Eye-witness narrates and analyzes US hatred to United Europe

From Kate McKenna's Substack:

"American Hate for Europe is Nothing New To understand today, we must first understand yesterday

Kate McKenna, Dec 13, 2025

 

In the late 90’s, I worked for AIG Trading, Hank Greenberg, and Kissinger’s secret weapon to support (and ensure) American interests in global capital markets. Working on the 13th floor of a 12-floor building, with biometric scans required to enter the trading floor, was unique back then. Having everything I did and everything I said recorded and monitored was not. I was part of a covert operation to derail the euro before it was even launched.

My partner in crime, and dear friend, was Bernard Connolly - the conduit for American interests - we travelled the globe making sure key partners knew that the euro was a disaster waiting to happen and that Brussels was the lair of the devil. We were the shadowy arm of US power. I was a kid with way too much power playing a game I did not truly understand but absolutely loved. Wisdom comes with age and battle scars.

“My central thesis is that the ERM and the EMU are not only inefficient but also undemocratic: a danger not only to our wealth but to our freedom and ultimately, our peace.” Bernard Connolly’s opening salvo in his book, The Rotten Heart of Europe, positions the euro’s precursor (ERM) and the union itself as existential risks, predicting that rigid currencies would ignite conflicts—foreshadowing the Greek crisis’s social unrest and Brexit’s sovereignty battles.

Enter the “Euro Basket,” a derivative that I created and sold in vast amounts. Not just a tool but a market-manipulating weapon that used options hedging to force spot prices and erode confidence in this bright new European world. A world that we were on a mission to upend, disrupt, and attempt to destroy.

“Like Hitler, like Stalin, the énarque believes that power will always prevail over economics.” In The Rotten Heart of Europe, Bernard lambasts French technocrats (énarques from the elite École Nationale d’Administration) driving EMU, equating their ideological zeal for monetary union with dictators’ disregard for economic reality. This comparison got him branded a heretic in Brussels. Back then, we knew there was a list of people who were enemies to the state, and Bernard was on the Top 10.

This wasn’t rogue trading. It wasn’t rogue behaviour. This was and, I believe, still is America’s playbook - throwing shade on Europe’s “castles in the air” [the euro, according to 1990s US commentary] to protect the dollar’s dominance. I watched with delight as my market machinations worked perfectly - it delighted me to watch the dominoes hit, one by one, exactly as I had planned. Sometimes these schemes of mine worked a little too well - a story for another time.

In case you wondered what side we were on: “For quite a few centuries... it’s been the British nation-state (together with its admirers in France, America, Austria) that has been teaching the world what it means for peoples to live in freedom and decency, while the idea of ‘Europe’ has spawned a succession of tyrannies.” Citing philosopher Yoram Hazony in his book, Bernard indicts pan-Europeanism as a historical incubator of despotism (e.g., the Napoleonic Wars, fascism), contrasting it with Anglo-Saxon liberty—a politically explosive claim that ties the EMU to centuries of conflict. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The Confrontation – Skeptics’ Prophecies and Hidden Agendas

In the feverish countdown to the euro’s 1999 debut, a relentless barrage of American economists unleashed intellectual artillery that scorched the entire project as a reckless, politically intoxicated fantasy. This wasn’t polite academic quibbling—it was a coordinated demolition job, fired from the ivory towers of Chicago, Harvard, and MIT, armed with the smoking wreckage of the 1992-1993 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) meltdown. Remember Black Wednesday? On September 16, 1992, George Soros and a swarm of speculators hammered the British pound so brutally that the UK was humiliatingly ejected from the ERM, hemorrhaging billions overnight while Italy soon followed suit. Those crises laid bare the suicidal folly of shackling wildly divergent economies to rigid exchange pegs—precisely the straitjacket the euro was about to impose permanently.

The onslaught drew its lethal precision from Robert Mundell’s Optimal Currency Area theory: for a single currency to survive without imploding, you need lightning-fast labor mobility, flexible wages, and a muscular fiscal federation to cushion regional shocks—Europe failed every test. Workers barely trickled across borders (annual intra-EU migration languished at a pathetic 0.1-0.2%, versus 2-3% in the nimble United States), linguistic and cultural walls turned relocation into exile, and the EU’s puny budget—scraping by at just 1% of GDP—offered no meaningful transfers, unlike America’s federal firepower at 20% of GDP.

Milton Friedman, the free-market titan, lobbed the first grenade in 1997: the euro would be “a big source of problems, not a source of help,” he thundered, warning it would “exacerbate political tensions by converting divergent shocks that could have been readily accommodated by exchange rate changes into divisive political issues.” Boom—straight to the heart of sovereignty.

Harvard’s Martin Feldstein went nuclear. In his blistering 1997 Foreign Affairs broadside “EMU and International Conflict,” he prophesied outright catastrophe: a malfunctioning currency union could ignite “war between France and Germany,” turning economic pain into raw interstate hatred. He invoked the American Civil War as a grim precedent—proof that even deep political bonds shatter without fiscal shock absorbers.

