The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover

[rmstock]

EU creator Jean Monnet was Roosevelt's eyes and ears in Europe. Some called him a US agent
The European Union always was a CIA project,
as Brexiteers discover
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD ____________________________________________
27 APRIL 2016 • 8:18PM   
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/04/27/the-european-union-always-was-a-cia-project-as-brexiteers-discov/

  "Brexiteers should have been prepared for the shattering intervention of
   the US.  The European Union always was an American project.
   
   It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s,
   and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
   and Nixon administrations.
   
   
   US President Barack Obama warned Britain to stay in the EU Credit: AFP/Getty
   
   While irritated at times, the US has relied on the EU ever since as the
   anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO.
   
   There has never been a divide-and-rule strategy.
   
   The eurosceptic camp has been strangely blind to this, somehow
   supposing that powerful forces across the Atlantic are egging on
   British secession, and will hail them as liberators.
   
   The anti-Brussels movement in France - and to a lesser extent in Italy
   and Germany, and among the Nordic Left - works from the opposite
   premise, that the EU is essentially an instrument of Anglo-Saxon power
   and 'capitalisme sauvage'.
   
   France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against
   dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian
   banks linked to Vladimir Putin.
   
   Like it or not, this is at least is strategically coherent.
   
   The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German
   reconciliation - and would lead by stages to the European Community -
   was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in
   Foggy Bottom. "It all began in Washington," said Robert Schuman's chief
   of staff.
   
   It was the Truman administration that browbeat the French to reach a
   modus vivendi with Germany in the early post-War years, even
   threatening to cut off US Marshall aid at a furious meeting with
   recalcitrant French leaders they resisted in September 1950.
   
   
   Soviet tanks rumble into Prague
   
   Truman's motive was obvious. The Yalta settlement with the Soviet Union
   was breaking down. He wanted a united front to deter the Kremlin from
   further aggrandizement after Stalin gobbled up Czechoslovakia, doubly
   so after Communist North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded
   the South.
   
   For British eurosceptics, Jean Monnet looms large in the federalist
   pantheon, the emminence grise of supranational villainy. Few are aware
   that he spent much of his life in America, and served as war-time eyes
   and ears of Franklin Roosevelt.
   
   General Charles de Gaulle thought him an American agent,  as indeed he
   was in a loose sense. Eric Roussel's biography of Monnet reveals how he
   worked hand in glove with successive administrations.
   
   
   General Charles de Gaulle was always deeply suspicious of American motives Credit: Alamy
   
   It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page study has never been
   translated into English since it is the best work ever written about
   the origins of the EU.
   
   Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department
   archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement
   secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push
   Britain into the project.
   
   As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became available,
   one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a
   full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J
   Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services,
   precursor of the Central Inteligence Agency.
   
   The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe
   (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided
   53.5 per cent of the European movement's funds in 1958. The board
   included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the
   Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the
   CIA.
   
   
   Bill Donovan, legendary head of the war-time OSS, was later in charge of orchestrating the EU project
   
   Papers show that it treated some of the EU's 'founding fathers' as
   hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding
   that would have broken reliance on Washington.
   
   There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely
   in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe
   was a roaring success.
   
   There were horrible misjudgments along the way, of course. A memo dated
   June 11, 1965, instructs the vice-president of the European Community
   to pursue monetary union by stealth, suppressing debate until the
   "adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable". This
   was too clever by half, as we can see today from debt-deflation traps
   and mass unemployment across southern Europe.
   
   In a sense these papers are ancient history. What they show is that the
   American 'deep state' was in up to its neck. We can argue over whether
   Boris Johnson crossed a line last week by dredging up President Barack
   Obama's "part-Kenyan ancestry", but the cardinal error was to suppose
   that Mr Obama's trade threat had anything to do with the ordeals of his
   grandfather in a Mau Mau prison camp. It was American foreign policy
   boilerplate.
   
   As it happens, Mr Obama might understandably feel rancour after the
   abuses that have come to light lately from the Mau Mau repression.  It
   was a shameful breakdown of colonial police discipline, to the disgust
   of veteran officials who served in other parts of Africa.  But the
   message from his extraordinary book - 'Dreams From My Father' - is that
   he strives to rise above historic grudges.
   
   Brexiteers take comfort that Republican hopeful Ted Cruz wants a
   post-Brexit Britain to jump to the "front of the line for a free trade
   deal", but he is merely making campaign hay. Mr Cruz will conform to
   Washington's Palmerstonian imperatives - whatever they may be at that
   moment - if he ever enters the White House.
   
