally shaped, and ideologically tethered to it. Of course, not wholly or completely, as if they had no autonomy at all or as if national history had no bearing on these elites, yet, each of these European nations' characteristics will give a unique flavor to the transatlantic worldview that informs their policies.

The result: U.S. foreign policy goals are not simply imposed on Berlin; they are voiced from within.

II. The Hegemonic Architecture: How Elite Capture Works

The liberal order sells itself as universal, yet those who join must accept the (publicly) unspoken rulebook. Those who do not join will be contained and encircled by a permanent U.S. military presence. In other words, the imperial core preserves its status by socializing other elites into its worldview rather than merely coercing them. Now, we’ll take a look at those elite integration machines (in particular, by analyzing the transatlantic ties of Germany and German functional elites):

1 From Chatham House to DGAP: A Brief Institutional Genealogy

Think‑tank power began in London with the Royal United Services Institute (1831), established by the Duke of Wellington as an independent professional body to study military and strategic issues. It broadened after 1919 when Chatham House and the Carnegie Endowment formalized elite debate (Roberts 2015). Across the Atlantic, the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) fused Wall Street wealth with Ivy League scholarship, with Ford and Rockefeller providing permanence. Corporate funding, after all. Indeed, the founders were often influential elites who sought coordination for their policies in the fields of defense and strategic thinking, first within the British Empire and then with the emerging American hegemon.

After 1945, the architecture was exported to a ruined Europe. The privately funded Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP, 1955) copied the CFR template in Bonn. The Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP, 1962) offered a more governmental cousin, supplying white papers directly to the Chancellery. However, importantly, after the Second World War, Anglo-American think tanks and their personnel became the center of policy formulation and long-term planning. Think tanks specializing in international affairs were generally considered essential supplements to the design of foreign policy. They also served as forums where politicians and bureaucrats could interact with representatives from the academic, media, and business worlds, as well as potential supporters or recruits for government operations.

In the 1960s, the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantic Institute, and Atlantik‑Brücke layered social glue on top of policy work through gala dinners, Young Leader jamborees, and media study tours but also influenced Western Germany’s political elites. Zetsche (2021) documents how the Brücke and its American sibling, the ACG (American Council on Germany), ensured Willy Brandt’s SPD drifted from neutralism to not abandoning NATO by cultivating party fixers in back‑channel seminars.

In the 1970s and 1980s, US think tanks already sensed an “American decline” in an increasingly globalized world. During this time, new institutional rivals for influence emerged, including think tanks committed to usually conservative perspectives, with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation at the forefront. (Now remember, the Heritage Foundation has funded Project 2025. A primer for today’s US policy.)

By the 1990s, every German party foundation ran a “Transatlantic Desk.” SWP staff circulated through the Munich Security Conference; DGAP fellows sat on the German Marshall Fund selection jury; editors at Der Spiegel and Die Zeit (an important newspaper in Germany) collected Atlantik‑Brücke alumni pins. The network matured into a seamless funnel: from university to party headquarters to boardroom to NATO off‑site. Ultimately, once U.S. validation becomes the yardstick of professional esteem, deviation is almost an act of self‑harm.

2 Why Think‑Tank History Matters Now

The architecture normalizes apparently suicidal choices. Shutting down cheap Russian pipeline gas is painful for BASF, but it sustains the reputational capital of everyone who holds an Atlantic fellowship. That internal incentive often outweighs national balance‑sheet logic.

What’s more: the think tank represents the forces that drive the global political economy, at least in its Western iteration. Still, geopolitical analysis today tends to be biased toward nation-states and their political actors. It is often through such networks of privately funded and influenced governance that the gap between the nation-state and global markets is filled (Heemskerk & Takes 2016).

3 Think Tanks as the Revolving-Door Engine

The map of institutions we have traced so far would be inert without a circulating cadre of professionals who glide between foundation cubicles, cable-news studios, and government offices.
Nourished by corporate endowments and philanthropic grants, U.S.–European think tanks act as both idea refineries and talent pipelines: they pre-agree the paradigm, then second their own staff to ministries that put it into practice.
Political economists Nano de Graaff and Bastiaan van Apeldoorn (2021) refer to this as the “policy-planning network”: a lattice that combines Fortune 500 funding, congressional alumni, and Ivy League credentialing into a single career escalator:

• Consensus workshop – Think-tank roundtables enable elites to harmonize positions in private before they become “non-partisan expertise” in public.

• Recruitment pool – The same institutes help presidents and cabinet secretaries fill executive-branch positions (McGann 2007).

• Revolving leverage – As Joseph Nye puts it, the most powerful influence is when you “get your own hands on the lever” after co-writing the brief (Conversations with History, 1998).

Together, these hubs function as a transatlantic HR department for the current order, grooming successors who will carry the banner forward.

4 Elite Capture on the Biographical Level

The machinery of elite capture operates on both the social group level and the individual biography level. And it is both simple and effective: a single prestige pipeline throughout one’s life and career from a Fulbright scholarship to a German Marshall Fund fellowship to an Atlantik-Brücke affiliation, and/or think-tank memberships. Such a career ladder has monopolized the symbolic capital required to ascend in Berlin’s foreign policy elite. The first cohort entered the system in the 1960s, but it achieved full self-replication after reunification. Today, many members of Merz’s cabinet boast U.S. State Department-funded fellowships, embassy internships, Atlantik-Brücke affiliations, or similar transatlantic ties; some hold board seats at Washington-aligned institutions, such as the Atlantic Council.

5 The Bourdieu Trap

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s framework reveals how the engineered life paths of these elites perpetuate themselves:

When one pathway dominates (the U.S. fellowship ladder), the field’s imagination of what is possible (in terms of actions and policies) atrophies. Embodied cultural capital (fluent Hill English, a Georgetown lanyard) converts into social capital (alumni networks), which crystallizes as symbolic capital (media legitimacy).

Dissent isn’t debated. It is rendered invisible and only actively excluded if it becomes too visible and loud. Such a hegemonic system, operating on a smaller scale among political elites, functions like a theological seminary, where deviation marks heresy and compliance brings canonization.

6 The Adolescent Capture

What is the most insidious feature of this elite socialization machine? It’s the question of time. The ideal pathway starts in adolescence, during the formative years when political worldviews congeal. Programs like:

• Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX)

• Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC)

target teens as young as 16, immersing them in Model NATO war games and U.S. Embassy "leadership training."

By the time these students enter university, their horizons are already narrowed. A 19-year-old returning from a State Department-funded summer at American University brings back English fluency (hopefully). Above all, they internalize a hierarchy of legitimacy: Washington’s priorities are neutral, universal, and common sense. Alternative modes of thinking about foreign policy, such as non-alignment, détente, and Eurasian trade, are filtered out as extremist or naïve.

This is ideological imprinting and the psychological construction of hegemony at the individual level. The result is a generation of political elites whose biographies read like U.S. State Department training manuals. The tragedy is that by the time these groomed elites reach positions of power in politics, media, or corporations, their compliance feels natural. They do not serve American interests because they are coerced; they do so because they cannot conceive of another way.

The abstract models I just presented here become clearer when we zoom out on a single national hub. Germany’s Atlantik-Brücke offers a textbook case.

III. The German Case: Atlantik-Brücke as Transmission Belt

Anne Zetsche’s archival deep dive on the Atlantik-Brücke and its U.S. sibling, the American Council on Germany (ACG), shows how an ostensibly “private” friendship society became a precision tool for post-war elite alignment. Like think tanks, it is a key institution in the elite integration and socialization machinery.

1 Founders & Fabric

• Eric Warburg, heir to the Hamburg banking dynasty, leveraged his Wall Street connections with John J. McCloy to reconnect German finance with U.S. capital markets; Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co. soon brokered Volkswagen’s first U.S. credit line.

• Marion Dönhoff leveraged Foreign Affairs soirées and George F. Kennan’s mentorship to rebrand German neutrality as “irresponsible.”

• Cosmopolitan elite habitus bound these bankers, editors, and counts. Their mission was to fold West Germany into a U.S.-led “community of nations” before either Moscow or Gaullist Paris could claim it.

2 The SPD’s Capture

• A neutral or Franco-centric West Germany was flagged as a deviation from the desired Atlantic trajectory: For example, Emmet Hughes and ACG envoys corresponded with Hamburg mayor Max Brauer to soften SPD anti-militarism (1950-54).

• By 1963, the ACG/Atlantik-Brücke tandem helped dilute the Élysée Treaty with a pro-NATO preamble.

• Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik also needed to be shifted away from a sustained and sovereign peace project into a NATO-approved "détente."

• Ford Foundation funds (via the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and AFL-CIO unions) underwrote youth seminars that purged the party of its Marxist undercurrents; an early example that philanthropy can have a profound impact, akin to intelligence work.

3 The Media

Annual Brücke dinners with NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander double as editorial retreats:

• Josef Joffe (Die Zeit), Kai Diekmann (Bild), and Stefan Kornelius (Süddeutsche Zeitung) are long-time members; ZDF anchor Claus Kleber once sat on the Brücke trust.

• The result is not a diktat but anticipatory alignment: mainstream outlets rarely frame German rearmament as optional. They frame it rather as the only way and ensure that mainstream discourse never strays from Atlanticist orthodoxy.

4 Boardroom Synergy

The Brücke board today represents a balance sheet of Atlantic capitalism, featuring prominent companies such as the American Chamber of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, and BASF. Media, law, and pharma sit beside CDU and SPD heavyweights; proof that “bipartisanship” here means fidelity to a shared transatlantic business model and world order.

5 Consensus Engineering in Action

• 2009 – Friedrich Merz (CDU) became the Brücke chair, then Germany’s head of BlackRock.

• 2019 – Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) takes over; critics fear a “provocateur,” but the appointment mainly neutralizes any residual SPD scepticism regarding the NATO 2 % target (which nowadays has become the 5 % target).

What appears to be a polite salon culture functions as a transatlantic transmission belt, diffusing U.S. preferences into German party platforms, boardrooms, and newsrooms without a single Pentagon directive.

Having traced how Atlantik-Brücke helped weld Germany’s post-war institutions into the wider transatlantic circuitry, we will now examine Bilderberg meetings as another conduit for transatlantic elite socialization.

IV. Bilderberg and the Business of Hegemony

The Bilderberg Group, often dismissed as a conspiracy theorists’ obsession, is in fact a critical node in what sociologist Kantor (2017) calls the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). An analysis of its 2010–2015 meetings reveals:

1 Who Sits at the Table?

• 67% of attendees were CEOs, bankers, or corporate directors (Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BP).

• Zero trade unionists were invited. The "dialogue" excludes labor by design.

• Corporate fraction dominates the TCC; politics is increasingly a service function of capital.

On the other hand, an analysis by Gijswijt (2019) shows us the post-Cold War composition of Bilderberg meetings when it was first establishing itself between 1954 and 1968:

• Roughly 25 % of attendees hailed from the United States, 14 % from the United Kingdom, and 9 % each from France and West Germany.

