https://x.com/BrianJBerletic/status/2018552311157809297?s=20
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Brian Berletic
@BrianJBerletic
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๐บ๐ธ๐ช๐บNEW ARTICLE: “US Consolidates Control Over Proxies Amid War on Multipolarism
(Note: Because Elon Musk’s X censors just as much as Twitter and still censors NEO links just like Twitter under Dorsey, I will be providing the whole article below)
Behind the political theater that is the โUS-European split,โ exists an aggressive campaign of US consolidation over its many proxies – including and perhaps especially over Europe itself.
Narratives floating through Western media space depict the US as challenging or threatening not only Europe over control of Denmarkโs Greenland territory, but also Canada in North America. Articles are written telling tales of Europe and Canada seeking leverage against Washington and countermeasures to protect themselves and their interests up to and including preparations for โguerrilla warfareโ against potentially invading American forces.
In reality, nothing of the sort will take place.
Already, opportunities for gaining actual leverage against the United States have been eagerly surrendered to the United States, particularly with the recent decision by the EU for a โcomplete ban on Russian gas imports by 2027.โ
The ban means the EU will completely eliminate any alternative to its growing dependence on US LNG imports leaving the US with disproportionate leverage over the EU as a whole and its members individually regarding virtually any matter of foreign or even domestic policy. It is inconceivable that the EUโs leadership would surrender such leverage to the US amid a supposed and growing โsplitโ with the US unless of course there was no real split to begin with.
A Matter of Perception Management
Instead, what is unfolding is perception management meant to shape both the American and wider Western public ahead of implementing the publicly declared โdivision of laborโ and โburden-sharing networkโ announced by the Trump administration and already taking shape during the previous Biden administration.
It was under the Biden administration that the first National Defense Industrial Strategy was published – admitting to the USโ failure to match Russian let alone Chinese military industrial production and the necessity for the United States to consolidate control over its vast network of โallies and partners,โ combining their collective resources, industrial capacity, and military power to confront Russia and Chinaโs growing power across all relevant domains.
Under a section titled, โEngage Allies and Partners to Expand Global Defense Production and
Increase Supply Chain Resilience,โ the Biden-era paper noted:
โThe global activity of pacing threats increasingly requires a global approach to defense industrial relationships, concerns, and competition. International allies and partners, each with their own robust defense industries, will continue to be a cornerstone of the DoDโs concept of Integrated Deterrence. Indeed, the global system of alliances and partnerships is central to the NDS, which calls to incorporate allies and partners at every stage of defense planning. Such linkages and relationships will continue to be a cornerstone of Integrated Deterrence in resisting and, if necessary, defeating known and emerging threats.โ
The paper also noted:
โThe United States has a complex web of friend-shoring-suitable alliances and partnerships around the world; a partial list includes Australia, Canada, the European Union, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.โ
The paper defines โfriend-shoringโ as, โa process that engages allies and partners in production and processing of critical and strategic materials and supplies.โ
The concept of the US exploiting its โwebโ of โfriend-shoringโ partners to compensate for the USโ own limits regarding military industrial production and to serve as an extension of Americaโs own military power has been continued – even accelerated – during the subsequent Trump administration.
In a February 2025 directive US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered to Europe in Brussels, he made it clear that Europe in particular would have to increase defense spending from 2% of each member nationโs GDP to 5% which all European nations have subsequently agreed to do.
Secretary Hegseth also demanded Europe prepare troops for deployment to Ukraine to ensure any freeze in the fighting would be made permanent, and noted that Europe must donate “more ammunition and equipment,โ and expand its defense industrial base – again – all steps Europe has since taken despite claims of a growing โUS-European split.โ
Finally, Secretary Hegseth made clear that the US was not abandoning Europe amid its own proxy war on Russia, but rather establishing a โdivision of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively,โ admitting that the US must prioritize China in the โIndo-Pacific,โ โrecognizing the reality of scarcityโ in terms of the US confronting both Russia and China at the same time.
Toward the end of the same year the Trump administration published its โNational Security Strategyโ which included an entire section titled, โBurden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting,โ highlighting the necessity of using US โallies and partnersโ to add to Americaโs own limited power.
The document stated:
โโฆthe United States will organize a burden-sharing network, with our government as convener and supporter. This approach ensures that burdens are shared and that all such efforts benefit from broader legitimacy. The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability. This strategic clarity will allow the United States to counter hostile and subversive influences efficiently while avoiding the overextension and diffuse focus that undermined past efforts. โ
What this โburden-sharing networkโ represents is the USโ use of subordinated nations and regions as an extension of its own military, economic, and industrial power, pursuing foreign policy objectives at the cost of these nations and regions.
