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Notes -
This might be old news.
A Swedish newspaper published a report, ostensibly a leak from RAND that purports to be a cynical summary of what anti-atlanticist Europeans believe to be the US strategy - sabotage Europe by denying it Russian energy, forcing investments and people to leave for the safer haven of US. Example of that is this substack post by disgraced academic Noah Carl.
The report is not very long and could very easily be a fake.
My intuitiojn says I think it's probably a fake, well within the capabilities of some of the less stupid Russian disinfo experts to create. Certainly I can imagine Russian spooks may have at least one or two people like Ilforte, but rabidly nationalist, who could make that up during lunch break.
Anyway has anything to say about it? I'm assuming the newspaper isn't a well-regarded one or a very professional one. But then I've heard very dire things about Swedish journalism, namely that it was extremely well aligned in the service of the 'liberal' left agenda of endless migration and self-hatred. That was years ago, things may have changed.
I remember this being shared in WhatsApp groups. Ilforte has written enough about this document that I have nothing to add.
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This, or a similar hoax, has been bouncing around the internet circa March or April, I think. I recall seeing it on /r/stupidpol, /r/credibledefense, /r/moderatepolitics, telegram channels, etc. So other outlets have been aware of it for six months now and have chosen not to push it, including outlets quite friendly to pro-Russian/anti-imperialist viewpoints. Which isn't a perfect test, someone needs to be first and sometimes stuff slips through the cracks. But for a low-tier Swedish newspaper to be the first to push this story seems very lacking in credibility. I could sorta believe they broke it if the leak were fresh, for whatever reason, but I can't believe that they were the only ones to notice this big document bouncing around the internet.
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The alleged article or the sentiment behind it?
The report is very likely a fake, for reasons already mentioned. I will note that the use of roman numerals isn't discrediting in and of itself- RAND does use sometimes publish reports and use roman numerals for the agenda / methodology / executive summary portion before the main report itself- but rather the cover page itself is a red flag. The image claims this is a research report, but RAND Research Reports have a general style of presentation, include front-page opening images and color. You can peruse RAND Research Reports via a search of their website, as the pictures show.
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?pub-date=20211210%3A&series=Research+Reports
Another formatting red flag is the mis-classification label. The first page graphic- which says this is 'Confidential' under 'January 25, 2022'- is mixing a few things. For one, RAND isn't an American government agency, and while it's a common belief in various circles that it's a distinction without a difference, classification (mis)labeling is one of those areas where it matters. 'Confidential' is an American classification labeling, and when reports are classified, the documents have various formatting requirements such as having the label on each page, and portion-marking individual paragraphs. This is so that the readers can reference various parts of the document at various levels or contexts. If the implicit argument is RAND is part/an extension of the American government, this would be a job-retraining failure. If the more defensible position is that this is something RAND wrote for the government, it would be customer abuse. A lot of companies/groups with regular engagement with governments will develop their own, internal control measures rather than mis-use the government's own classification system.
A third red flag is the front page distribution list. Aside from the placement on the page- above the Executive Summary, which is where the RAND logo is placed? Really?- I assume by WHCS they mean White House Chief of Staff, but that's not an office, and wouldn't be in the same context as three letter agencies. Also conspicuously absent from the distribution list is the Treasury Department- a kind of big omission of any report nominally on economic analysis. Instead, the list is primarily the big spooky externally known 3-letter agencies... when there isn't a need for that information to be on the Executive Summary Page in the first place. That's the sort of information you track on a cover sheet, so you don't need to re-publish a report every time some new office is involved.
Overall, the formatting has a lot of red flags, and most of the potential explanations- 'they didn't follow their usual practices because of the need for secrecy'- ask people to be dumb in different ways. 'This was made by someone who thinks this is how the Americans work' is much more likely...
...not least because the article really doesn't reflect how the American government national-security types think about this general topic, or Europe, and so the report reads like 'this was written by someone who thinks this is how the Americans think,' or even 'this is written by someone who wants other people to think this is how the Americans think.'