• 30 % were “businessmen, bankers, and lawyers,” 20 % “politicians and some trade-union leaders,” another 16 % diplomats, with the balance made up of academics, journalists, and senior officials from NATO, the World Bank, the OECD, and the IMF.

• Women were “glaringly absent.”

• Double-dipping by core firms & states

  • Deutsche Bank sent both the CEO & chair (2016); the Netherlands fielded the PM & King (2016).

  • Extra chairs secure agenda-setting and serve as evidence that economy > polity within elite coordination.

Those numbers demonstrate how closely Bilderberg’s center of gravity aligned with the Cold War core of the liberal order, encompassing Atlantic finance, defense, and diplomacy, while maintaining sufficient national representation to claim a pan-Western mandate.

2 Recruitment Through Recognition

The organizers “were always on the lookout for new talent” who could be socialized into the club. (Gijswijt 2019) Participation became a credential: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel each appeared before reaching high office. Far from being a smoky-room king-maker, the value lay in the prestige pipeline itself: a CV line that signaled ideological reliability and opened doors across Wall Street, Whitehall, and the Bundeskanzleramt.

3 Informal Diplomacy, Not Formal Decisions

No resolutions were passed and no minutes released, yet “[t]he real importance of the meetings was determined by what participants did with the symbolic capital they assembled.” (Gijswijt 2019) The conference functioned as a high-trust rehearsal room: ideas could be tried out, reputations vetted, and rival premises harmonized. That latent consensus then resurfaced in NATO communiqués, or EC white papers.

4 Identity Work and Alliance Management

By design, Bilderberg cultivated “a strong sense of emotional community based on conceptions of the Free World or the West.” (Gijswijt 2019) Simply showing up, especially for marquee U.S. figures, “stimulate[d] acceptance of the United States’ leadership role within NATO.” The meeting was therapy for transatlantic nerves: a place to absorb unilateral shocks, reset talking points, and leave with a reaffirmed hierarchy in which Washington remained primus inter pares.

5 Network Multipliers

Membership overlapped with the CFR, Chatham House, IFRI, DGAP, and later the Trilateral Commission, creating “a dense web of transnational relationships: an informal alliance” (Gijswijt 2019). Spin-offs proliferated. Denis Healey secured Ford Foundation money for London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies after a 1957 Bilderberg side-conversation. Other satellites, such as the Munich Security Conference, the Königswinter Conference, and the biannual German-American Conferences of the ACG/Atlantik-Brücke, copied the format to stabilize policy communities at the national level.

6 The Revolving Door

Another characteristic of the Bilderberg participants is their overlapping “memberships” in the different fields of politics, business, media, and academia:

• Peter Sutherland (Bilderberg regular) cycled between Goldman Sachs, the WTO, and the EU Commission.

• Robert Rubin moved from the U.S. Treasury to Citigroup to the CFR: a perfect illustration of interlocking elite fractions.

• Think-tank ‘stammgäste’

  • Regulars from CFR, Carnegie, IFRI, AEI, Economist.

  • Shows inter-permeability of TCC fractions—corporate, political, technical, consumerist—blurring punditry with boardroom power.

7 The Ideological Filter

As researcher Lukáš Kantor notes:

"Bilderberg’s FAQ claims it invites ‘diverse viewpoints,’ yet Noam Chomsky has never received an invitation. The ‘dialogue’ is confined to those who already agree."

This is ultraimperialism (Kautsky’s term) in action: national elites collude across borders to protect shared class interests, even as their publics suffer the costs.

8 Why It Matters for Germany

Bilderberg’s German quota never exceeded ten percent; yet, the careers it turbo-charged, such as those of Friedrich Merz, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, or Josef Ackermann, fed back into the Atlantik-Brücke–DGAP–Munich network we just examined. In other words, Atlantik-Brücke is the German branch; Bilderberg meetings are the transatlantic roots that keep the ideological seeds fertilizing the ground. Bilderberg is also a quality-control lab for Euro-Atlantic capitalism: screening personnel, harmonizing talking points, and safeguarding the corporate faction’s primacy inside the wider TCC.

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IV-a. The Ford Foundation: Venture Capital of Atlanticism

“New generations would be entering positions of power with no personal memory of World War II or the Marshall Plan. To keep the alliance alive, they first had to be socialised into it.” – Zetsche (2015)

1 Public-Private by Design
Philanthropy textbooks still present Ford as a neutral, technocratic charity. Archival work by Anne Zetsche reveals the opposite: the Foundation sat at the center of a dense public-private triangle—comprising the State Department, Fortune 500 companies, and elite academia—built to manage U.S. foreign policy governance. Parmar refers to this nexus as the “soft machinery” that converts corporate wealth into strategic knowledge and personnel.

2 Financing the German Node
Ford money underwrote Atlantik-Brücke’s early German-American Conferences (from 1959) and scholarship pipelines that fed the DGAP, SWP, and party foundations. When staff worried the invite lists were looking too old, they added Youth Fellows tracks and “next-gen” study grants to replicate the worldview in cohorts with no lived memory of rubble and anti-communism.

3 Strategic Goal-Posts
Internal correspondence within the early Ford Foundation days flagged two ideological threats:

• Gaullist Europe-sans-America—a French-led continental bloc.

• Brandt’s early Ostpolitik—German neutrality between the blocs.

The remedy was to broaden funding for exchange programs, summer institutes, and seed grants only to candidates who could be trusted to keep one foot in Washington. By 1970, every West-German ministry employed Ford alumni; by 1980, so did the editorial boards of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and FAZ.

4 Money as Curriculum
Unlike Bilderberg’s invitation-only salons, Foundation grants came with syllabi: Atlantic history modules, Marshall-Plan retrospectives, and off-the-record briefings at the Council on Foreign Relations. Funding thus doubled as orientation. The result was a cadre who intuitively equated European security with U.S. primacy and viewed alternatives, such as non-alignment and European autonomy, as historical aberrations.

Fast-forward a generation, and the classroom has moved from Ivy seminar rooms to off-grid conference hotels. The same social logic persists, but the faculty now wear four stars or run cloud-computing clusters or do both.

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IV-b. Bilderberg 2025: From Grand Strategy to Tech–War Drill

The lineage continues. This June 2025, the Bilderberg invite list shifted even further toward generals, AI titans, and nuclear planners —a signal that today’s “informal alliance” is less a salon and more a joint-ops war room.

2025 Discussion Topics: The agenda included the transatlantic Relationship, Ukraine, US Economy / Europe balance, Middle East, “Authoritarian Axis”, Defense Innovation & Resilience, AI, Deterrence & National Security, Energy & Critical-Minerals Geopolitics, Depopulation & Migration, and interestingly, Proliferation ▶︎ note the absence of the customary non.

Who set the tone? Cluster Sample participants (and current roles):

Hard Power: Mark Rutte (NATO SG), Jens Stoltenberg (ex-SG), Gen. Chris Donahue (US Army Europe-Africa), Adm. Sam Paparo (US INDOPACOM)

Surveillance-Capital: Satya Nadella & Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Alex Karp (Palantir), Eric Schmidt (ex-Google), Scherf Gundbert (Helsing GmbH), Peter Thiel (Thiel Capital)

Media Chorus: Mathias Döpfner (Axel Springer), Zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

The agenda’s most telling word: “Proliferation.” Not non-proliferation, but a frank recognition that nuclear sharing (Poland, Romania?) is moving from hush-hush to a talking point. Within days, GLOBSEC’s 2025 Forum (a Bilderberg-style offshoot funded by many of the same corporations but leaning toward tech and defense) released a policy brief urging NATO to

“explicitly extend to all three essential pillars of nuclear deterrence: capabilities, resolve, and communication. This holistic approach is critical not only for deterring Russia in a more dangerous security environment, but also for strengthening internal Alliance cohesion, ensuring public trust, and dissuading adversaries from testing NATO’s red lines.”

A poster-child for this converging tech–defense elite is Dr Gundbert Scherf ( a participant in 2025 Bilderberg’s meeting and 2024 Globsec conference):

• 2000s: Cambridge / Sciences Po / Free University Berlin (standard transatlantic grooming)

• 2014-16: special adviser, German MoD

• 2017-20: McKinsey partner for aerospace & defence

• 2021- : co-founder & co-CEO, Helsing AI, Europe’s hottest battlefield-AI start-up (already piloting NATO projects)

• 2024-25: speaker slots at Bilderberg-adjacent fora as well as Bilderberg (GLOBSEC, MSC “innovation track”, etc.)

Scherf has never faced an electorate, yet he moves through the same Atlantic Fellowship circuit as sitting ministers: a reminder that, in 2025, key policy levers rest as comfortably in cloud-computing start-ups as in parliaments. When Bilderberg discusses a topic called “Proliferation,” Helsing’s code base is already poised to appear, months later, as the new Rules-of-Engagement paragraph in a NATO white paper.

Consider this cascade of policy-making:

• Bilderberg 2025 agenda: “Proliferation”

• GLOBSEC 2025 forum & report: “NATO’s Nuclear Deterrence and Burden-Sharing”

• Live tweet from GLOBSEC at the NATO 2025 summit:

”As Allies take stock of the #NATOSummit2025 underway, Jim Stokes, Director of Nuclear Policy at @NATO, elaborates on what role NATO’s nuclear sharing plays today amid shifting European security dynamics and burden-sharing debates.”

The idea first emerges in an off-the-record hotel ballroom, reappears as a panel theme in Bratislava, and finally solidifies into an operational directive in Brussels. These networks no longer merely discuss grand strategy; they prototype it and then sell it back to defense ministries as the next unavoidable step. Proliferation, hypersonics, AI target-selection: each cycle begins with “informal” diplomacy, migrates to a glossy policy brief, and finishes as a line item in someone’s procurement budget.

National inflections remain: Atlantic immersion is never a blank-slate exercise; each country imports its own historical sediment. In Germany, the process was intertwined with residual West German anti-communism and only partially completed denazification, leaving a political class that can denounce Moscow as an “eternal enemy” (according to German foreign minister Johann Wadephul) while recycling family lineages that once marched for Großdeutschland in Brilon or Breslau. Thus, the current escalation is simultaneously an act of transatlantic loyalty and a revival, however sublimated, of West German Cold War nationalism (and possibly, pre-Cold War nationalism). Every node in the elite network carries its own local flavor; the recipe, though, is still cooked in Washington.

Having traced the dollars that keep the conveyor belt humming, we can now watch those grants translate into actual résumés, following a few German decision-makers from their first Ford-funded semester abroad to cabinet rank.

V. The Biographical Assembly Line: Manufactured Consensus

Examine the CVs of Merz’s cabinet, and a pattern emerges, not just of career milestones but of ideological imprinting through three distinct phases of elite socialization: three sequential phases that manufacture consensus. Jacob Schrot and Lars Klingbeil illustrate the process from two angles, one through an academic fast-track, the other through an experience of crisis, yet they emerge with the same Atlantic reflexes.

