Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony
From Nord Stream’s sabotage to NATO’s 5 % arms push: Inside the Networks Fueling Transatlantic Madness
Prelude: The Lansing Memo Comes to Berlin
Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, dictated the 1924 “ambitious young Mexicans” memo. You know the line: open our universities to their élite, drench them in American values, and they’ll govern Mexico for us: better, cheaper, and without a single Marine. The method rings depressingly true today.
One hundred years after Lansing spelled out the blueprint, Germany has become its most perfected specimen. When Olaf Scholz’s cabinet greenlit the destruction of Nord Stream 2, an act of economic self-sabotage with no plausible strategic benefit for Germany, and Merz, now Chancellor, pledged never to use it again, they were betraying Germany. At the same time, they were fulfilling a biographical destiny forged out of their limited horizons, manufactured in Ivy League seminars, Pentagon workshops, and the velvet-lined chambers of the Atlantik-Brücke.
This is the story of an elite cohort trained to regard Atlanticism as synonymous with "Western civilization" itself. The costs: collapsing industrial output, energy poverty, and the specter of conscription, are borne by everyone else.
Introduction: The Madness and Its Method
Germany, an export titan that once closely guarded its economic sovereignty, now sacrifices its energy infrastructure, bankrolls long-range missiles (including the co-production of long-range weapons with Ukraine), and reverts to war-preparedness (so-called Kriegstüchtigkeit) as a virtue, while rehearsing mobilization plans for a NATO-Russia clash that would, first and foremost, churn German soil as the Operationsplan Deutschland lays out. This is a strategic realignment on a deeper level as a result of ideological automation. How else can we explain the enduring gap between public sentiment and elite decision-making?
A 2024 poll shows that 60 percent of Germans oppose further weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Yet Lars Klingbeil, SPD co-leader, vice-Chancellor, and Finance Minister, proclaims that for Germany to be “war-ready,” the Bundeswehr would need to be more attractive for potential conscripts, e.g., through the possibility of getting a driver's license for free from the federal government. Additionally, the coalition presses on with so-called strategic ambiguity.
These are the symptoms of a peculiar madness unfolding in Berlin. A nation that rebuilt itself from the ashes of war and division now willingly marches toward conflict with a nuclear-armed neighbor. The madness, however, follows a method.
Consider NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s recent proclamation at the 2025 summit:
"NATO is the most powerful defense alliance in world history—more powerful than the Roman Empire, more powerful than Napoleon’s empire… We must prevent Russian dominance because we value our way of life."
The historical illiteracy or obfuscation (depending on how we interpret Rutte’s statements) is staggering. Napoleon, like NATO today, justified continental domination as liberation. His invasion of Russia, a catastrophic failure, was framed as a preemptive strike against "aggressive" Tsarist expansion. The parallels write themselves.
Historian Jeff Rich, dissecting NATO’s Operation Spiderweb sabotage campaigns inside Russia, observed:
"NATO is the power base for elites who act in lockstep with U.S. geopolitical projection. When Rutte compares NATO to Napoleon, he forgets that Russia ultimately liberated Europe from that empire. Perhaps Russia will liberate Europe from the United States after this war."
What I’m trying to say is that this is not a conspiracy. It is institutionalized hegemony, operating through what Gramsci called the "cultural leadership" of a ruling class. But where Gramsci analyzed national elites vis-a-vis their fellow citizens, we now confront a transnational caste: German politicians like Jakob Schrot (more on him shortly), Dutch technocrats like Rutte (who recently called the current US president Trump “daddy” at the NATO summit that cements 5% defense spending), and French Eurocrats whose biographies, education, and career incentives align not with their citizens, but with the imperatives of keeping the project of US American unipolarity alive. The actions of these elites on the geopolitical chessboard are not just irrational; the governing elites are simply loyal to a different reference group
I. The riddle: Why are European elites torching their own house?
As we begin to see, the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. It is far more banal and far more effective. The answer also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions. It also lies in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.