The Americans don't talk about the Europeans in terms of 'sovereignty.' The American establishment viewpoint is that the Europeans already have it- it's the anti-American/anti-American-empire-ists who would frame the European alliances as non-sovereign, not a quasi-government report. Nor is a Biden-administration solicited report going to talk about Europe in terms of 'if one day we abandon Europe,' when the opening year of the Biden administration was ABT, or Anything But Trump, with even the exceptions subject to rebranding for the 'we're back' theme. Nor would the US of Jan 2022 been talking about Ukraine causing a 'controlled economic crisis' to plan for the duration of 2022... because the Americans were planning for a relatively quick and short Russia-Ukraine War. The Americans were flowing insurgency-friendly weapons into Ukraine, but not heavier conventional equipment, because of the expectation that Russia would have a conventional victory in short order. Second and third order effects of that would be the expectation that- as happened repeatedly before- German and other European interests would press for normalization of Energy supplies (and even currently, with the gas price cap, set a price above what was generally being charged, ie. not actually capping prices or flow). Broader pushback against sanctions primarily has not happened because Ukraine remained in the fight... but Ukraine remaining in the fight was manifestly not something the Americans were planning on. If Ukraine's government had toppled in the first month, months 2-10 of the war, and all the sanctions discussions that occurred, would have gone very differently.
Meanwhile, the report doesn't identify various things the American national-security types would raise about if it WAS an American product. Like the description of the German economic pillars: that wouldn't be Russian gas and 'cheap French electrical power.' The other pillar would be something akin to 'exports to China,' because that's something the Americans care about far more than French electrical imports, and is relevant to the strategic-level topic. There would be mentions that the German military under-spending, because that's been a long, long on-going complaint from the American perspective that goes hand-in-hand with the Russian energy reliance- both are decades-long-issues that have been persistent issues in mind.
Add to this the plethora of pejorative framings and boo-light words almost specifically driven to incite German/European emotions ('trap,' 'lack of professionalism of current leaders,' 'thanks to our precise action,' the whole 'French dependent on AUKUS' framing)- which just so coincidentally predicted a political context almost a year later after multiple unpredicted inflection points in the Ukraine unforeseeable at the time, which is just so coincidentally being leaked at a time when those framing devices and predictions are most salient to ongoing contexts...
...while also embracing the framing that Ukraine was an American trap, and that Russia was 'provoked' so that it would be 'possible' to declare Russia the aggressor...
...in a report nominally authored in late January 22, when the Russians had already been moving their invasion hardware along the various invasion axis assembly areas in the clear logistical buildup that the American government was publicizing at the time, but that this report makes no reference to...
Obvious false-flag information effort, targeting people who are only vaguely familiar with the alleged participants or Ukrainian context, or stroking the biases of those vulnerable to agreeing by what Stephen Colbert once called the truthiness of it.
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To me, this looks like "The Protocols of the Elders of Columbia." What stands out to me most is that it doesn't feel like it's written from the authentic perspective of somebody in on such a scheme: usually, the harms inflicted by one's foes are much less sadistically targeted than one imagines them to be.
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The very first paragraph of the Executive Summary has red flags: "the uncontrolled issue of cash" instead of "issuance," "dollar supply" rather than "money supply."
Also, "loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress" is odd phrasing, and I doubt that RAND would refer to "costs for us" rather than "costs to the United States."
And "the" is omitted in "a major obstacle to it is growing independence of Germany," and is used unnecessarily in other places. Classic English language learner errors.
It's an error that I believe is more prevalent in Slavs, who don't use that many definite articles. Or any. Not clear. What do you think /u/georgioz ?
Germans probably wouldn't make that many similar errors, on account of them using definite and indefinite articles.