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1 Acquisition Phase │ Ideological Baptism

Worldviews are gradually established here. The process begins with U.S.-funded programs that target young people at career or even personal inflection points.

Jacob Schrot (Chief of Staff to the Chancellor & Head of the newly established National Security Council) – embraces Atlantic orthodoxy via curricula:

• TransAtlantic Masters, 2013-2016: A joint M.A. in Transatlantic Relations rotated him through the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Humboldt-Universität, and Freie Universität, Berlin.

• Washington Semester, American University 2012-2013: A research year at American University’s Washington-Semester Program in U.S. Foreign Policy dropped him inside the Beltway. Mornings at the German Marshall Fund (a NATO advocacy think tank), afternoons on Capitol Hill as an intern to Rep. Eliot Engel (House Foreign Affairs), who was also the chief architect of CAATSA/Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

• Age 25, NGO founder (2014): Founds Initiative junger Transatlantiker; a year later, chairs the Federation of German-American Clubs (30 alumni groups).

By the time Schrot turned 30 and returned to Berlin, his worldview had been cast in concrete: NATO and Atlanticism had become the only legitimate worldview. U.S. leadership was a moral fact, to the extent that German interests became synonymous with those of Washington.

Lars Klingbeil (Vice-Chancellor & Finance Minister) – learns through crisis and socialization:

• 9/11 Internship (2001, Manhattan): The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) - the SPD's political foundation - placed the 23-year-old political science student in a Manhattan-based NGO during the September 11 attacks. This formative experience became the emotional cornerstone of his Atlanticist worldview. In his own words:

"After that, I engaged very intensively with foreign and security policy. I later returned to the U.S. to Washington and wrote my master's thesis on U.S. defense policy there. My relationship with the Bundeswehr and military operations changed fundamentally through these terrible attacks. Without 9/11, I might never have discovered my interest in security policy and perhaps wouldn't have ended up on the Defense Committee."

• Georgetown exchange & Hill internship, 2002-2003: Lars Klingbeil returned and took part in a U.S. exchange program in 2002–03 at Georgetown University in Washington to study American defence policy; this U.S. exposure gave Klingbeil a transatlantic outlook from the start, effectively a “soft capture” baptism into American strategic thinking. During his time in Washington, he interned on Capitol Hill in the office of Congresswoman Jane Harman (then a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the future president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a CIA-linked think tank). Harman’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence oversaw: NSA mass surveillance programs and post-9/11 "Global War on Terror" legislation.

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2 Conversion Phase │ Networked Ascension

Where loyalty and compliance are rewarded with belonging:

In the conversion phase, we could describe Schrot as an entrepreneurial networker. As stated above, at 25, Schrot founded a youth NGO (Initiative junger Transatlantiker) while still a student and chaired the Federation of German-American Clubs (30+ alumni associations). Thus, unlike most, he created transatlantic associations from within.

In contrast, Lars Klingbeil took a more traditional path in this phase as a board climber with a slight progressive veneer, as his SPD membership would suggest.
Back home in Germany, he plugged into legacy ladders: becoming an Atlantik-Brücke member. Interestingly, in a 2018 Atlantik-Brücke report, Klingbeil appears alongside U.S. Ambassador Amy Gutman and Friedrich Merz, now the Chancellor of Germany, as well as the former head of BlackRock Germany.

In summary, Schrot manufactures elite social capital while Klingbeil taps it. The result is the same garden-party circuit but with a different entry ticket.

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3 Reinforcement Phase │ Systemic Reproduction

Graduates become gatekeepers; the loop closes.

Finally, Jakob Schrot is now Chancellor Merz’s Chief of Staff and National Security Council coordinator. He vets advisers’ shortlists and drafts every security memo. Schrot now controls personnel pipelines in the Chancellery; Klingbeil pushes a €100 billion Zeitenwende rearmament fund and revives talk of a TTIP-lite accord. Klingbeil (among several other German politicians) attended Bilderberg 2025 (as did Friedrich Merz in 2024), securing his place within the whisper network with NATO SecGen, U.S. generals, tech CEOs that functions as an “informal alliance” of policy-planning elites.

Schrot chooses who writes the briefings; Klingbeil decides what gets funded. Together they weld Germany’s policy machinery. But most importantly, they do so on Washington’s terms. And they couldn’t do it any other way with such biographies.

Apart from incentives, there is another side: The Schröder Effect: Dissenters to the transatlantic discourse face professional annihilation. The ex-Chancellor’s advocacy for Nord Stream 2 and diplomacy with Moscow led to him being stripped of the official perks accorded to former chancellors, citing his refusal to sever ties with Russian energy giants as a failure to uphold the obligations of his office. As a result, he was practically erased from media discourse.

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The Operational Outcome: A Closed Epistemic Universe

This assembly line produces policy alignment. But more importantly, it manufactures a shared perceptual prison. When a majority of Germany and also Europe’s political elites pass through the same U.S. programs:

• Their cognitive boundaries shrink: détente becomes “appeasement.” Neutrality equals "collaboration". Energy deals with Russia are "geopolitical treason"

• Their emotional responses are conditioned: A Pentagon official’s frown sparks more fear than voter anger. The Economist’s approval feels more valuable than domestic polling.

• Their imagination atrophies: They cannot fathom alternatives like OSCE-based security architectures. They dismiss China’s rise as a "temporary deviation" from U.S. unipolarity.

Worst of all, they (possibly) don’t experience this as coercion. By the time they enter office, Atlanticism has become political common sense, as instinctive as breathing.

The tragedy lies in what’s lost: leaders such as Willy Brandt, whose years in exile taught him that sovereignty begins with the courage to disobey. In today’s Berlin, by contrast, there is little space for politicians shaped by unorthodox biographies; the pipeline produces cadres who no longer have to decide to comply, because they cannot imagine anything else. Small wonder, then, that during a 2022 visit to Washington, then-Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck could promise that Germany stood ready to exercise a “serving leadership” — a phrase so sure of its own logic that no one bothered to ask the obvious questions: lead whom, and serve what?

Before we talk about breaking hinges, it’s worth recalling a few European leaders who managed to step outside the pipeline altogether and how that widened the realm of the possible.

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VI. Biographies that once widened the horizon and could again

The transatlantic pipeline has not always been airtight. A handful of post-war European leaders slipped free of the Atlantic school and, in doing so, expanded the range of what their countries could imagine. Their life stories read more like detours marked by exile, neutrality, and decolonization work. They prove that when a politician’s formative network is built outside Washington-centric fellowship loops, the menu of “realistic” policy options suddenly gets larger.

Willy Brandt, the exile who knelt

• Fled the Reich in 1933 and lived in Norway and Sweden: Brandt fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and lived in Oslo and Stockholm during the war years, working as a journalist and being cut off from Nazi and West German patronage networks.

• Political socialization through Scandinavian social democracy and Norwegian resistance: His political development was influenced by Scandinavian social democracy and contacts with the Norwegian resistance, rather than by Western postwar institutions such as the Marshall Plan network.

• Returned to West Berlin in 1948, fluent in Nordic coalition-building: Brandt regained German citizenship in 1948 and became active in Berlin politics, bringing experience from Scandinavian coalition politics.

• Saw Moscow as a negotiable neighbor, not an existential foe: Brandt’s Ostpolitik (1969–74) was a pragmatic policy of détente and normalization with Eastern Bloc countries, treating Moscow as a partner for negotiation rather than an absolute enemy.

Olof Palme, the neutral who spoke

• Born into Sweden’s upper class but radicalized in the labor movement: Palme came from an upper-class background but became a leading figure in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, embracing progressive labor politics.

• Sweden’s non-alignment limited NATO or U.S. establishment ties: Sweden’s strict neutrality meant Palme had limited engagement with U.S. foreign policy institutions; his only notable U.S. connection was a scholarship at Kenyon College (1948–49). He did not enter the revolving door of think-tank fellowships to become part of the transatlantic foreign policy establishment.

• Mentored by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld; focus on Global South: Early in his career, Palme worked with the UN and was deeply engaged with newly decolonized states in Asia & Africa, shaping his worldview around global justice rather than Atlantic alliances. Global-South conferences shaped his moral vocabulary more than Atlantic summits.

• Treated superpowers symmetrically; critical of U.S. actions like Hanoi bombings: Palme was outspoken in criticizing U.S. actions in Vietnam, likening the bombings to Guernica, and even suspended Swedish-U.S. relations for a year while maintaining dialogue with Moscow.

• Championed European “common security” outside NATO: Palme advocated for a European security framework independent of NATO, emphasizing détente and cooperation.

Both men acquired their formative networks in settings that were geographically and ideologically peripheral to the main Atlantic indoctrination belt:

• Brandt’s circle was the Nordic anti-Nazi diaspora;

• Palme’s was the UN/decolonization circuit.

Because their careers were already viable before U.S.–funded fellowships became the EU default, they could borrow Atlantic tools without adopting Atlantic reflexes. These outliers demonstrate that distance from the Atlantic socialization network doesn’t guarantee wisdom or an absolute distance from them; yet, having an essentially outsider biography widens the thinkable. Their lanes have since narrowed; reopening them is the precondition for any sovereign German or European strategy.

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Breaking the grip: realistic hinges

What can be done? In a way, this will be and has to be the labor of both the people within these Western countries within the transatlantic spiderwebs, and of the newly emerging multipolar world:

• Prestige competition: In these early stages, an EU-BRICS Peace Fellowship (or just BRICS) with the same stipend and photo-op pomp as Fulbright. So, young students also understand that even non-NATO security can be good for their career (and even better for the world).

• Mandatory multipolar secondments: No promotion to a governmental-political office without a 12-month rotation at OSCE Vienna, AU Addis, or UNIDIR Geneva.

• Foreign-influence register: Bundestag members, for example, already disclose their shares; add every foundation-funded trip, board seats, and Bilderberg (and similar) invitation.

• Think‑Tank Matching Fund: Parliamentary Research Service to match private defense‑industry donations euro for euro, diluting capture. Even though more could be done here.

These are hinges that creak open only when exogenous shock pries them: a U.S. debt default that ends Ukraine funding, or a protest wave the police cannot kettle. However, none of these destroy the existing network. They inject some pluralism.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (new ed., Oxford UP, 1956/2000), p. 11. Neither “blind drift” nor “conspiracy,” Mills warns, can substitute for the work of tracing how shifting structures hand new levers to old elites.

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Closing Notes: Hegemony or Survival

The evidence traced across foundations, think-tank pipelines, and invitation-only conclaves leaves little doubt: the trans-Atlantic elite project is hard-wired for self-preservation.

Its cultural hegemony obliges Europe to underwrite a U.S.-centred imperium and the elites of all its allied countries, even when that imperium sabotages Europe’s material interests. Hegemonies rarely collapse out of ethical embarrassment; they yield only when external pressures or domestic ruptures make compliance more costly than defiance. One of three things (or all of these together) could put a dent in this machinery:

1. Narrative Rupture from Below
   Organised refusal, whether through mass strikes, boycotts, electoral realignments, or sustained media counter-campaigns, can delegitimize the war-economy consensus and make Atlantic allegiance politically toxic.