   
   President Obama's grandfather was a prisoner during the suppression of Kenya's Mau Mau revolt, a shameful episode of British colonial history
   
   It is true that America had second thoughts about the EU once the
   ideological fanatics gained ascendancy in the late 1980s, recasting the
   union as a rival superpower with ambitions to challenge and surpass the
   US.
   
   John Kornblum,  the State Department's chief of European affairs in the
   1990s, says it was a nightmare trying deal with Brussels. "I ended up
   totally frustrated. In the  areas of military, security and defence, it
   is totally dysfunctional."
   
    Mr Kornblum argues that the EU "left NATO psychologically" when it
   tried to set up its own military command structure, and did so with its
   usual posturing and incompetence. "Both Britain and the West would be
   in much better shape if Britain was not in the EU," he said.
   
   This is interesting but it is a minority view in US policy circles. The
   frustration passed when Poland and the first wave of East European
   states joined the EU in 2004, bringing in a troupe of Atlanticist
   governments.
   
   We know it is hardly a love-affair. A top US official was caught two
   years ago on a telephone intercept dismissing Brussels during the
   Ukraine crisis with the lapidary words, "fuck the EU".
   
   Yet the all-pervading view is that the Western liberal order is under
   triple assault, and the EU must be propped, much as Britain and France
   propped up the tottering Ottoman Empire in the 19th - and wisely so
   given that its slow collapse led directly to the First World War.
   
   Today's combined threats comes from Jihadi terror and a string of
   failed states across the Maghreb and the Levant; from a
   highly-militarized pariah regime in Moscow that will soon run out of
   money but has a window of opportunity before Europe rearms; and from an
   extremely dangerous crisis in the South China Sea that is escalating by
   the day as Beijing tests the US alliance structure.
   
   The dangers from Russia and China are of course interlinked. It is
   likely - pessimists say certain - that Vladimir Putin would seize on a
   serious blow-up on Pacific rim to try his luck in Europe. In the eyes
   of Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, and those capitals around the world
   that broadly view Pax Americana as a plus, this is not the time for
   Britain to lob a stick of dynamite into Europe's rickety edifice.
   
   The awful truth for the Leave campaign is that the governing
   establishment of the entire Western world views Brexit as strategic
   vandalism. Whether fair or not, Brexiteers must answer this reproach. A
   few such as Lord Owen grasp the scale of the problem. Most seemed
   blithely unaware until Mr Obama blew into town last week.
   
   In my view, the Brexit camp should be laying out plans to increase UK
   defence spending by half to 3pc of GDP, pledging to propel Britain into
   the lead as the undisputed military power of Europe. They should aim to
   bind this country closer to France in an even more intimate security
   alliance. These sorts of moves would at least spike one of Project
   Fear's biggest guns.
   
   The Brexiteers should squelch any suggestion that EU withdrawal means
   resiling from global responsibility, or tearing up the European
   Convention (that British-drafted, non-EU, Magna Carta of freedom), or
   turning our backs on the COP21 climate accords, or any other of the
   febrile flirtations of the movement.
   
   It is perhaps too much to expect a coherent plan from a disparate
   group, thrown together artificially by events. Yet many of us who are
   sympathetic to the Brexit camp, who also want to take back our
   sovereign self-government and escape the bogus and usurped supremacy of
   the European Court of Justice, have yet to hear how Brexiteers think
   this extraction can occur without colossal collateral damage and in a
   manner consistent with the honour of this country.
   
   You can quarrel with Europe, or you can quarrel with the US, but it is
   courting fate to quarrel with the whole democratic world at the same
   time.

   READ MORE ABOUT:
       Russia
       Vladimir Putin
       Barack Obama
       History
       Boris Johnson
       European Court of Justice
       European Union
       Europe
       France
       Ted Cruz   "

[rmstock]

This was written less than a month ago :

  "Mr Cruz will conform to
   Washington's Palmerstonian imperatives - whatever they may be at that
   moment - if he ever enters the White House. "

very strange how fast these characters have entirely left the scenery ...

[yankeedoodle]

Propaganda managed to slip in claim that Vlad is funding Front National, which, surely, is intended to make the reader think Vlad is funding all the nationalist movements in Europe.

Before Vlad and Marine, there was, respectively, Yeltsin and Jean-Marie.  Guess we are supposed to believe Yeltsin was funding Jean-Marie.

France's Marine Le Pen is trenchantly anti-American. She rails against dollar supremacy. Her Front National relies on funding from Russian banks linked to Vladimir Putin.