Elite Knowledge Networks
Inderjeet Parmar (2019) terms this the soft machinery of elite knowledge networks: “flows of people, money, and ideas” that institutionalize consensus from Washington to Berlin. The Fulbright Program, the German Marshall Fund, Atlantik-Brücke, the Munich Security Conference, and the Bilderberg Meetings are formative ecosystems. They sort, school, and elevate those who can carry the worldview forward.
Critically, these networks are not passive forums. They are “American elites’ essential power technology”: a mode of knowledge production and personnel selection that is spectacularly successful at reproducing a pro-U.S. worldview globally. Elite socialization in itself is not a benign process. It hardwires assumptions, defines what is politically imaginable, and naturalizes asymmetry.
The World Order
The liberal international order, which underlies these elites’ worldviews, far from being universalist, is built on a double logic. As Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, candidly admitted in 2017 during the first Trump administration, the very purpose of Euro-Atlanticism is to prevent a post-West world order:
Tomorrow I am meeting President Trump and I will try to convince him that euroatlantism is primarily cooperation of the free for the sake of freedom; that if we want to prevent the scenario that has already been named by our opponents not so long ago in Munich as the “post-West world order”, we should watch over our legacy of freedom together.
Within this system, inclusion is selective. Japan and South Korea, despite their loyalty, were never treated like Western Europe. And rising powers are either domesticated, coaxed to conform, or contained as threats. This logic is foundational: if incorporation fails, containment must follow.
Yet containment begins with minds, not missiles. The ideological assimilation of foreign elites is the first line of imperial defense. Thus, the maintenance of hegemony relies less on coercion than on soft incorporation. Elite knowledge networks, embedded in university programs, philanthropic foundations, and think tanks, act as vectors for this soft power. They socialize, recruit, and certify rising leaders.
Elite Integration Machines
As Parmar notes, these networks define what counts as “thinkable thought” and “askable questions.” The Ford and Rockefeller foundations, RAND Corporation, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for American Progress are elite integration machines where, through these processes of integration and socialization, a certain type of knowledge becomes power. Thus, a Fulbright or Atlantik-Brücke lapel pin becomes an all-access badge to Brussels and DC and the surest way to “belong.”
Yet this ecosystem is not the whole planet. A 2016 study by Eelke Heemskerk and Frank Takes, mapping 400,000 board interlocks, shows that the densest transnational elite cluster still resides on the North-Atlantic axis. The Asian corporate elite, by contrast, forms a separate, far less entangled community, structurally poised to build its own power base and perhaps an alternative, Sino-centric capitalism. The more Asia’s networks remain self-insulated, the greater the risk (in Euro-Atlantic elites’ eyes) of a genuine “post-West world order.”
In other words, Western think-tank pipelines are about pre-empting that divergence and protecting their elite sphere.
European elites are not merely influenced by the United States. Through this system, they are formatted, professionally shaped, and ideologically tethered to it. Of course, not wholly or completely, as if they had no autonomy at all or as if national history had no bearing on these elites, yet, each of these European nations' characteristics will give a unique flavor to the transatlantic worldview that informs their policies.
The result: U.S. foreign policy goals are not simply imposed on Berlin; they are voiced from within.
II. The Hegemonic Architecture: How Elite Capture Works
The liberal order sells itself as universal, yet those who join must accept the (publicly) unspoken rulebook. Those who do not join will be contained and encircled by a permanent U.S. military presence. In other words, the imperial core preserves its status by socializing other elites into its worldview rather than merely coercing them. Now, we’ll take a look at those elite integration machines (in particular, by analyzing the transatlantic ties of Germany and German functional elites):
1 From Chatham House to DGAP: A Brief Institutional Genealogy
Think‑tank power began in London with the Royal United Services Institute (1831), established by the Duke of Wellington as an independent professional body to study military and strategic issues. It broadened after 1919 when Chatham House and the Carnegie Endowment formalized elite debate (Roberts 2015). Across the Atlantic, the Council on Foreign Relations (1921) fused Wall Street wealth with Ivy League scholarship, with Ford and Rockefeller providing permanence. Corporate funding, after all. Indeed, the founders were often influential elites who sought coordination for their policies in the fields of defense and strategic thinking, first within the British Empire and then with the emerging American hegemon.