Heinlein's (quite good, actually) book 'Moon is a Harsh Mistress', where the Lunar colony has a significant Russian speaking component is written without using many definite articles.
The use of articles varies subtly even between languages who generally use them; Romance languages use articles in many situations in which English does not, and vice versa.
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The only Slavic langauges with articles are Bulgarian and Macedonian (which sometimes considered as a dialect of the former) and they don't look similar to types in English etc.
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Polish has no articles at all. But more importantly, as I understand, they do not exist in Russian language.
a/an/the is an irritating stuff for me.
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Having a brief read of it, I'm inclined to believe it's a fake. Honestly, the grammar in some parts is so odd I don't think it was even written by someone who has English as their first language. Some things that make me suspicious:
1. The page numbering. The pages are numbered using roman numerals rather than the normal arabic characters. This is common for things like the preface to reports but my general experience (admittedly limited) is that executive summaries tend to be part of the main body and numbered appropriately. Additionally there are no page numbers visible on the title page or copyright page but the "Executive Summary" page starts at "iii". It's normal for title pages and copyright pages not to be numbered but they also are generally excluded from the numbering system altogether such that the first page after them ought to be "i", not "iii". Either two numbered pages are missing between the copyright page and the "Executive Summary" titled page or something odd is happening here.
2. Some of the acronyms on the "distribution" line on the title page don't mean anything to me. "Dept. of State", "CIA", "NSA", and "DNC" are all presumably clear enough (although, an odd grouping) but "WHCS" does not seem to be anything I can find with a Google or Wikipedia search and the only ANSA that seems relevant is... an Italian news agency? Of course, just because I can't find any relevant hits doesn't mean they don't exist but I'm not sure what they are supposed to indicate and no likely matches suggest themselves.
3. Grammatical and general formatting problems. For example the final paragraph on page "iii" (which is also a single sentence) reads (emphasis added):
of course, it's possible the repeated "if" is something an editor missed, but it is suggestive. The document uses the "Old Europe" construction in a number of places, apparently intending to mean Western Europe. I've never heard this construction before and would be interested if anyone has examples of other RAND reports that use it. The first paragraph on the last page has the sentence
"both indirectly and most directly" is not a construction I have ever read in English and does not read like natural English to me. There are other constructions that seem odd but these were the ones that jumped out the most.
4. The whole thing is written much more... directly... regarding its goal of harming various European countries to the benefit of the US than I would expect. Not that people planning bad things never write them down but this is, like, "notes on a criminal conspiracy" level. I would expect any descriptions of intentions, estimates of results, and desirability, to be written much more circumspectly. With much more room for plausible deniability, especially by an operation like RAND.
There are other formatting issues on the pages- RAND doesn't usually put their symbol, or date and (mis-)classification on the Executive Summary page- but I will note that the roman numerals itself isn't off.
RAND regularly has a numbering divide between the main-body of a report, and the pre-body pages that include the copyright page, the agenda, but also the executive summary. Pre-main body material will be in roman numerals, with main body reports in arabic characters. The 'missing' pages would likely have been the Agenda and the Methodology pages... but the implication they were only a page each, on an executive summary this length, is itself a red flag.
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Note also that "the Old Europe" is suspect; a native English speaker would not include the article there.
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Old Europe is a bit of an odd one since it hasn't really been used prominently in almost two decades, but it got some traction when the Bush admin used this framing to bash France and Germany in comparison to Eastern European countries that supported the Iraq War adventure.
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I agreefully with your reply and believe you are right.
Hopefully Ilforte won't be insulted by my OP.
Given the levels of narrative control the US blue state possesses, that is perhaps a prudent attitude that is no longer necessary.
I've been amazed by some of the opinions I've seen - for example, that when FBI pressured Twitter to censor Trump, that was a 2nd amendment violation, but that Trump is the guilty party. It's a very powerful take, a case of 'woke are more correct than the mainstream'. Yes, Trump failed to rein in the deep state and keep it within acceptable limits.
