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