After 1945, the architecture was exported to a ruined Europe. The privately funded Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik (DGAP, 1955) copied the CFR template in Bonn. The Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP, 1962) offered a more governmental cousin, supplying white papers directly to the Chancellery. However, importantly, after the Second World War, Anglo-American think tanks and their personnel became the center of policy formulation and long-term planning. Think tanks specializing in international affairs were generally considered essential supplements to the design of foreign policy. They also served as forums where politicians and bureaucrats could interact with representatives from the academic, media, and business worlds, as well as potential supporters or recruits for government operations.
In the 1960s, the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantic Institute, and Atlantik‑Brücke layered social glue on top of policy work through gala dinners, Young Leader jamborees, and media study tours but also influenced Western Germany’s political elites. Zetsche (2021) documents how the Brücke and its American sibling, the ACG (American Council on Germany), ensured Willy Brandt’s SPD drifted from neutralism to not abandoning NATO by cultivating party fixers in back‑channel seminars.
In the 1970s and 1980s, US think tanks already sensed an “American decline” in an increasingly globalized world. During this time, new institutional rivals for influence emerged, including think tanks committed to usually conservative perspectives, with the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation at the forefront. (Now remember, the Heritage Foundation has funded Project 2025. A primer for today’s US policy.)
By the 1990s, every German party foundation ran a “Transatlantic Desk.” SWP staff circulated through the Munich Security Conference; DGAP fellows sat on the German Marshall Fund selection jury; editors at Der Spiegel and Die Zeit (an important newspaper in Germany) collected Atlantik‑Brücke alumni pins. The network matured into a seamless funnel: from university to party headquarters to boardroom to NATO off‑site. Ultimately, once U.S. validation becomes the yardstick of professional esteem, deviation is almost an act of self‑harm.
2 Why Think‑Tank History Matters Now
The architecture normalizes apparently suicidal choices. Shutting down cheap Russian pipeline gas is painful for BASF, but it sustains the reputational capital of everyone who holds an Atlantic fellowship. That internal incentive often outweighs national balance‑sheet logic.
What’s more: the think tank represents the forces that drive the global political economy, at least in its Western iteration. Still, geopolitical analysis today tends to be biased toward nation-states and their political actors. It is often through such networks of privately funded and influenced governance that the gap between the nation-state and global markets is filled (Heemskerk & Takes 2016).
3 Think Tanks as the Revolving-Door Engine
The map of institutions we have traced so far would be inert without a circulating cadre of professionals who glide between foundation cubicles, cable-news studios, and government offices.
Nourished by corporate endowments and philanthropic grants, U.S.–European think tanks act as both idea refineries and talent pipelines: they pre-agree the paradigm, then second their own staff to ministries that put it into practice.
Political economists Nano de Graaff and Bastiaan van Apeldoorn (2021) refer to this as the “policy-planning network”: a lattice that combines Fortune 500 funding, congressional alumni, and Ivy League credentialing into a single career escalator:
Consensus workshop – Think-tank roundtables enable elites to harmonize positions in private before they become “non-partisan expertise” in public.
Recruitment pool – The same institutes help presidents and cabinet secretaries fill executive-branch positions (McGann 2007).
Revolving leverage – As Joseph Nye puts it, the most powerful influence is when you “get your own hands on the lever” after co-writing the brief (Conversations with History, 1998).
Together, these hubs function as a transatlantic HR department for the current order, grooming successors who will carry the banner forward.
4 Elite Capture on the Biographical Level
The machinery of elite capture operates on both the social group level and the individual biography level. And it is both simple and effective: a single prestige pipeline throughout one’s life and career from a Fulbright scholarship to a German Marshall Fund fellowship to an Atlantik-Brücke affiliation, and/or think-tank memberships. Such a career ladder has monopolized the symbolic capital required to ascend in Berlin’s foreign policy elite. The first cohort entered the system in the 1960s, but it achieved full self-replication after reunification. Today, many members of Merz’s cabinet boast U.S. State Department-funded fellowships, embassy internships, Atlantik-Brücke affiliations, or similar transatlantic ties; some hold board seats at Washington-aligned institutions, such as the Atlantic Council.