2. Systemic Shock from Outside
   A decisive loss of U.S. financial or military primacy (for instance, a petrodollar fracture or a failed proxy war) would compel European elites to reassess their allegiances.

3. Accountability from Above
   Nuremberg-style tribunals, however improbable today, remain the one mechanism that historically deters elite adventurism by attaching personal risk to strategic folly.

Every rung in their career ladder has normalized the next escalation. Contemporary European leaders do not consciously choose perpetual war; they inherit it as the safest path within an ecosystem that equates Atlantic conformity with professional legitimacy.

A Call for a New Circuitry

Replacing personalities will not suffice. The task is to dismantle the biographical assembly line that begins with foundation-funded youth exchanges, runs through think-tank fellowships, and terminates in cabinet offices or corporate boards. Unless that conveyor belt is broken or at least diversified beyond the Atlantic echo chamber, any “fresh faces” will replicate the same strategic reflexes.

The alternative is stark: witness your nation bleed in service of another’s empire’s elites or reclaim the capacity to decide its own future.

The choice, then, is no longer between status quo and reform, but between hegemony and survival. The window for peaceful de-alignment may be closing, but it has not yet slammed shut. Learning from history offers no guarantees, but it offers opportunities for interruption.

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Traduction automatique en Français : 

Capture d'élite et autodestruction européenne: l'architecture cachée de l'hégémonie transatlantique

Du sabotage de Nord Stream à la poussée de 5 % des armements de l'OTAN: Inside the Networks alimente la folie transatlantique

Nel

28 juin 2025

Hôtel « De Bilderberg », Oosterbeek (Pays-Bas), avant la première conférence de Bilderberg - 30 mai 1954. Photo: Anefo / Nationaal Archief (domaine-publique, CC 0).

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Prélude : La mémo de Lansing arrive à Berlin

Le secrétaire d’État de Woodrow Wilson, Robert Lansing, a dicté la « mémo des jeunes mexicains ambitieux » de 1924. Vous connaissez la ligne : ouvrir nos universités à leur élite, les plonger dans les valeurs américaines, et elles gouverneront le Mexique pour nous : mieux, moins cher et sans un seul Marine. La méthode sonne de manière déprimante aujourd'hui.

Cent ans après que Lansing a énoncé le plan, l'Allemagne est devenue son spécimen le plus perfectionné. Lorsque le cabinet d'Olaf Scholz a blanlé la destruction de Nord Stream 2, un acte d'autosabotage économique sans aucun avantage stratégique plausible pour l'Allemagne, et Merz, maintenant Chancelier, qui se sont engagés à ne plus jamais l'utiliser, ils trahissaient l'Allemagne. Dans le même temps, ils accomplissaient un destin biographique forgé de leurs horizons limités, fabriqués dans des séminaires de la Ligue Ivy, des ateliers du Pentagone et des chambres bordées de velours de l'Atlantik-Brocke.

C'est l'histoire d'une cohorte d'élite formée pour considérer l' indicatifisme comme synonyme de « civilisation occidentale » elle-même. Les coûts : l'effondrement de la production industrielle, la pauvreté énergétique et le spectre de la conscription sont supportés par tous les autres.

Introduction : La folie et sa méthode

L'Allemagne, un titan d'exportation qui gardait autrefois de près sa souveraineté économique, sacrifie maintenant son infrastructure énergétique, finance des missiles à longue portée (y compris la coproduction d'armes à longue portée avec l'Ukraine), et revient à la préparation de la guerre (appelée Kriegstatchtigkeit) en tant que vertu, tout en répétant des plans de mobilisation pour un affrontement OTAN-Russie quiOperationsplan Deutschland, d'abord, s'étendrait le sol allemand. Il s'agit d'un réalignement stratégique à un niveau plus profond résultant de l'automatisation idéologique. Comment expliquer autrement l'écart persistant entre le sentiment du public et la prise de décision de l'élite?

Un sondage de 2024 montre que 60 % des Allemands s'opposent à d'autres livraisons d'armes à l'Ukraine. Pourtant, Lars Klingbeil, co-chef, co-chancelier du SPD, et ministre des Finances, proclame que pour que l'Allemagne soit « prête pour la guerre », la Bundeswehr devrait être plus attrayante pour les conscrits potentiels, par exemple, par la possibilité d'obtenir un permis de conduire gratuitement auprès du gouvernement fédéral. En outre, la coalition insiste sur l'idée dite d'ambiguité stratégique.

Ce sont les symptômes d'une folie particulière qui se déroule à Berlin. Une nation qui s'est reconstruite des cendres de la guerre et de la division maintenant se diriger vers un conflit avec un voisin doté d'armes nucléaires. La folie, cependant, suit une méthode.

Envisager la récente proclamation du secrétaire général de l’OTAN, Mark Rutte, lors du sommet 2025 :

"L'OTAN est l'alliance de défense la plus puissante de l'histoire mondiale - plus puissante que l'Empire romain, plus puissante que l'empire de Napoléon... Nous devons empêcher la domination russe parce que nous apprécions notre mode de vie."

L’analphabétisme historique ou l’obfuscation (selon la manière dont nous interprétons les déclarations de Rutte) est stupéfiant. Napoléon, comme l'OTAN aujourd'hui, a justifié la domination continentale en tant que libération. Son invasion de la Russie, un échec catastrophique, a été conçue comme une attaque préventive contre l'expansion « agressive » des tsaristes. Les parallèles s'écrivent eux-mêmes.

L'historien Jeff Rich, qui disséque les campagnes de sabotage de l'OTAN à l'intérieur de la Russie, a fait observer :

"L'OTAN est la base de pouvoir pour les élites qui agissent en marge de la projection géopolitique américaine. Quand Rutte compare l'OTAN à Napoléon, il oublie que la Russie a finalement libéré l'Europe de cet empire. Peut-être la Russie libérera-t-elle l'Europe des États-Unis après cette guerre."

Ce que j'essaie de dire, c'est que ce n'est pas une conspiration. C'est l'hégémonie institutionnalisée, qui opère à travers ce que Gramsci appelle la « direction culturelle » d'une classe dirigeante. Mais là où Gramsci a analysé les élites nationales vis-à-vis de leurs concitoyens, nous sommes maintenant confrontés à une caste transnationale : des politiciens allemands comme Jakob Schrot (plus de temps sur lui), des technocrates néerlandais comme Rutte (qui a récemment qualifié l'actuel président américain Trump de « papa » au sommet de l'OTAN qui cimente 5 % des dépenses de défense), et les eurocrates français dont les biographies, l'éducation et les incitations professionnelles.unipolarity Les actions de ces élites sur l'échiquier géopolitique ne sont pas seulement irrationnelles; les élites au pouvoir sont simplement fidèles à un groupe de référence différent.

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I. L'énigme : pourquoi les élites européennes brûlent-elles leur propre maison ?

Alors que nous commençons à le voir, la réponse ne réside pas dans la corruption pure et directe ou la ferveur idéologique. Elle est beaucoup plus banale et beaucoup plus efficace. La réponse se trouve également dans les biographies, les réseaux et les institutions. Elle réside aussi dans l'hégémonie au niveau de l'élite fonctionnelle : quand les idées dirigeantes deviennent du bon sens. Et dans ce cas, l'hégémonie n'est pas imposée uniquement par la violence, mais par l'éducation, le recrutement d'élite et la répétition rituel.

Réseaux de connaissances Elite

Inderjeet Parmar (2019) signifie que la machinerie douce des réseaux de connaissances d'élite : « flux de personnes, d'argent et d'idées » qui institutionnaliser le consensus de Washington à Berlin. Le programme Fulbright, le Fonds Marshall allemand, Atlantik-Brucke, la Conférence de Munich sur la sécurité et les réunions de Bilderberg sont des écosystèmes de formation. Ils trient, scolarisent, et élèvent ceux qui peuvent faire avancer la vision du monde.

De manière critique, ces réseaux ne sont pas des forums passifs. Il s’agit de « la technologie de puissance essentielle des élites américaines » : un mode de production de connaissances et de sélection du personnel qui réussit de manière spectaculaire à reproduire une vision du monde en faveur des États-Unis à l’échelle mondiale. La socialisation de l'élite en soi n'est pas un processus bénin. Il s'agit d'ensaisons, définit ce qui est politiquement imaginable et naturalise l'asymétrie.

L'ordre mondial

L’ordre international libéral, qui sous-tend les visions du monde de ces élites, loin d’être universalistes, repose sur une double logique. Comme Donald Tusk, ancien président du Conseil européen, l'a reconnu franchement en 2017 lors de la première administration Trump, l'objectif même de l'euro-atlantique est d'empêcher un ordre mondial post-Ouest :

Demain, je rencontrerai le président Trump et j'essaierai de le convaincre que l'euro-linté est avant tout la coopération libre pour le bien de la liberté ; que si nous voulons empêcher le scénario qui a déjà été nommé par nos adversaires il n'y a pas si longtemps à Munich comme « l'ordre mondial post-œultien », nous devrions surveiller notre héritage de liberté ensemble.

Dans ce système, l'inclusion est sélective. Le Japon et la Corée du Sud, malgré leur loyauté, n'ont jamais été traités comme l'Europe occidentale. Et les pouvoirs croissants sont soit domestiqués, obstinés à se conformer, soit contenus comme des menaces. Cette logique est fondamentale: si l'incorporation échoue, le confinement doit suivre.

Pourtant, l'endiguement commence avec l'esprit, pas avec les missiles. L'assimilation idéologique des élites étrangères est la première ligne de la défense impériale. Ainsi, le maintien de l'hégémonie repose moins sur la contrainte que sur l'incorporation à des conditions de faiblesse. Les réseaux de connaissances élites, intégrés dans des programmes universitaires, des fondations philanthropiques et des groupes de réflexion, agissent comme vecteurs de ce soft power. Ils socialisent, recrutent et certifient les leaders émergents.

Machines d'intégration d'élite

Comme le note Parmar, ces réseaux définissent ce qui compte comme « une pensée réfléchie » et des « questions interrogeables ». Les fondations Ford et Rockefeller, RAND Corporation, Brookings, la Carnegie Endowment et le Center for American Progress sont des machines d'intégration d'élite où, par ces processus d'intégration et de socialisation, un certain type de connaissance devient un certain pouvoir. Ainsi, une épingle Fulbright ou Atlantik-Brucke devient une plaquette d'accès à Bruxelles et à DC et la plus sûre pour « appartenir ».

Pourtant, cet écosystème n'est pas la planète entière. Une étude de 2016 d'Eelke Heemskerk et Frank Takes, cartographiant 400 000 gages de panneaux, montre que le cluster d'élite transnational le plus dense réside toujours sur l'axe nord-atlantique. L'élite des entreprises asiatiques, en revanche, forme une communauté séparée, beaucoup moins enchevêtrée, structurellement prête à construire sa propre base de pouvoir et peut-être un capitalisme sino-centrique alternatif. Plus les réseaux asiatiques restent auto-isolés, plus le risque (aux yeux des élites euro-atlantiques) d’un véritable « ordre mondial post-occidental ».