Paul Krugman, the sharp-tongued MIT prodigy, fired a chilling caution in his 1998 Fortune essay “The Euro: Beware of What You Wish For.” Without America’s effortless labor flows, he warned, the euro would cruelly “exacerbate inequalities,” trapping regions in endless slumps—like Massachusetts bleeding jobs while the Sun Belt boomed—dooming the periphery to permanent disadvantage.

Rudiger Dornbusch, Krugman’s MIT colleague, delivered the coup de grâce with savage disdain, branding the whole endeavor “Euro fantasies” in his 1996 Foreign Affairs takedown. It was a delusional “panacea,” he sneered, blind to inflation gaps and wage rigidities that would gut southern competitiveness, spawn housing bubbles, and demand either crushing austerity or explosive breakups.

This wasn’t random sniping. It was a synchronized intellectual blitz that I was at the centre of coordinating, feeding, amplifying, and leveraging. Each salvo reinforcing the last, all rooted in the ERM’s humiliating collapse and the glaring OCA failures Europe stubbornly ignored. Their warnings weren’t just prescient—they were prophetic thunder that echoed through the 2010 debt inferno, Greece’s near-expulsion, and the north-south chasm that still festers today. The American economists didn’t just doubt the euro. They damned it as a dangerous delusion—and history has been proving them brutally right ever since.

This was a coordinated attack to protect American interests against the growing European threat.

While the economists rained fire from academia, U.S. government heavyweights delivered the real gut punches—cold, calculated strikes from the corridors of power that exposed America’s raw contempt for Europe’s pretensions to independence.

Madeleine Albright, architect of NATO’s post-Cold War order, drew a brutal red line in 1998: any European defense push must obey her infamous “three Ds”—no de-linking from NATO, no duplication of U.S. capabilities, no discrimination against non-EU allies. Translation? Brussels could dream of autonomy all it wanted, but Washington would tolerate nothing that threatened American command. She dismissed European objections as “hogwash,” making clear: NATO stays America’s instrument, or it stays irrelevant.

Defense Secretary William Cohen piled on with venomous jabs at Europe’s freeloading. In 1997, he publicly humiliated allies for failing pledges made in 1991, snarling that they weren’t “moving ahead quite fast enough” on reforms while slashing budgets to fund Maastricht’s fiscal gymnastics. The message was savage: Europe was gorging on U.S. protection while starving its own defenses—classic parasite behavior.

Treasury Undersecretary Lawrence Summers, the Clinton administration’s economic enforcer, delivered the quiet killer in 1997: “profound skepticism” about the euro’s viability, warning investors would demand a “proven track record” before touching the new currency. It was diplomatic code for: this experiment is built on sand, and we’re not betting America’s financial supremacy on it.

All of this echoed Henry Kissinger’s devastating diagnosis of Europe’s self-inflicted wound—the “hiatus.” As he warned in the late 1990s, handing sovereignty to Brussels had gutted the national resolve that once fueled European power, without creating anything capable of replacing it. The result? A continent that could no longer project global force yet refused to fully submit to U.S. leadership—trapped in limbo, eroding its own relevance while chaining America to its defense.

Europe wasn’t just integrating. In Washington’s eyes, it was committing slow-motion suicide—and expecting the United States to foot the bill while it bled out.

Anybody who thinks Trump’s NSS is shocking and new hasn’t been concentrating for the last few decades, or if you are a newbie to life, hasn’t read enough. American hate for the creation and existence of Europe is nothing new.

On December 4, 2025: Donald Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy dropped like a thermonuclear indictment, demanding Europe cough up 5% of GDP for defense or face U.S. abandonment, declaring neutrality on Russia to “stabilize Eurasia,” and branding the EU a sinking ship of “decline”—regulatory strangulation, migrant floods, and identity erosion dooming NATO’s heartland to become “majority non-European” in decades.

Madeleine Albright’s 1997: “I will insist that our old allies share this burden fairly. That is what NATO is all about.” That is Trump’s “Hague Commitment” verbatim, a fair-share shakedown upgraded from Clinton’s polite prod to existential threat. William Cohen’s 1997 gut-punch—” They weren’t moving ahead quite fast enough”—morphs into the NSS’s savage ledger of “enormous imbalances,” where Europe’s post-Cold War budget slashes (Germany at 1.7% GDP in 1999) now justify troop pullouts. Lawrence Summers’ 1997 whisper of “profound skepticism” about the euro’s “unproven track record” echoes the NSS’s trade-war broadsides against Brussels’ “malign activities,” from carbon tariffs to digital sovereignty—barriers to U.S. dominance, plain and predatory.

Europe’s integration as a self-sabotaging fever dream, hollowing national spines without forging a global fist, leaving the U.S. to babysit a continent too proud to pay its tab. What if, without this relentless U.S. barrage, the euro had welded Europe into a unified colossus— a dollar-killer rivaling America’s orbit? Instead, it birthed a half-baked behemoth, its real convergence a cruel joke. Sadly, and very likely because of people like me who never gave it a chance. We created invisible vulnerabilities that we knew would undermine it precisely as it played out.