5 The Bourdieu Trap
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s framework reveals how the engineered life paths of these elites perpetuate themselves:
When one pathway dominates (the U.S. fellowship ladder), the field’s imagination of what is possible (in terms of actions and policies) atrophies. Embodied cultural capital (fluent Hill English, a Georgetown lanyard) converts into social capital (alumni networks), which crystallizes as symbolic capital (media legitimacy).
Dissent isn’t debated. It is rendered invisible and only actively excluded if it becomes too visible and loud. Such a hegemonic system, operating on a smaller scale among political elites, functions like a theological seminary, where deviation marks heresy and compliance brings canonization.
6 The Adolescent Capture
What is the most insidious feature of this elite socialization machine? It’s the question of time. The ideal pathway starts in adolescence, during the formative years when political worldviews congeal. Programs like:
target teens as young as 16, immersing them in Model NATO war games and U.S. Embassy "leadership training."
By the time these students enter university, their horizons are already narrowed. A 19-year-old returning from a State Department-funded summer at American University brings back English fluency (hopefully). Above all, they internalize a hierarchy of legitimacy: Washington’s priorities are neutral, universal, and common sense. Alternative modes of thinking about foreign policy, such as non-alignment, détente, and Eurasian trade, are filtered out as extremist or naïve.
This is ideological imprinting and the psychological construction of hegemony at the individual level. The result is a generation of political elites whose biographies read like U.S. State Department training manuals. The tragedy is that by the time these groomed elites reach positions of power in politics, media, or corporations, their compliance feels natural. They do not serve American interests because they are coerced; they do so because they cannot conceive of another way.
The abstract models I just presented here become clearer when we zoom out on a single national hub. Germany’s Atlantik-Brücke offers a textbook case.
III. The German Case: Atlantik-Brücke as Transmission Belt
Anne Zetsche’s archival deep dive on the Atlantik-Brücke and its U.S. sibling, the American Council on Germany (ACG), shows how an ostensibly “private” friendship society became a precision tool for post-war elite alignment. Like think tanks, it is a key institution in the elite integration and socialization machinery.
1 Founders & Fabric
Eric Warburg, heir to the Hamburg banking dynasty, leveraged his Wall Street connections with John J. McCloy to reconnect German finance with U.S. capital markets; Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co. soon brokered Volkswagen’s first U.S. credit line.
Marion Dönhoff leveraged Foreign Affairs soirées and George F. Kennan’s mentorship to rebrand German neutrality as “irresponsible.”
Cosmopolitan elite habitus bound these bankers, editors, and counts. Their mission was to fold West Germany into a U.S.-led “community of nations” before either Moscow or Gaullist Paris could claim it.
2 The SPD’s Capture
A neutral or Franco-centric West Germany was flagged as a deviation from the desired Atlantic trajectory: For example, Emmet Hughes and ACG envoys corresponded with Hamburg mayor Max Brauer to soften SPD anti-militarism (1950-54).
By 1963, the ACG/Atlantik-Brücke tandem helped dilute the Élysée Treaty with a pro-NATO preamble.
Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik also needed to be shifted away from a sustained and sovereign peace project into a NATO-approved "détente."
Ford Foundation funds (via the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and AFL-CIO unions) underwrote youth seminars that purged the party of its Marxist undercurrents; an early example that philanthropy can have a profound impact, akin to intelligence work.
3 The Media
Annual Brücke dinners with NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander double as editorial retreats:
Josef Joffe (Die Zeit), Kai Diekmann (Bild), and Stefan Kornelius (Süddeutsche Zeitung) are long-time members; ZDF anchor Claus Kleber once sat on the Brücke trust.
The result is not a diktat but anticipatory alignment: mainstream outlets rarely frame German rearmament as optional. They frame it rather as the only way and ensure that mainstream discourse never strays from Atlanticist orthodoxy.
4 Boardroom Synergy
The Brücke board today represents a balance sheet of Atlantic capitalism, featuring prominent companies such as the American Chamber of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, and BASF. Media, law, and pharma sit beside CDU and SPD heavyweights; proof that “bipartisanship” here means fidelity to a shared transatlantic business model and world order.
