To understand the reasons for the charade that played out in the Oval Office of the White House on February 28, it is advisable to look at what happened in Germany just a few hours later: Friedrich Merz, chancellor-in-waiting and a former BlackRock executive, announced a $900 billion package – twice Germany’s annual federal budget – for defence and infrastructure. (In a bulletin on February 24, BlackRock had anticipated that the German vote would allow for increased spending.) A few days later, Merz confirmed radical proposals (the largest overhaul of monetary policy since the reunification, alongside a constitutional reform) aimed at relaxing restrictions on debt accumulation to enable increased defence expenditure – in stark contrast, of course, to the fiscal austerity enforced across the EU over the past two decades, particularly the sadistic measures imposed on Greece.

As often the case, tout se tient. It is enough to connect the dots to grasp that today’s key geopolitical events originate in the elementary driver, and desperate lifeline, of contemporary capitalism: debt. Zelensky and Trump lock horns in front of the cameras (“this is going to be great television” says the Donald). A few hours later the former comedian, now victim of institutional bullying, is welcomed back into liberal Europe by the “coalition of the willing” (sic!), a pack of lugubrious politicians fittingly led by Keir Starmer. Meanwhile, like a Pavlov dog, the indignation of all “true progressive forces” is unleashed across the Old Continent. And, contextually, the Bundestag capitalizes on the general outcry to loosen Germany’s fiscal cordons and oil the money presses: more debt für uns und für alle! The conditions are perfect: a freshly formed Große Koalition, a recession in progress, and, most crucially, the irresistible primal scene of two forms of “political insanity” (Trump and Putin) apparently making love to each other. After the Covid crisis, the debt brake can again be suspended due to “unusual emergencies beyond governmental control”. It is Germany’s much-awaited “whatever it takes” moment, its spectacular capitulation to economic pressure camouflaged as geopolitical responsibility. Under the new leadership of “BlackRock Merz”, the last bastion of fiscal discipline converts to the American model of debt-based “financial growth”. Unsurprisingly, huge amounts of capital are now pouring into German equities – the highest influx since the pandemic bonanza. The spectre of Weimar, it seems, is no longer haunting the country.

While Berlin announces a mega stimulus of almost a trillion euros, in Brussels Ursula von der Leyen pulls out of her hat the Re-Arm Europe project (later more soberly rebranded Readiness 2030). In a coordinated effort, the functionaries of “crisis capitalism” propose to lift restrictions on deficit spending provided this spending is used for defence (which is just another word for warfare). Apparently, Re-Arm Europe could mobilize something like 840 billion euros for our security, for we cannot turn our backs on Ukraine in the darkest hour (regardless of the fact that the war is long lost, having resulted in the tragic and avoidable loss of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians); just as we cannot wait for Putin to invade Portugal. Regrettably, this statement is not made in jest – it reflects the disturbing narrative we have been exposed to over the past three years. A very simple question arises here: why on earth would the Russians be itching to invade Europe, if they already have too much land and resources to manage, as well as a growing economy? Incidentally, if Europe is serious about “rearmament”, which is yet to be proven, it will need to cut back on welfare costs (education, infrastructure, healthcare, pensions, etc.) and redirect funds towards military spending, as even the Financial Times cautioned. This would also mean increasing arms purchases from – guess who? – the United States, which was already up 35% during the Biden administration. In the interim, however, scaremongering will do, as the EU recommends, also through a grotesque video-message that merits analysis as a remarkable instance of postmodern communication, that we hold 72-hour emergency supplies (after which, it seems, we’ll just have no option but die).

This situation is both tragic and farcical, since it now demands applying a lick of military-green paint to a European economy caught with its pants down after years of self-inflicted pain, from the Green New Deal to sixteen sanction packages against Russia (which, of course, worked the opposite way we were promised they would work). Incidentally, you may have noticed the establishment’s nonchalant shift from commitment to environmental sustainability, exemplified by ESG investments, to the aggressive rhetoric aimed at bolstering the military-industrial complex. Will they, perhaps, produce eco-friendly weapons? Clearly, “green” is a flexible, fluid signifier, perfectly adaptable to market needs, fulfilling both environmental goals and “existential” military ends. So we can either persist in being bamboozled by Frau Ursula and her technocratic associates, as many pseudo-leftist intellectuals love to do, or we can acknowledge that that there is only one real emergency: the two-headed monster of structural stagflation, with potential financial collapse attached. It is this monster that drives the puppeteers to seek increasingly dangerous alibis to recklessly generate vast amounts of credit from economic nothingness – mountains of credit supposed to rain down on a broken system. The new clamour for arms is aimed at creating more debt as a “healthy tonic” for weakened member states, perhaps in anticipation of the Eurozone’s dissolution.

