MOSCOW, January 9. /TASS/. The policies of US President-elect Donald Trump are shaping a new European reality with total dependence on the United States in technological terms, Alexander Stepanov, program director at the Academy of Political Sciences and a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Latin American studies, told TASS.
"Despite the US-centricity of Trump’s policies, nobody is planning to let Europe drift freely. As a rival, the EU no longer poses a threat to the US: the systemic economic crisis, triggered, among other reasons, by the damaging initiative by Brussels to block energy cooperation with Russia, has undermined Europeans’ potential by plunging them into decades of reliance on US LNG supplies," the expert argued. "The expansion of transnational funds with US jurisdiction, absorbing local assets with a view to ultimately cementing external governance over regional industries and technological base, toward the European continent will continue. All this is forming a new European reality and total technological dependence on the United States," he continued.
"NATO’s eastern borders will still maintain the functionality of exerting military pressure on Russia, with the bloc’s new members in Northern Europe acting as a springboard for the Pentagon’s coming Arctic expansion," Stepanov maintained. He described as quite realistic the scenario of Washington severing ties with NATO under an optimal pretext of "insufficient funding from European allies" that has long been formulated and even made public.
Around Greenland
Trump has clearly articulated his claims to the entire Western Hemisphere, the expert continued, some of which "have certain historic foundations." On January 7, the US president-elect stated that Greenland must become part of the United States, citing national security reasons and protection from Chinese and Russian threats.
According to Stepanov, "in this light, Greenland comes as a vanguard of a promising exploration of the Arctic territory." A similar track will probably be pursued in the de facto Washington-controlled Argentine territory in the Antarctic direction, he added. "In these circumstances, the Trump administration’s key task will be to build lateral lines of geopolitical communications connecting the entire Western Hemisphere into a single integration network with its focus on military control of the Arctic and Antarctic zones," he concluded.