5 Consensus Engineering in Action
2009 – Friedrich Merz (CDU) became the Brücke chair, then Germany’s head of BlackRock.
2019 – Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) takes over; critics fear a “provocateur,” but the appointment mainly neutralizes any residual SPD scepticism regarding the NATO 2 % target (which nowadays has become the 5 % target).
What appears to be a polite salon culture functions as a transatlantic transmission belt, diffusing U.S. preferences into German party platforms, boardrooms, and newsrooms without a single Pentagon directive.
Having traced how Atlantik-Brücke helped weld Germany’s post-war institutions into the wider transatlantic circuitry, we will now examine Bilderberg meetings as another conduit for transatlantic elite socialization.
IV. Bilderberg and the Business of Hegemony
The Bilderberg Group, often dismissed as a conspiracy theorists’ obsession, is in fact a critical node in what sociologist Kantor (2017) calls the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). An analysis of its 2010–2015 meetings reveals:
1 Who Sits at the Table?
67% of attendees were CEOs, bankers, or corporate directors (Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BP).
Zero trade unionists were invited. The "dialogue" excludes labor by design.
Corporate fraction dominates the TCC; politics is increasingly a service function of capital.
On the other hand, an analysis by Gijswijt (2019) shows us the post-Cold War composition of Bilderberg meetings when it was first establishing itself between 1954 and 1968:
Roughly 25 % of attendees hailed from the United States, 14 % from the United Kingdom, and 9 % each from France and West Germany.
30 % were “businessmen, bankers, and lawyers,” 20 % “politicians and some trade-union leaders,” another 16 % diplomats, with the balance made up of academics, journalists, and senior officials from NATO, the World Bank, the OECD, and the IMF.
Women were “glaringly absent.”
Double-dipping by core firms & states
Deutsche Bank sent both the CEO & chair (2016); the Netherlands fielded the PM & King (2016).
Extra chairs secure agenda-setting and serve as evidence that economy > polity within elite coordination.
Those numbers demonstrate how closely Bilderberg’s center of gravity aligned with the Cold War core of the liberal order, encompassing Atlantic finance, defense, and diplomacy, while maintaining sufficient national representation to claim a pan-Western mandate.
2 Recruitment Through Recognition
The organizers “were always on the lookout for new talent” who could be socialized into the club. (Gijswijt 2019) Participation became a credential: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Angela Merkel each appeared before reaching high office. Far from being a smoky-room king-maker, the value lay in the prestige pipeline itself: a CV line that signaled ideological reliability and opened doors across Wall Street, Whitehall, and the Bundeskanzleramt.
3 Informal Diplomacy, Not Formal Decisions
No resolutions were passed and no minutes released, yet “[t]he real importance of the meetings was determined by what participants did with the symbolic capital they assembled.” (Gijswijt 2019) The conference functioned as a high-trust rehearsal room: ideas could be tried out, reputations vetted, and rival premises harmonized. That latent consensus then resurfaced in NATO communiqués, or EC white papers.
4 Identity Work and Alliance Management
By design, Bilderberg cultivated “a strong sense of emotional community based on conceptions of the Free World or the West.” (Gijswijt 2019) Simply showing up, especially for marquee U.S. figures, “stimulate[d] acceptance of the United States’ leadership role within NATO.” The meeting was therapy for transatlantic nerves: a place to absorb unilateral shocks, reset talking points, and leave with a reaffirmed hierarchy in which Washington remained primus inter pares.
5 Network Multipliers
Membership overlapped with the CFR, Chatham House, IFRI, DGAP, and later the Trilateral Commission, creating “a dense web of transnational relationships: an informal alliance” (Gijswijt 2019). Spin-offs proliferated. Denis Healey secured Ford Foundation money for London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies after a 1957 Bilderberg side-conversation. Other satellites, such as the Munich Security Conference, the Königswinter Conference, and the biannual German-American Conferences of the ACG/Atlantik-Brücke, copied the format to stabilize policy communities at the national level.