Not that he was ever likely to do so, but doesn't the responsibility lie with the big boss ?
Why would I be insulted? That's all true, down to the trouble with missing or unnecessary articles (I despise the very notion of a definite article). I've been advised to agree to this career path, too.
Might even be flattering – that article is making rounds, apparently. Months ago, I've asked a Swedish guy what he makes of it. His conclusion was the same as the consensus here: BS.
Nevertheless, I think we have enough legitimate leaks and official admissions and absence of satisfactory responses to accusations coming from European figures to tell that such undermining of European economies and sovereignty and poaching of talent is, if not a proactive policy, then certainly not a negative scenario in the eyes of Anglo/American State Security. (We might even suspect that such immediately discredited fakes are part of the master plan to hide the truth, like in Eliezer's Meta-Truther 9/11 story). There are only two decent objections: «what if the europoors figure it out» and «strong Europe benefits the US»; neither is particularly watertight. As Russia grinds itself to fine paste on Ukrainian fortifications, Europeans become increasingly irrelevant, and they don't have a choice of allies anyway – not like they can turn to China; neither will they be of much help in the coming war, so the expected value of prolonging the agony of the Western half of Eurasia and maintaining appearances is below that of quickly reindustrializing the US and dealing with the East.
That's a cynical way of looking at things, but what can I do. Half a year ago I've written on «great replacement» and the same epistemology should apply here – adjusted for greater secrecy and moral particularism of spooks.
Some links from mainstream sources:
Wikipedia, The Wolfowitz Doctrine: «Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. … We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.»
The Guardian, Key US-EU trade pact under threat after more NSA spying allegations Espionage: «The impact of the Der Spiegel allegations may be felt more keenly in Germany than in Brussels. The magazine said Germany was the foremost target for the US surveillance programmes, categorising Washington's key European ally alongside China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia in the intensity of the electronic snooping. … Under the international intelligence agreements, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is defined as 'first party' while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy 'second party' trusted relationships. Countries such as Germany and France have 'third party', or less trusted, relationships.» Note however that American sources at the time were pooh-poohing this whole narrative.
National Review, Lord Ismay, NATO, and the Old-New World Order: «The purpose of the new treaty organization founded in 1952, Ismay asserted, was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”… Ismay, a favorite of Churchill’s and a military adviser to British governments, had a remarkable sense of history — namely that constants such as historical memory, geography, and national character always transcend the politics of the day. … Lastly in his triad of advice, Ismay referred generically to “Germany” — without specifying a contemporary friendly and allied West Germany, juxtaposed to the Soviet-inspired, Communist, and hostile East Germany. Again, the East–West German fault line existed in Ismay’s time; yet he reduced all those unique differences of his age into a generic “Germany down.” … Once again, if there were not Angela Merkel’s increasingly defiant Germany, it too would have to be created. Some in the United States were troubled that Angela Merkel, from a beer hall in Munich no less, recently lashed out at the United States and promised that Germany might just have to navigate between the U.S. and Russia — quite a thought from a Germany once saved largely by the United States from its own carnivorousness and later likely Communist servitude.»
Bloomberg, Macron Accuses US of Trade ‘Double Standard’ Amid Energy Crunch: «“The North American economy is making choices for the sake of attractiveness, which I respect, but they create a double standard” with lower energy prices domestically while selling natural gas to Europe at record prices, Macron said at a news conference in Brussels following a meeting of European Union leaders.»
On Twitter, a video of some French guy who's allegedly an Economy Minister: «I think it's time for us Europeans to tell our American friends that we are very concerned about the Inflation Reduction Act and that it could cause the deindustrialization of Europe.»
Peter Zeihan on the same topic: «And so Biden's general position is: you can suck it». A few of my regular opponents are Zeihan stans, share his smug attitude towards Old Worlders, so it's neat to have it on record.