In other words, Western think-tank pipelines are about pre-empting that divergence and protecting their elite sphere.

European elites are not merely influenced by the United States. Through this system, they are formatted, professionally shaped, and ideologically tethered to it. Of course, not wholly or completely, as if they had no autonomy at all or as if national history had no bearing on these elites, yet, each of these European nations' characteristics will give a unique flavor to the transatlantic worldview that informs their policies.

Résultat : les objectifs de politique étrangère des États-Unis ne sont pas simplement imposés à Berlin, ils sont exprimés de l'intérieur.

II. L'architecture hégémonique: comment fonctionne la capture d'élite

L'ordre libéral se vend comme universel, mais ceux qui se joignent doivent accepter le domaine de la règle (publique) tacite. Ceux qui n'y adhéreront pas seront enfermés et encerclés par une présence militaire permanente des États-Unis. En d'autres termes, le noyau impérial préserve son statut en socialisant d'autres élites dans sa vision du monde plutôt que de simplement les contraindre. Maintenant, nous allons jeter un coup d'œil à ces machines d'intégration d'élite (en particulier, en analysant les liens transatlantiques de l'Allemagne et les élites fonctionnelles allemandes) :

1 From Chatham House to DGAP: A Brief Institutional Genealogy

Think‑tank power began in London with the Royal United Services Institute (1831), established by the Duke of Wellington as an independent professional body to study military and strategic issues. It broadened after 1919 when Chatham House and the Carnegie Endowment formalized elite debate (Roberts 2015). Across the Atlantic, the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) fused Wall Street wealth with Ivy League scholarship, with Ford and Rockefeller providing permanence. Corporate funding, after all. Indeed, the founders were often influential elites who sought coordination for their policies in the fields of defense and strategic thinking, first within the British Empire and then with the emerging American hegemon.

Après 1945, l'architecture a été exportée vers une Europe ruinée. La Deutsche Gesellschaft for Ausw'rtige Politik (DGAP, 1955), financée par des fonds privés, a copié le modèle CFR à Bonn. La Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP, 1962) a offert un cousin plus gouvernemental, fournissant des livres blancs directement à la Chancellerie. Cependant, c'est important, après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les groupes de réflexion anglo-américains et leur personnel sont devenus le centre de la formulation des politiques et de la planification à long terme. Les groupes de réflexion spécialisés dans les affaires internationales étaient généralement considérés comme des compléments essentiels à la conception de la politique étrangère. Ils ont également servi de forums où les politiciens et les bureaucrates pouvaient interagir avec des représentants des milieux universitaires, des médias et des affaires, ainsi qu'avec des partisans ou des recrues potentielles pour les opérations gouvernementales.

Dans les années 1960, le German Marshall Fund, l'Atlantic Institute et Atlantik-Brucke ont stratifié la colle sociale en plus des travaux politiques par le biais de dîners de gala, de jeunes dirigeants jamborees et de voyages d'étude dans les médias, mais ont également influencé les élites politiques de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest. Le SPD de ACG (American Council on GermanyWilly Brandt a dérivé du neutralisme à l'OTAN en cultivant des séminaires de retour fixersdans les séminaires de district.

Dans les années 1970 et 1980, les groupes de réflexion américains ont déjà senti un « déclin américain » dans un monde de plus en plus mondialisé. Au cours de cette période, de nouveaux rivaux institutionnels pour l'influence ont émergé, y compris des groupes de réflexion engagés dans des perspectives généralement conservatrices, avec l'American Enterprise Institute et la Heritage Foundation à l'avant-garde. (Rappelez-vous maintenant que la Fondation du patrimoine a financé le projet 2025. Un guide pour la politique américaine d'aujourd'hui.)

Dans les années 1990, chaque fondation du parti allemand dirigeait un « bureau transatlantique ». Le personnel du SWP a été distribué par l'intermédiaire de la Conférence de Munich sur la sécurité; des boursiers de la DGAP ont siégé au jury de sélection du Fonds Marshall allemand; les rédacteurs de Der Spiegel et de Die zeit (un journal important en Allemagne) ont collecté des millésices Atlantik-Brucke. Le réseau a mûri dans un entonnoir sans faille: de l'université au quartier général du parti en passant par l'OTAN hors site. En fin de compte, une fois que la validation américaine devient le critère de l'estime professionnelle, la déviation est presque un acte d'automutilation.

2 Why Think‑Tank History Matters Now

The architecture normalizes apparently suicidal choices. Shutting down cheap Russian pipeline gas is painful for BASF, but it sustains the reputational capital of everyone who holds an Atlantic fellowship. That internal incentive often outweighs national balance‑sheet logic.

Qui plus est : le groupe de réflexion représente les forces qui animent l’économie politique mondiale, du moins dans son itération occidentale. Pourtant, l'analyse géopolitique tend aujourd'hui à être biaisée vers les États-nations et leurs acteurs politiques. C'est souvent par le biais de ces réseaux de gouvernance financées par le secteur privé et en influence que l'écart entre les marchés de l'État-nation et celui des marchés mondiaux est comblé (Heemskerk et a pris en compte 2016).

3 groupes de réflexion en tant que moteur à portes tournantes

La carte des institutions que nous avons tracées jusqu'à présent serait inerte sans un cadre de professionnels circulants qui glissent entre les cabines de fondation, les studios d'information par câble et les bureaux gouvernementaux.
Nourris par des dotations d'entreprises et des subventions philanthropiques, les groupes de réflexion américains et européens agissent à la fois comme des raffineries d'idées et des pipelines de talents : ils préjugent du paradigme, puis secondent leur propre personnel auprès des ministères qui le mettent en pratique.
Les économistes politiques Nano de Graaff et Bastiaan van Apeldoorn (2021) se réfèrent à cela comme le « réseau de planification politique » : un réseau qui combine le financement du Fortune 500, les anciens élèves du Congrès et l'accréditation de la Ligue Ivy en un seul escalier de carrière :

• Consensus workshop – Think-tank roundtables enable elites to harmonize positions in private before they become “non-partisan expertise” in public.

• Recruitment pool – The same institutes help presidents and cabinet secretaries fill executive-branch positions (McGann 2007).

• Revolving leverage – As Joseph Nye puts it, the most powerful influence is when you “get your own hands on the lever” after co-writing the brief (Conversations with History, 1998).

Ensemble, ces pôles fonctionnent comme un département transatlantique des ressources humaines pour l'ordre actuel, en toilelant des successeurs qui porteront la bannière vers l'avant.

4 Capture d'élite au niveau biographique

The machinery of elite capture operates on both the social group level and the individual biography level. And it is both simple and effective: a single prestige pipeline throughout one’s life and career from a Fulbright scholarship to a German Marshall Fund fellowship to an Atlantik-Brücke affiliation, and/or think-tank memberships. Such a career ladder has monopolized the symbolic capital required to ascend in Berlin’s foreign policy elite. The first cohort entered the system in the 1960s, but it achieved full self-replication after reunification. Today, many members of Merz’s cabinet boast U.S. State Department-funded fellowships, embassy internships, Atlantik-Brücke affiliations, or similar transatlantic ties; some hold board seats at Washington-aligned institutions, such as the Atlantic Council.

5 The Bourdieu Trap

Le cadre du sociologue français Pierre Bourdieu révèle comment les parcours de vie imaginaires de ces élites se perpétuent :

When one pathway dominates (the U.S. fellowship ladder), the field’s imagination of what is possible (in terms of actions and policies) atrophies. Embodied cultural capital (fluent Hill English, a Georgetown lanyard) converts into social capital (alumni networks), which crystallizes as symbolic capital (media legitimacy).

La dissidence n'est pas débattue. Elle est rendue invisible et n'est exclue que si elle devient trop visible et forte. Un tel système hégémonique, fonctionnant à plus petite échelle parmi les élites politiques, fonctionne comme un séminaire théologique, où la déviation marque l'hérésie et la conformité apporte la canonisation.

6 La capture des adolescents

What is the most insidious feature of this elite socialization machine? It’s the question of time. The ideal pathway starts in adolescence, during the formative years when political worldviews congeal. Programs like:

• Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX)

• Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC)

target teens as young as 16, immersing them in Model NATO war games and U.S. Embassy "leadership training."

Au moment où ces étudiants entrent à l'université, leurs horizons sont déjà rétrécis. Un jeune de 19 ans, qui revient d'un été financé par le Département d'État à l'Université américaine, élève une maîtrise de l'anglais (espérons-le). Surtout, ils intériorisent une hiérarchie de légitimité : les priorités de Washington sont neutres, universelles et de bon sens. D'autres modes de réflexion sur la politique étrangère, tels que le non-alignement, la détente et le commerce eurasien, sont filtrés comme extrémistes ou naîfs.

Il s'agit d'une empreinte idéologique et de la construction psychologique de l'hégémonie au niveau individuel. Le résultat est une génération d'élites politiques dont les biographies se lisent comme les États-Unis. Manuels de formation du Département d'État. La tragédie est qu'au moment où ces élites se sont préparées à la recherche de positions de pouvoir dans la politique, les médias ou les entreprises, leur conformité semble naturelle. Ils ne servent pas les intérêts américains parce qu'ils sont contraints; ils le font parce qu'ils ne peuvent pas concevoir d'une autre manière.

The abstract models I just presented here become clearer when we zoom out on a single national hub. Germany’s Atlantik-Brücke offers a textbook case.

III. The German Case: Atlantik-Brücke as Transmission Belt

Anne Zetsche’s archival deep dive on the Atlantik-Brücke and its U.S. sibling, the American Council on Germany (ACG), shows how an ostensibly “private” friendship society became a precision tool for post-war elite alignment. Like think tanks, it is a key institution in the elite integration and socialization machinery.

1 Fondateurs et tissus

• Eric Warburg, heir to the Hamburg banking dynasty, leveraged his Wall Street connections with John J. McCloy to reconnect German finance with U.S. capital markets; Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co. soon brokered Volkswagen’s first U.S. credit line.

• Marion Dönhoff leveraged Foreign Affairs soirées and George F. Kennan’s mentorship to rebrand German neutrality as “irresponsible.”

• L'élite cosmopolite habitus liait ces banquiers, éditeurs et comtes. Leur mission était de plier l'Allemagne de l'Ouest dans une « communauté des nations » dirigée par les États-Unis avant que Moscou ou Paris gaulliste ne puissent la revendiquer.

2 The SPD’s Capture

• Une Allemagne occidentale neutre ou francophone a été signalée comme un écart par rapport à la trajectoire atlantique souhaitée: par exemple, les envoyés d'Emmétam Hughes et de l'ACG correspondaient avec le maire de Hambourg Max Brauer pour assouplir le sOPRapport antimilitarisme (1950-54).

• En 1963, le tandem ACG/Atlantik-Brucke a contribué à diluer le traité de l'Élysée avec un préambule pro-OTAN.