This has already manifested itself as joint arms production or expanding joint arms production schemes where nations like Germany and Japan have been or will begin mass producing US-designed weapons like the Patriot missile air defense system and munitions for US-made multiple launch rocket systems to compensate for the USโ own inability to sufficiently expand military industrial production at home.
Japan, which has manufactured Patriot missiles on a relatively small scale since 2008, more recently doubled production and has even begun exporting these missiles back to the United States starting in 2024 in direct response to limits in US military industrial production exposed in the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine.
Since the Trump administration took office, attempts to rapidly accelerate this process of consolidation has included proposals to radically rewrite both US laws and those of its โallies,โ as well as openly expressing a desire to outright seize territory (Greenland, Venezuela) and facilities (ports near the Panama Canal) deemed necessary for the explicit purpose of confronting both China and Russia.
An April 2025 CNN article noted US interest in using South Korean shipyards to build and repair US warships because US shipbuilding and repair capacity has drastically decreased over decades and is incapable of closing the gap on its own with China – as pointed out in the Biden-era National Defense Industrial Strategy paper.
The CNN article pointed out that South Korean shipyards were already repairing US warships โin theater,โ meaning in Asia-Pacific where the US seeks to encircle and contain China. The same article mentioned the necessity of changing current US laws prohibiting foreign nations (like South Korea) from building US warships the US itself is not and will not be capable of building itself.
Nations like Japan and the Philippines are circumventing their own laws to allow both a wider US military presence within their territory as well as for their own military forces to play a more integrated and active role in advancing US foreign policy in terms of confronting and containing China in the region.
Of course, by doing so, both nations are undermining regional stability required for their own peace and prosperity as well as their own respective relationships with China itself – both nations counting China among their largest, most important trading partners.
And now Europe is preparing to surrender itself into similar receivership to be used to advance US foreign policy objectives at Europeโs expense, and to a much greater degree than it already has between 2014 and today regarding the ongoing US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Already, Europe has played a role in the US proxy war on Russia as well as in the USโ ongoing policy of encircling and containing China – both through direct measures taken against Russia and China, as well as assisting the US in political interference, proxy war, and the political capture and dismemberment of nations working together with Russia and China.
Europeโs participation in these US policies has left the region itself in terminal decline – with its collective industry collapsing because of rising energy costs, collapsing social programs as greater sums of public funding are diverted to underwriting Washingtonโs proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and the possible collapse of Europe itself as the prospect of a direct confrontation between Europe and Russia is increasingly presented to the European public as both a necessity and an inevitability.
Ukraine itself is a microcosm of this wider โburden sharing networkโ in which US proxies are compelled to abandon their own objective best interests in favor of serving US interests at their own expense. Ukraineโs political system was violently overthrown by the US in 2014 and replaced by a US client regime for the sole purpose of transforming Ukraine into a battering ram to be used against neighboring Russia.
Regarding wider Europe, over the decades following WW2, the US has politically captured the continent, replacing national centers of political and economic power with the regional bureaucracy of the European Union, overriding the best interests of the European people regionally and collectively in service of advancing US special interests. This includes everything from waging wars of aggression alongside the US within Europe (Serbia and now Ukraine) and far beyond it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria) – to subordinating and even sacrificing its economic wealth to isolate and cripple the economies of targeted nations ranging from Iraq and Iran to more recently Russia and China.
While explanations for the EU leadershipโs behavior have dwelled on ideological or political obsession or a recent divide between a โconservativeโ US administration and a โliberalโ EU political order – the answer is far simpler. Just as is the case for Ukraine specifically – where a US-installed client regime was placed in power solely to serve US interests at whatever the cost to Ukraine – Europe in general has been consolidated under the EU for the very same purpose. EU leadership has been placed into power, shaped, and directed by the same US-based special interests that likewise drive American foreign and domestic policy regardless of the cost to the average American citizen.
Even as EU leadership sells a narrative of a widening โUS-European splitโ to justify the transfer or greater percentages of public funding for what is entirely Washingtonโs proxy war on Russia, it continues to consolidate power over its individual member states for the sole purpose of transferring this power to and in service of US interests – the ban on Russian gas imports only one of many recent examples.
Until a greater percentage of journalists, analysts, and the general public can strip away the political theater used to perpetuate this continuity of agenda and reduce analysis to its material realities – revealing the simple structure of what is modern American empire at work – this destructive process will continue to erode and destroy both members of the multipolar world and the West itself.
Only time will tell whether or not the multipolar world can expose this process for what it is and propose a more compelling vision of a collective future for the world – and in the meantime – defend itself and its aspiring members from the global war Wall Street and Washington is waging – and now expanding – against the multipolar world.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.
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