Instead of reflecting on the underlying causes of decline, Europe’s technocratic leaders are tying deficit spending to a frantic narrative of a geopolitical emergency. The fundamental truth of this narrative is that the West has exhausted any capacity for “economic miracles.” In fact, growth rates have long been stagnant, work is precarious, fiat currencies are devaluing, debt is structural, and the resulting financial bubbles are “managed” through grotesque emergency manipulations. If anything, the new arms race further highlights the elitist and undemocratic tendencies of European leadership, which may well result in the collapse of the Euro – especially if we consider that, being aligned with BlackRock, Merz is primarily loyal to the interests of transnational financial capital. Should European debt yields surge—similar to what happened to German Bunds on March 5—the situation could spiral out of control. In such a scenario, “war mobilization” could evolve from a mere propaganda tactic to a genuine catastrophe.

In Hegelian terms, evil is in the eye that perceives evil everywhere around it: we may well descend into barbarism without grasping its underlying causes. After all, the collapse of a civilization is most apparent in its reluctance to engage in self-reflection. And the incompetence of those in power is not an anomaly but the correct image of our historical moment, where Homo economicus falters under the weight of its own rationale. In other words, the structural breakdown of the social contract between labour and capital, which underpins the modern liberal order, can only lead to a rise in institutional cynicism. But, again, there is nothing more ideological today than confusing this cynicism with the root cause of all our troubles. If we merely react with horror to the actions of a psychopathic political elite, we likely do so to distract ourselves from the paralyzing fear of confronting the reasons for the collapse of an entire civilization.

First, we should retain a minimum of historical memory. That is, we ought to start from the paradigm shift of the late 1980s, when globalization decreed the victory of the Western model of a highly financialised market economy. We were told that we were entering the era of the “peace dividend” and global prosperity, which many believed would be endless. In fact, it was a fake utopia that lasted a mere decade. As the new millennium approached, the repressed substance of capitalism re-emerged, namely the truth about a socioeconomic ecosystem that had imposed itself thanks to a solid foundation in violence, plunder, and deceit. Yet the ideological optimism surrounding capitalist progress, both on the right and on the left of increasingly obsolete political frameworks, chose to ignore the new areas of mass poverty produced by the globalization drive, as well as the wars with which the US-led West assumed the role of global policeman. Unsurprisingly, the latter stage of this collapsing constellation has been characterised by a resurgence of Western militarism (the “war on terror”) and increasingly frequent financial bubble convulsions (dotcom in 2000, subprime in 2007-08), which are now overtly manipulated (as demonstrated by the global financial coup that has gone down in history as a pandemic). In short, the capitalist mode of production has long since confirmed its true nature as a mode of destruction.

We are now left with the increasingly chaotic crisis management of a fragile economic system that is structurally obsolete, since it is incapable of socialising itself through the extraction of value from work (“money has lost its narrative quality,” as Don DeLillo wrote in Cosmopolis). In the meantime, the globalization project has failed. In the interplanetary competition, the West is now losing on all fronts: economic, military, political-diplomatic. American foreign policy itself, now based on a hostile rhetoric to “progressive universalism”, stems from the realization that unsustainable debt levels undermine any aspirations for a global dominance that recent US administrations still attempted to maintain. With Trump’s election—an effect rather than a cause of this shift—the focus has moved from a supposed monopoly on economic and military power, disguised as a universalist mission, to the management of a potentially devastating internal debt crisis. This presupposes acceptance of the reality principle: acknowledging the United States’ reduced influence within a multicentric world where the common feature is decline.

In the United States, the primary focus today is on lowering Treasury yields (government debt securities) in order to make them appealing again as their prices rise. It is crucial to note that by the end of 2025, the U.S. government will need to refinance a staggering $9.2 trillion in maturing debt, which was issued when the ten-year yield was just above 2% – significantly lower than the current rates. With the total debt exceeding $36 trillion and continuing to grow, the only real priority is to find a way to quickly reduce yields, thereby creating at least an illusion of debt sustainability. And what better way to achieve this result than to force the hand of the central bank (Federal Reserve) by invoking the threat of a financial crash accompanied by a violent recession? A full-blown, creatively justified recession could prove to be by far the most effective mechanism for easing the debt burden.

Europe, meanwhile, seems to be able to do nothing but hide its nakedness behind a grotesque arms race aimed at propping up financial bubbles. This is merely the latest chapter in a prolonged period of deception that began with the rapid rise of neoliberal financialization. While the latter did boost purchasing power at the end of the last century, particularly in the West, it lacked any genuine underlying value. Now the crippling limitations of financial-speculative capitalism are presenting us with a hefty bill. The geo/biopolitical events of recent years have no causative potential: they are simply morbid symptoms of a collapse that first strikes the hyper-indebted and unproductive.

If the outcome of crisis management strategies inevitably leads to monetary devaluation, whether through inflation or deflation, if may be time to confront the money-fetish to finally seek alternatives to the modern commodity-producing system. All traditional reform policies, including its various leftist iterations, are increasingly absurd and socially repressive in the face of a credit addiction that destroys fiat currencies. The only glimmer of hope would seem to lie in the emergence of a movement of resistance and transition, ideally founded on the repudiation of war, which could foster a new awareness of the unmanageable contradictions that shape life under capitalism – and which tries to transcend them.