• L'Ostpolitik de Willy Brandt devait également être déplacé d'un projet de paix soutenu et souverain vers une « détente » approuvée par l'OTAN.

• Ford Foundation funds (via the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and AFL-CIO unions) underwrote youth seminars that purged the party of its Marxist undercurrents; an early example that philanthropy can have a profound impact, akin to intelligence work.

3 Les médias

Annual Brücke dinners with NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander double as editorial retreats:

• Josef Joffe (Die Zeit), Kai Diekmann (Bild), and Stefan Kornelius (Süddeutsche Zeitung) are long-time members; ZDF anchor Claus Kleber once sat on the Brücke trust.

• The result is not a diktat but anticipatory alignment: mainstream outlets rarely frame German rearmament as optional. They frame it rather as the only way and ensure that mainstream discourse never strays from Atlanticist orthodoxy.

4 Boardroom Synergy

Aujourd'hui, le conseil d'administration de Brucke représente un bilan du capitalisme atlantique, avec des entreprises de premier plan telles que la Chambre de commerce américaine, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer et BASF. Les médias, le droit et la pharmacie sont assis à côté des poids lourds de la CDU et du SPD ; la preuve que la « bipartisanité » signifie ici la fidélité à un modèle commercial transatlantique et à un ordre mondial partagés.

5 Consensus Engineering in Action

• 2009 – Friedrich Merz (CDU) became the Brücke chair, then Germany’s head of BlackRock.

• 2019 – Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) takes over; critics fear a “provocateur,” but the appointment mainly neutralizes any residual SPD scepticism regarding the NATO 2 % target (which nowadays has become the 5 % target).

What appears to be a polite salon culture functions as a transatlantic transmission belt, diffusing U.S. preferences into German party platforms, boardrooms, and newsrooms without a single Pentagon directive.

Having traced how Atlantik-Brücke helped weld Germany’s post-war institutions into the wider transatlantic circuitry, we will now examine Bilderberg meetings as another conduit for transatlantic elite socialization.

IV. Bilderberg et l'affaire de l'hégémonie

Le groupe Bilderberg, souvent rejeté comme une obsession des théoriciens du complot, est en fait un nœud critique dans ce que le sociologue Kantor 2017(2017) appelle la catégorie des capitalistes transnationaux (TCC). Une analyse de ses réunions 2010-2015 révèle:

1 Qui s'assied à la table ?

• 67 % des participants étaient des PDG, des banquiers ou des directeurs d'entreprise (Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BP).

• Zero trade unionists were invited. The "dialogue" excludes labor by design.

• Corporate fraction dominates the TCC; politics is increasingly a service function of capital.

On the other hand, an analysis by Gijswijt (2019) shows us the post-Cold War composition of Bilderberg meetings when it was first establishing itself between 1954 and 1968:

• Environ 25 % des participants venaient des États-Unis, 14 % du Royaume-Uni et 9 % de la France et de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest.

• 30 % étaient des « hommes d’affaires, des banquiers et des avocats », 20 % des « hommes politiques et certains dirigeants syndicaux », 16 % de diplomates, avec l’équilibre composé d’universitaires, de journalistes et de hauts responsables de l’OTAN, de la Banque mondiale, de l’OCDE et du FMI.

• Women were “glaringly absent.”

• Double-dipping by core firms & states

  • Deutsche Bank sent both the CEO & chair (2016); the Netherlands fielded the PM & King (2016).

  • Extra chairs secure agenda-setting and serve as evidence that economy > polity within elite coordination.

Those numbers demonstrate how closely Bilderberg’s center of gravity aligned with the Cold War core of the liberal order, encompassing Atlantic finance, defense, and diplomacy, while maintaining sufficient national representation to claim a pan-Western mandate.

2 Recrutement par la reconnaissance

The organizers “were always on the lookout for new talent” who could be socialized into the club. (Gijswijt 2019) Participation became a credential: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel each appeared before reaching high office. Far from being a smoky-room king-maker, the value lay in the prestige pipeline itself: a CV line that signaled ideological reliability and opened doors across Wall Street, Whitehall, and the Bundeskanzleramt.

3 Diplomatie informelle, décisions non formelles

Aucune résolution n'a été adoptée et aucun procès-verbal n'a été publié, mais « l'importance réelle des réunions a été déterminée par ce que les participants ont fait avec la capitale symbolique qu'ils ont rassemblée ». (Gijswijt 2019) La conférence a fonctionné comme une salle de répétition très confiante: les idées pourraient être expérimentées, les réputations contrôlées et les locaux concurrents harmonisés. Ce consensus latent a ensuite refait surface dans les communiqués de l'OTAN, ou livres blancs de la CE.

4 Travail d'identité et gestion des alliances

Par conception, Bilderberg cultivait « un fort sentiment de communauté émotionnelle basée sur les conceptions du monde libre ou de l'Occident ». (Gijswijt 2019) Simplement apparaissant, en particulier pour les figures américaines de marque, « stimuler l’acceptation du rôle de leadership des États-Unis au sein de l’OTAN ». La réunion était une thérapie pour les nerfs transatlantiques: un lieu pour absorber les chocs unilatéraux, réinitialiser les points de discussion et partir avec une hiérarchie réaffirmée dans laquelle Washington est resté primus inter pares.

5 multiplicateurs de réseau

L'adhésion chevauche la CFR, Chatham House, l'IFRI, la DGP, et plus tard la Commission trilatérale, créant « un réseau dense de relations transnationales : une alliance informelle » (Gijswijt 2019). Les spin-offs prolifèrent. Denis Healey a obtenu de l'argent de la Ford Foundation pour l'Institut international d'études stratégiques de Londres après une conversation parallèle de Bilderberg en 1957. D'autres satellites, tels que la Conférence de Munich sur la la Conférence de l'hiver de et les conférences germano-américaines semestrielles de l'ACG/Atlantik-Brocke, ont copié le format pour stabiliser les communautés politiques au niveau national.

6 The Revolving Door

Another characteristic of the Bilderberg participants is their overlapping “memberships” in the different fields of politics, business, media, and academia:

• Peter Sutherland (Bilderberg regular) cycled between Goldman Sachs, the WTO, and the EU Commission.

• Robert Rubin est passé des États-Unis. Trésor à Citigroup au CFR: une parfaite illustration des fractions d'élite imbriquées.

• Think-tank ‘stammgäste’

  • Regulars from CFR, Carnegie, IFRI, AEI, Economist.

  • Shows inter-permeability of TCC fractions—corporate, political, technical, consumerist—blurring punditry with boardroom power.

7 The Ideological Filter

As researcher Lukáš Kantor notes:

"Bilderberg’s FAQ claims it invites ‘diverse viewpoints,’ yet Noam Chomsky has never received an invitation. The ‘dialogue’ is confined to those who already agree."

C'est l'ultra-impérialisme (terme de Kautsky) en action : les élites nationales s'entendent au-delà des frontières pour protéger les intérêts de classe partagés, même si leurs publics en subissent les coûts.

8 Why It Matters for Germany

Le quota allemand de Bilderberg n'a jamais dépassé dix pour cent ; pourtant, la carrière qu'il a turbo-chargée, comme celles de Friedrich Merz, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg ou Josef Ackermann, ont réinjecté dans le réseau Atlantik-Brucke-DGAP-Munich que nous venons d'examiner. En d'autres termes, Atlantik-Brucke est la branche allemande; les réunions de Bilderberg sont les racines transatlantiques qui gardent les graines idéologiques féconds du sol. Bilderberg est également un laboratoire de contrôle de la qualité pour le capitalisme euro-atlantique : filtrer le personnel, harmoniser les points de discussion et préserver la primauté de la faction d'entreprise au sein de la TCC au sens large.

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IV-a. Fondation Ford: Capital-risque de l'Atlantiquenisme

“New generations would be entering positions of power with no personal memory of World War II or the Marshall Plan. To keep the alliance alive, they first had to be socialised into it.” – Zetsche (2015)

1 Public-Private by Design
Les manuels de philanthropie présentent toujours Ford comme une organisation caritative technocratique neutre. Le travail d'archives d'Anne zetsche révèle le contraire : la Fondation s'est assise au centre d'un triangle public-privé dense, comprenant le Département d'État, les entreprises du Fortune 500 et l'université d'élite – construite pour gérer la gouvernance de la politique étrangère des États-Unis. Parmar se réfère à ce lien comme la « machinerie souple » qui convertit la richesse des entreprises en connaissances et en personnel stratégiques.

2 Financement du nœud allemand
Ford monnaie a sous-écrit les premières conférences germano-américaines d'Atlantik-Brocke (à partir de 1959) et des bourses qui ont alimenté les fondations de la DGAP, du SWP et des partis. Lorsque le personnel s'inquiétait de trop vieux, le personnel s'inquiétait de trop vieilles, ils ont ajouté des titres de Youth Fellows et des subventions d'études « next-gen » pour reproduire la vision du monde dans des cohortes sans mémoire vécue de gravats et d'anti-communisme.

3 Objectifs stratégiques - Postes
La correspondance interne au début des premiers jours de la Ford Foundation a signalé deux menaces idéologiques :

• Gaullistes Europe-sans-America, un bloc continental dirigé par la France.

• Brandt’s early Ostpolitik—German neutrality between the blocs.

The remedy was to broaden funding for exchange programs, summer institutes, and seed grants only to candidates who could be trusted to keep one foot in Washington. By 1970, every West-German ministry employed Ford alumni; by 1980, so did the editorial boards of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and FAZ.

4 L'argent comme programme d'études
Contrairement aux salons d’invitation de Bilderberg, les subventions de la Fondation ont été accompagnées de programmes : modules d’histoire de l’Atlantique, rétrospectives Marshall-Plan, et exposés déconnectés au Council on Foreign Relations. Le financement a donc doublé en tant qu'orientation. Le résultat a été un cadre qui assimilait intuitivement la sécurité européenne à la primauté des États-Unis et considérait les alternatives, telles que le non-alignement et l'autonomie européenne, comme des aberrations historiques.

Avance rapide d'une génération, et la salle de classe a déménagé des salles de séminaire Ivy vers les hôtels de conférence hors réseau. La même logique sociale persiste, mais la faculté porte maintenant quatre étoiles ou exécute des clusters de calcul de nuages ou font les deux.

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IV-b. Bilderberg 2025: de la grande stratégie à la recherche de technologies et de guerres

La lignée continue. En juin 2025, la liste des invitations de Bilderberg s’est encore déplacée vers les généraux, les titans de l’IA et les planificateurs nucléaires – un signal que l’« alliance informelle » d’aujourd’hui est moins un salon et plus une salle de guerre commune.

2025 Discussion Topics: The agenda included the transatlantic Relationship, Ukraine, US Economy / Europe balance, Middle East, “Authoritarian Axis”, Defense Innovation & Resilience, AI, Deterrence & National Security, Energy & Critical-Minerals Geopolitics, Depopulation & Migration, and interestingly, Proliferation ▶︎ note the absence of the customary non.