Need proof that Trump’s Euro-Hate is nothing new for America? Here:

1990s U.S. Skepticism vs. 2025 NSS: The Unbroken Thread

• Burden-Sharing Demands
  1990s Echo: Madeleine Albright (1997) – “I will insist that our old allies share this burden fairly.”
  2025 NSS Parallel: The “Hague Commitment” – 5% GDP defense spending or face isolation.
  Real-World Vindication: Europe’s average defence spend lingers around 1.7% (2024), handing America massive leverage amid the Ukraine war.

• Freeloading and Reform Delays
  1990s Echo: William Cohen (1997) – “They weren’t moving ahead quite fast enough on reforms.”
  2025 NSS Parallel: Europe “offloaded the cost of its defense onto the American people.”
  Real-World Vindication: Post-1999 budget cuts raised NATO’s non-U.S. share to about 30%, yet America still shoulders roughly 70% of the load.

• Doubts on the Euro’s Viability
  1990s Echo: Lawrence Summers (1997) – “Profound skepticism” about the euro’s “unproven track record.”
  2025 NSS Parallel: EU “decline” driven by stifling regulations and unchecked migration.
  Real-World Vindication: The euro plunged from $1.18 at launch (1999) to $0.82 by 2000, confirming Optimal Currency Area fears.

• Sovereignty Erosion and Identity Loss
  1990s Echo: Henry Kissinger (late 1990s) – Europe’s “hiatus” in sovereignty erodes its global power.
  2025 NSS Parallel: “Loss of identities... a continent unrecognizable in 20 years.”
  Real-World Vindication: 2024 GDP per capita (PPS) disparities – Luxembourg at 241% of the EU average, Bulgaria around 41% – gaps have widened roughly 20% since 1999.

In case all of this has not been clear, Europe, you are sitting squarely in American sights, and it is gunning for you - it might have taken two decades, but your foundations are being chiselled away as I type. I remain as loyal to America as I was back then, faithful to the United Kingdom (don’t think for a second that dear ol’ Maggie & Co wasn’t watching from the wings - BREXIT had equally longstanding roots). But I am also extremely pro-Europe as it is the only security Ukraine can genuinely count on. I believe that America got it wrong, and so did the UK - Europe was never the threat. China was and is. A story for another time, as yes, I was also part of that Kissinger-and-Hank dance.

A Chronological Scan

Cold War Era (1950s-1970s): Prioritizing Division Over Unity

• Henry Kissinger (1973, addressing European complaints):

“There have been complaints in Europe that America is out to divide Europe economically, or to desert Europe militarily, or to bypass Europe.”
Acknowledges U.S. accusations of deliberate economic fragmentation to maintain dominance, revealing early intent to prevent a cohesive bloc rivaling American influence. Notice he never denied it - lol.

Post-Cold War 1990s: Predicting Conflict to Undermine Integration
• Martin Feldstein (1997): “A malfunctioning currency union could lead to civil war.”
Frames EMU as a catalyst for violent interstate war, implying U.S. endorsement of critiques that could sow seeds of division within Europe.
• Henry Kissinger (late 1990s): “The unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than any European integration.”
Explicitly prioritizes German unity and Soviet collapse over EU progress, signaling U.S. preference for a fragmented Europe over a unified powerhouse.
• Madeleine Albright (1998, “three Ds”): No de-linking from NATO, no duplication of efforts, no discrimination against non-EU allies—dismissing EU autonomy as “hogwash.”
Enforces U.S. veto on independent European defense, ensuring NATO (U.S.-led) keeps the bloc divided and dependent.

2010s: Open Calls for Reversal
• Ted Malloch (2017, Trump nominee for EU ambassador): “The US should... make firm its opposition to a federal Europe by saying a definite No to a single Euro government... European integration is not at all in America’s interest.”
Advocates actively opposing and reversing EU federalism, treating integration as contrary to U.S. goals—explicit intent to encourage disintegration via bilateral deals.

2025 Era: Explicit Threats of Erasure and Exit
• U.S. National Security Strategy (2025): “Europe is on a path to becoming ‘unrecognizable’ because of migration policies that are undermining the national identities of European [nations]... The nations of Europe cannot look to the US for their own security at the same time they affirmatively undermine the security of the US itself.”
Warns of “civilizational erasure” and pressures allies to abandon EU unity, framing integration as self-destructive and hostile to America.
• Leaked U.S. files (2025): Reports of a strategy to persuade Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland to leave the EU, following Brexit’s model.
Reveals alleged active U.S. efforts to engineer exits, aiming to splinter the bloc into weaker, U.S.-aligned fragments.

So what now?

If you accept that this latest anti-European American aggression is nothing new, then the decision is relatively straightforward. Time for Europeans to take responsibility for their future if they want it to be big and beautiful. America is wrong. Russia is the threat. China is the threat. Europe has never been the Boogie Man that Kissinger and others have taught you to believe it is. The world is better when the West is united, and that means a strong united front."