And so on and so forth; if someone is to make the case for EU as an independent pole, I'd rather it was an actual European.
Ultimately it doesn't matter, Europeans have sovereignty but not enough sovereignty to weasel out of this global house of cards collapse. The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. Putin is generally correct in his theoretical understanding of geopolitics; the only issue is, he ignored most dimensions of strength and was deluded regarding ones he believed all-important.
I feel were you tasked with doing something like that, you'd have written it more professionally, thus associating you with such sloppy work might be a bit insulting.
E.g. downloaded a bunch of RAND papers, studied the style, fixed the language, and so on.
But I guess if you were just to write it quickly so it could be flogged to infowars tier outlets, no problem.
Also - I should have been more clear that I think the idea that US likes a weak Europe and tries to ensure that happens is almost certainly true.
I really do not care for Atlanticist bullshit after all the America-caused shit we've had to deal with.
Even absent wokism, I'd probably still be somewhat against them being over here.
However - thanks for your reply; if I ever go the way of effort-posting in Czech trying to wake the normies, I'll have something to go on.
What coming war ? You mean the US / China match that they're trying to get Europe involved in ?
Given that Europe does have some armed forces, probably enough to stop Turks from doing something stupid, and that France has nuclear weapons, why can't Europe just sit it out ?
What sense do you think they're trying to get Europe involved?
For lack of a navy, Europe is not a credible contender in the Pacific, nor is it a decisive economic, political, information, or social influencer in the region. There would be no time to move European forces militarily, and the availability of European navies in the region would make them more useful as neutral observers than active participants.
Aside from that no one east of France trusts French to provide nuclear guarantees for anyone but France? It's the wrong question. Sitting out is expected. The question is one of ongoing trade with China during a China-US war.
'Strategic autonomy' from the US isn't being forced to fight in the war- the US has had more than enough wars with sit-outs that it's not a credible issue- but being able to keep economic trade going with both the US and China, and not being forced to divest from one side or the other. The Americans, for various reasons, are not particularly interested in protecting the maritime commerce of allies into a country they would be in a hot war with. Many European countries, also for various reasons, are not particularly interested in cutting off key export markets they've become economically dependent on to sustain their domestic economies.
The American nightmare wasn't if there was a war, but the Europeans didn't come when called. The American nightmare was if the US embarked a naval blockade, but then German cargo ships showed up to sail on through anyway. Or if the Americans called on the regional allies, but French and European arms suppliers leveraged their supply chain influence on countries like Australia to keep them neutral and isolate the US from necessary partners. Or if the US called for sanctions on China, and the EU said 'no thanks' and threatened retaliation against the US if the US went against companies doing business in the US for also maintaining business in Europe.
Of course, the Ukraine war has a way of reframing things. What 'Europe' might have tolerated if it were Taiwan was not tolerated in Ukraine, and in doing so set precedents for divestment and de-globalization that have set normative expectations for a US-China conflict in case of a Taiwan. There will be no European Consensus of threatening EU-level retaliation against the Americans enforcing China sanctions, or even the prospect of major European actors pressuring the Americans to let Taiwan lose in the service of protecting European economies.
The Europeans will not be expected to send forces or fleets to help the Americans or defend anyone else from China. They will be expected not to prioritize their Chinese economic ties over American economic and security ties, if they wish to maintain the later. The choice will be sovereign, unless one's definition of sovereignty entails an unconditional commitment of American military guarantees and access to American markets even when trading with American enemies during an American war.
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Undersells it a bit. It appears Nya Dag is not "not well regarded" in the sense NYPost is but maybe more in the sense of Alex Jones.
Now that doesn't need to be an instant "boo", but one should consider that even with reputable newspapers, just that it made it to a newspaper doesn't make thing necessarily a credible nor true. The journalist should be expected to show that they did the legwork to prove the veracity of the leaked documents. The newspaper does not claim to have done anything besides receiving images of report that has "RAND" written on title page.
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