Who set the tone? Cluster Sample participants (and current roles):

Hard Power: Mark Rutte (NATO SG), Jens Stoltenberg (ex-SG), Gen. Chris Donahue (US Army Europe-Africa), Adm. Sam Paparo (US INDOPACOM)

Surveillance-Capital: Satya Nadella & Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Alex Karp (Palantir), Eric Schmidt (ex-Google), Scherf Gundbert (Helsing GmbH), Peter Thiel (Thiel Capital)

Chorus des médias : Mathias D'pfner (Axel Springer), zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), Anne Applebaum (L'Atlantique)

The agenda’s most telling word: “Proliferation.” Not non-proliferation, but a frank recognition that nuclear sharing (Poland, Romania?) is moving from hush-hush to a talking point. Within days, GLOBSEC’s 2025 Forum (a Bilderberg-style offshoot funded by many of the same corporations but leaning toward tech and defense) released a policy brief urging NATO to

« s'étendent explicitement aux trois piliers essentiels de la dissuasion nucléaire : les capacités, la détermination et la communication. Cette approche holistique est essentielle non seulement pour dissuader la Russie dans un environnement de sécurité plus dangereux, mais aussi pour renforcer la cohésion de l'Alliance interne, assurer la confiance du public et dissuader les adversaires de tester les lignes rouges de l'OTAN. »

Un poster-enfant pour cette élite convergente de la technologie-défense est le Dr Gundbert Scherf (un participant à la réunion de Bilderberg en 2025 et à la conférence Globsec 2024):

• Années 2000: Cambridge / Sciences Po / Université libre de Berlin (garniture de toilettage transatlantique standard)

• 2014-16: conseiller spécial, Ministère de la défense allemand

• 2017-20: McKinsey partner for aerospace & defence

• 2021- : co-founder & co-CEO, Helsing AI, Europe’s hottest battlefield-AI start-up (already piloting NATO projects)

• 2024-25: speaker slots at Bilderberg-adjacent fora as well as Bilderberg (GLOBSEC, MSC “innovation track”, etc.)

Scherf has never faced an electorate, yet he moves through the same Atlantic Fellowship circuit as sitting ministers: a reminder that, in 2025, key policy levers rest as comfortably in cloud-computing start-ups as in parliaments. When Bilderberg discusses a topic called “Proliferation,” Helsing’s code base is already poised to appear, months later, as the new Rules-of-Engagement paragraph in a NATO white paper.

Consider this cascade of policy-making:

• Programme de Bilderberg 2025 agenda: « prolifération »

• GLOBSEC 2025 forum & report: “NATO’s Nuclear Deterrence and Burden-Sharing”

• Live tweet from GLOBSEC at the NATO 2025 summit:

« Alors que les Alliés font le point sur le projet de résolution, Jim Stokes, directeur de la politique nucléaire à l’OTAN, explique le rôle que joue le partage nucléaire de l’OTAN aujourd’hui dans un contexte de changement de dynamique de sécurité européenne et de débats sur le partage des charges. »

L'idée émerge pour la première fois dans une salle de bal d'hôtel à l'hôtel, réapparaît comme un thème de panel à Bratislava et se solidifie enfin en une directive opérationnelle à Bruxelles. Ces réseaux ne se contentent plus de discuter de la grande stratégie, ils la prototypent et la revendent ensuite aux ministères de la défense comme prochaine étape inévitable. Prolifération, hypersonorisation, sélection des cibles de l'IA : chaque cycle commence par une diplomatie « informelle », migre vers une note d'orientation brillante et se termine en tant que rubrique du budget d'achat de quelqu'un.

Il reste des inflexions nationales: l'immersion dans l'Atlantique n'est jamais un exercice d'ardus blanc; chaque pays importe ses propres sédiments historiques. En Allemagne, le processus a été imbriqué avec l'anti-communisme ouest-allemand résiduel et n'a été que partiellement terminé la dénazification, laissant une classe politique qui peut dénoncer Moscou comme un « ennemi éternel » (selon le ministre allemand des Affaires étrangères Johann Wadephul) tout en recyclant des lignées familiales qui ont jadisée pour Gro-deutschland à Brilon ou Breslau. Ainsi, l'escalade actuelle est à la fois un acte de loyauté transatlantique et un renouveau, aussi sublimé soit-il, du nationalisme de la guerre froide ouest-allemande (et peut-être, le nationalisme pré-guerre froide). Chaque nœud du réseau d'élite porte sa propre saveur locale ; la recette, cependant, est toujours cuite à Washington.

Après avoir tracé les dollars qui maintiennent la bande transporteuse bourdonnée, nous pouvons maintenant regarder ces subventions se traduire en résumés réels, à la suite de quelques décideurs allemands de leur premier semestre financé par Ford à l'étranger jusqu'au rang de cabinet.

V. La ligne d'assemblage biographique: consensus manufacturé

Examinez les CV du cabinet de Merz, et un modèle émerge, pas seulement de jalons de carrière, mais d'empreintes idéologiques à travers trois phases distinctes de la socialisation de l'élite : trois phases séquentielles qui fabriquent un consensus. Jacob Schrot et Lars Klingbeil illustrent le processus sous deux angles, l'un à travers une procédure académique, l'autre à travers une expérience de crise, mais ils émergent avec les mêmes réflexes atlantiques.

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1 Phase d'acquisition - Baptême idéologique

Des visions du monde sont progressivement établies ici. Le processus commence avec des programmes financés par les États-Unis qui ciblent les jeunes aux points de carrière ou même de manœuvre personnelle.

Jacob Schrot (Chef du Chancelier - Chef du Conseil national de sécurité nouvellement créé) - adopte l'orthodoxie de l'Atlantique par le biais des programmes:

• TransAtlantic Masters, 2013-2016: Un M.A. conjoint en relations transatlantiques l'a fait passer par l'Université de Caroline du Nord, Chapel Hill, Humboldt-Universitat, et Freie Universitat, Berlin.

• Washington Semestre, American University 2012-2013: Une année de recherche au programme Washington-Semester de l'American University aux États-Unis. La politique étrangère l'a laissé tomber à l'intérieur du Beltway. Matin du Black Fund allemand (un groupe de réflexion sur le plaidoyer de l'OTAN), après-midis sur Capitol Hill en tant que stagiaire à Rep. Eliot Engel (House Foreign Affairs), qui était également l'architecte en chef de la loi CAATSA/Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

• 25 ans, fondateur de l'ONG (2014): Founds Initiative junger Transatlantiker; un an plus tard, préside la Fédération des clubs germano-américains (30 anciens groupes).

Au moment où Schrot a eu 30 ans et est revenu à Berlin, sa vision du monde avait été mise dans le concret : l'OTAN et l'Atlantiquenisme étaient devenus la seule vision légitime du monde. La direction des États-Unis était un fait moral, dans la mesure où les intérêts allemands devinrent synonymes de ceux de Washington.

Lars Klingbeil (Vice-Chancelier et ministre des Finances) – apprend par la crise et la socialisation:

• Stage du 11 septembre (2001, Manhattan) : La Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) - la fondation politique du SPD - a placé l'étudiant en sciences politiques de 23 ans dans une ONG basée à Manhattan pendant les attentats du 11 septembre. Cette expérience formatrice est devenue la pierre angulaire émotionnelle de sa vision du monde atlantiste. Selon ses propres termes :

"Après cela, je me suis engagé très intensément dans la politique étrangère et de sécurité. Je suis ensuite retourné aux États-Unis à Washington et j'ai écrit la thèse de mon maître sur la politique de défense des États-Unis. Ma relation avec la Bundeswehr et mes opérations militaires ont fondamentalement changé par ces terribles attaques. Sans le 11 septembre, je n'aurais peut-être jamais découvert mon intérêt pour la politique de sécurité et peut-être n'aurait-il pas fini par faire partie du comité de la défense."

• Exchange - Stavut sur les collines de Georgetown, 2002-2003: Lars Klingbeil est revenu et a participé à un programme d'échange américain en 2002-03 à l'Université de Georgetown à Washington pour étudier la politique de défense américaine ; cette exposition américaine a donné à Klingbeil une perspective transatlantique dès le début, un baptême de « capture douce » dans la pensée stratégique américaine. Durant son séjour à Washington, il a interné à Capitol Hill dans le bureau de la députée Jane Harman (alors membre du House Intelligence Committee et futur président du Woodrow Wilson Center, un groupe de réflexion lié à la CIA). Le comité permanent sur le renseignement a supervisé les programmes de surveillance de masse de la NSA et la législation sur la guerre mondiale contre la terreur après le 11 septembre.

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2 Phase de conversion et ascension en réseau

Lorsque la loyauté et le respect sont récompensés par l'appartenance:

Dans la phase de conversion, nous pourrions décrire Schrot comme un réseau d'entrepreneurs. Comme on l'a dit plus haut, à l'âge de 25 ans, Schrot a fondé une ONG de jeunes (Initiative junger Transatlantiker) alors qu'elle était encore étudiante et présidait la Fédération des clubs germano-américains (30 associations d'anciens élèves). Ainsi, contrairement à la plupart, il a créé des associations transatlantiques de l'intérieur.

En revanche, Lars Klingbeil a pris un chemin plus traditionnel dans cette phase en tant que grimpeur de bord avec un léger vernis progressif, comme son membre du SPD le suggère.
De retour en Allemagne, il s'est enfoncé dans les anciennes pavées: en devenant un membre d'Atlantik-Brucke. Il est intéressant de noter que dans un rapport Atlantik-Brucke de 2018, Klingbeil apparaît aux côtés des États-Unis. L'Ambassadeur Amy Gutman et Friedrich Merz, aujourd'hui Chancelier de l'Allemagne, ainsi que l'ancien chef de BlackRock Allemagne.

En résumé, Schrot fabrique un capital social d'élite tandis que Klingbeil le tape. Le résultat est le même circuit de garde-jardin mais avec un ticket d'entrée différent.

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3 Phase de renforcement et reproduction systémique

Les diplômés deviennent des gardiens; la boucle se ferme.

Enfin, Jakob Schrot est maintenant le chef d’état-major du chancelier Merz et coordinateur du Conseil de sécurité nationale. Il vérifie les listes restreintes de conseillers et rédige tous les notes de sécurité. Schrot contrôle désormais les pipelines de personnel dans la Chancellerie; Klingbeil pousse un Zeitenwendefonds de réarmement de 100 milliards de dollars et relance les discussions sur un accord de blanchiment sur le TTIP-lite. Klingbeil (entre plusieurs autres politiciens allemands) a fréquenté Bilderberg 2025 (comme Friedrich Merz en 2024), sécurisant sa place au sein du réseau de chuchotements avec le SecGen de l'OTAN, les généraux américains, les PDG de la technologie qui fonctionne comme une « alliance informelle » des élites de planification politique.

Schrot choisit qui écrit les informations ; Klingbeil décide de ce qui est financé. Ensemble, ils soudaient les mécanismes politiques de l’Allemagne. Mais surtout, ils le font selon les termes de Washington. Et ils ne pouvaient pas le faire autrement avec de telles biographies.

À l'exception des incitations, il y a une autre face : l'Effet Schrader : les dissidents au discours transatlantique sont confrontés à une annihilation professionnelle. Le plaidoyer de l'ex-Chancelier pour Nord Stream 2 et la diplomatie avec Moscou l'ont amené à être privé des avantages officiels accordés aux anciens chanceliers, citant son refus de rompre les liens avec les géants de l'énergie russes comme un manquement à l'obligation de ses fonctions. En conséquence, il a été pratiquement effacé du discours des médias.

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Le résultat opérationnel: un univers épistémique fermé

Cette chaîne de montage produit un alignement politique. Mais plus important encore, il fabrique une prison perceptuelle partagée. Quand une majorité de l'Allemagne et des élites politiques européennes passent par les mêmes programmes américains :

• Leurs limites cognitives se rétrécissent : la détente devient « l'apprêt ». La neutralité est égale à la "collaboration". Les accords énergétiques avec la Russie sont une " trahison géopolitique"

• Leurs réponses émotionnelles sont conditionnées : un fonctionnaire du Pentagone fait grimper plus de peur que la colère des électeurs. L'approbation de The Economist ut « tien d'énergie » est plus utile que le scrutin national.

• Leur imagination s'atrophie : ils ne peuvent pas comprendre des alternatives comme les architectures de sécurité basées sur l'OSCE. Ils rejettent la montée de la Chine comme une « déviation temporaire » de l'unipolarité américaine.

Pire encore, ils (peut-être) ne connaissent pas cela comme une coercition. Au moment où ils entrent en fonction, l'atlantiqueisme est devenu un bon sens politique, aussi instinctif que la respiration.

La tragédie réside dans ce qui est perdu : des dirigeants comme Willy Brandt, dont les années en exil lui ont appris que la souveraineté commence par le courage de désobéir. Dans Berlin d’aujourd’hui, en revanche, il y a peu d’espace pour les politiciens façonnés par des biographies peu orthodoxes ; le pipeline produit des cadres qui n’ont plus à décider de s’y conformer, parce qu’ils ne peuvent rien imaginer d’autre. Je ne m'étonne donc pas qu'au cours d'une visite de 2022 à Washington, le vice-chancelier de l'époque, Robert Habeck puisse promettre que l'Allemagne était prête à exercer un « leadership au service » - une phrase si sûre de sa propre logique que personne n'a pris la peine de poser les questions évidentes : diriger qui, et servir quoi ?

Avant de parler de rupture des charnières, il convient de rappeler quelques dirigeants européens qui ont réussi à sortir complètement du pipeline et comment cela a élargi le domaine du possible.

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VI. Des biographies qui ont autrefois élargi l'horizon et pourraient à nouveau

Le gazoduc transatlantique n'a pas toujours été étanche à l'air. Une poignée de dirigeants européens d'après-guerre se sont libérés de l'école atlantique et, ce faisant, ont élargi l'éventail de ce que leurs pays pouvaient imaginer. Leurs histoires de vie sont davantage lues comme des détours marqués par l'exil, la neutralité et le travail de décolonisation. Ils prouvent que lorsque le réseau de formation d'un politicien est construit en dehors des boucles de bourses centrées sur Washington, le menu des options politiques « réalistes » s'élargit soudainement.

Willy Brandt, l'exil qui s'agenouille

• Fusionnant le Reich en 1933 et a vécu en Norvège et en Suède: Brandt a fui l'Allemagne nazie en 1933 et a vécu à Oslo et Stockholm pendant les années de guerre, travaillant comme journaliste et coupé des réseaux de clientélisme nazis et occidentaux allemands.

• Socialisation politique par la démocratie sociale scandinave et la résistance norvégienne : son développement politique a été influencé par la social-démocratie scandinave et les contacts avec la résistance norvégienne, plutôt que par les institutions occidentales d'après-guerre telles que le réseau Marshall Plan.

• Retour à Berlin-Ouest en 1948, courant de la constitution d'une coalition nordique: Brandt a retrouvé la citoyenneté allemande en 1948 et est devenu actif dans la politique de Berlin, apportant l'expérience de la politique de coalition scandinave.

• Saw Moscow as a negotiable neighbor, not an existential foe: Brandt’s Ostpolitik (1969–74) was a pragmatic policy of détente and normalization with Eastern Bloc countries, treating Moscow as a partner for negotiation rather than an absolute enemy.

Olof Palme, the neutral who spoke

• Née dans la classe supérieure de la Suède mais radicalisée dans le mouvement ouvrier : Palme est venue d'un fond de la classe supérieure mais est devenue une figure de proue du Parti social-démocrate suédois, englobant la politique du travail progressiste.

• La stricte neutralité de la Suède signifiait que la franchise de la Suède avait un engagement limité avec les institutions de politique étrangère des États-Unis ; sa seule connexion notable aux États-Unis était une bourse au Kenyon College (1948-1949). Il n'est pas entré dans la porte tournante des bourses de groupes de réflexion pour faire partie de l'establishment de la politique étrangère transatlantique.

• Au début de sa carrière, Palme a travaillé avec l'ONU et s'est profondément engagé avec les États nouvellement décolonisés d'Asie et d'Afrique, en matérialisant sa vision du monde autour de la justice mondiale plutôt que d'alliances atlantiques. Les conférences mondiales et sud ont plus façonné son vocabulaire moral que les sommets atlantiques.

• Traspecté symétriquement les superpuissances, critiques des actions américaines comme les bombardements de Hanoi : Palme a voté ouvertement en critiquant les actions des États-Unis au Vietnam, en comparant les bombardements à Guernica, et même suspendu les relations entre la Suède et les États-Unis pendant un an tout en maintenant le dialogue avec Moscou.

• Championne de la « sécurité commune » européenne en dehors de l’OTAN : Palme a plaidé en faveur d’un cadre européen de sécurité indépendant de l’OTAN, mettant l’accent sur la détente et la coopération.

Both men acquired their formative networks in settings that were geographically and ideologically peripheral to the main Atlantic indoctrination belt:

• Brandt’s circle was the Nordic anti-Nazi diaspora;

• Palme’s was the UN/decolonization circuit.

Parce que leur carrière était déjà viable avant que les bourses américaines ne deviennent la monnaie de l'UE, ils pourraient emprunter des outils de l'Atlantique sans adopter de réflexes atlantiques. Ces valeurs aberrantes démontrent que l'éloignement du réseau de socialisation atlantique ne garantit pas la sagesse ou une distance absolue de ceux-ci ; pourtant, avoir une biographie essentiellement extérieure élargit le pouvoir. Leurs voies se sont depuis réduite; leur réouverture est la condition préalable à toute stratégie souveraine allemande ou européenne.

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Briser l'adhérence: charnières réalistes

What can be done? In a way, this will be and has to be the labor of both the people within these Western countries within the transatlantic spiderwebs, and of the newly emerging multipolar world:

• Concurrence du Prestige : Dans ces premières étapes, une bourse de la paix UE-BRICS (ou juste des BRICS) avec la même allocation et la même pompe photo-op que Fulbright. Les jeunes étudiants comprennent donc que même la sécurité non-OTAN peut être bonne pour leur carrière (et même mieux pour le monde).

• Mandatory multipolar secondments: No promotion to a governmental-political office without a 12-month rotation at OSCE Vienna, AU Addis, or UNIDIR Geneva.

• Registre d'influence étrangère: les membres du Bundestag, par exemple, divulguent déjà leurs actions; ajouter chaque voyage financé par la fondation, les sièges au conseil d'administration et Bilderberg (et similaire).

• Think-Tank Matching Fund : Le service de recherche parlementaire pour égaler les dons de l'industrie de la défense privée pour l'euro pour l'euro, la capture de dilution. Même si l'on pourrait faire davantage ici.

Ce sont des charnières qui s'ouvrent uniquement lorsque exogenous shockl'exogènechoint les cicatrisant : un défaut de paiement de la dette américaine qui met fin au financement de l'Ukraine, ou une vague de protestation, la police ne peut pas bouilloire. Cependant, aucun d'entre eux ne détruit le réseau existant. Ils insufflent un peu de pluralisme.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (nouvelle éd., Oxford UP, 1956/2000), p. 11. Ni la « dérive aveugle » ni la « conspiration », avertit Mills, ne peut se substituer au travail de retracer le changement des structures qui tournent de nouvelles voix vers les anciennes élites.

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Closing Notes: Hegemony or Survival

The evidence traced across foundations, think-tank pipelines, and invitation-only conclaves leaves little doubt: the trans-Atlantic elite project is hard-wired for self-preservation.

Its cultural hegemony obliges Europe to underwrite a U.S.-centred imperium and the elites of all its allied countries, even when that imperium sabotages Europe’s material interests. Hegemonies rarely collapse out of ethical embarrassment; they yield only when external pressures or domestic ruptures make compliance more costly than defiance. One of three things (or all of these together) could put a dent in this machinery:

1. Rupture narrative d'après
   Le refus organisé, que ce soit par le biais de grèves de masse, de boycotts, de réalignements électoraux ou de contre-campagnes soutenues dans les médias, peut délégitimer le consensus de l'économie de guerre et rendre l'allégeance de l'Atlantique politiquement toxique.

2. Choc systémique à l'extérieur
   Une perte décisive de la primauté financière ou militaire des États-Unis (par exemple, une fracture du pétrodollar ou une guerre indirecte ratée) obligerait les élites européennes à réévaluer leurs allégeances.

3. Responsabilité d'en haut
   Les tribunaux de type Nuremberg, aussi improbables aujourd'hui, restent le seul mécanisme qui décourage historiquement l'aventurisme d'élite en attachant le risque personnel à la folie stratégique.

Chaque échelon de leur carrière a normalisé la prochaine escalade. Les dirigeants européens contemporains ne choisissent pas consciemment la guerre perpétuelle ; ils l’héritent comme la voie la plus sûre au sein d’un écosystème qui assimile la conformité de l’Atlantique à la légitimité professionnelle.

Un appel à un nouveau circuit

Le remplacement des personnalités ne suffira pas. La tâche consiste à démanteler la ligne de réunion biographique qui commence par des échanges de jeunes financés par des fondations, gère des bourses de groupes de réflexion et met fin dans des bureaux ministériels ou des conseils d'administration. À moins que cette bande transporteuse ne soit cassée ou du moins diversifiée au-delà de la chambre d'écho atlantique, tout « visage frais » répliquera les mêmes réflexes stratégiques.

L'alternative est brutale : voyez votre nation saigner au service des élites de l'empire d'autrui ou réclamer la capacité de décider de son propre avenir.

Le choix n'est donc plus entre le statu quo et la réforme, mais entre l'hégémonie et la survie. La fenêtre pour le désalignement pacifique est peut-être en train de fermer, mais elle n'a pas encore claqué. Apprendre de l'histoire n'offre aucune garantie, mais il offre des possibilités d'interruption.

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