6 The Revolving Door
Another characteristic of the Bilderberg participants is their overlapping “memberships” in the different fields of politics, business, media, and academia:
Peter Sutherland (Bilderberg regular) cycled between Goldman Sachs, the WTO, and the EU Commission.
Robert Rubin moved from the U.S. Treasury to Citigroup to the CFR: a perfect illustration of interlocking elite fractions.
Think-tank ‘stammgäste’
Regulars from CFR, Carnegie, IFRI, AEI, Economist.
Shows inter-permeability of TCC fractions—corporate, political, technical, consumerist—blurring punditry with boardroom power.
7 The Ideological Filter
As researcher Lukáš Kantor notes:
"Bilderberg’s FAQ claims it invites ‘diverse viewpoints,’ yet Noam Chomsky has never received an invitation. The ‘dialogue’ is confined to those who already agree."
This is ultraimperialism (Kautsky’s term) in action: national elites collude across borders to protect shared class interests, even as their publics suffer the costs.
8 Why It Matters for Germany
Bilderberg’s German quota never exceeded ten percent; yet, the careers it turbo-charged, such as those of Friedrich Merz, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, or Josef Ackermann, fed back into the Atlantik-Brücke–DGAP–Munich network we just examined. In other words, Atlantik-Brücke is the German branch; Bilderberg meetings are the transatlantic roots that keep the ideological seeds fertilizing the ground. Bilderberg is also a quality-control lab for Euro-Atlantic capitalism: screening personnel, harmonizing talking points, and safeguarding the corporate faction’s primacy inside the wider TCC.
IV-a. The Ford Foundation: Venture Capital of Atlanticism
“New generations would be entering positions of power with no personal memory of World War II or the Marshall Plan. To keep the alliance alive, they first had to be socialised into it.” – Zetsche (2015)
1 Public-Private by Design
Philanthropy textbooks still present Ford as a neutral, technocratic charity. Archival work by Anne Zetsche reveals the opposite: the Foundation sat at the center of a dense public-private triangle—comprising the State Department, Fortune 500 companies, and elite academia—built to manage U.S. foreign policy governance. Parmar refers to this nexus as the “soft machinery” that converts corporate wealth into strategic knowledge and personnel.
2 Financing the German Node
Ford money underwrote Atlantik-Brücke’s early German-American Conferences (from 1959) and scholarship pipelines that fed the DGAP, SWP, and party foundations. When staff worried the invite lists were looking too old, they added Youth Fellows tracks and “next-gen” study grants to replicate the worldview in cohorts with no lived memory of rubble and anti-communism.
3 Strategic Goal-Posts
Internal correspondence within the early Ford Foundation days flagged two ideological threats:
Gaullist Europe-sans-America—a French-led continental bloc.
Brandt’s early Ostpolitik—German neutrality between the blocs.
The remedy was to broaden funding for exchange programs, summer institutes, and seed grants only to candidates who could be trusted to keep one foot in Washington. By 1970, every West-German ministry employed Ford alumni; by 1980, so did the editorial boards of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and FAZ.
4 Money as Curriculum
Unlike Bilderberg’s invitation-only salons, Foundation grants came with syllabi: Atlantic history modules, Marshall-Plan retrospectives, and off-the-record briefings at the Council on Foreign Relations. Funding thus doubled as orientation. The result was a cadre who intuitively equated European security with U.S. primacy and viewed alternatives, such as non-alignment and European autonomy, as historical aberrations.
Fast-forward a generation, and the classroom has moved from Ivy seminar rooms to off-grid conference hotels. The same social logic persists, but the faculty now wear four stars or run cloud-computing clusters or do both.
IV-b. Bilderberg 2025: From Grand Strategy to Tech–War Drill
The lineage continues. This June 2025, the Bilderberg invite list shifted even further toward generals, AI titans, and nuclear planners —a signal that today’s “informal alliance” is less a salon and more a joint-ops war room.
2025 Discussion Topics: The agenda included the transatlantic Relationship, Ukraine, US Economy / Europe balance, Middle East, “Authoritarian Axis”, Defense Innovation & Resilience, AI, Deterrence & National Security, Energy & Critical-Minerals Geopolitics, Depopulation & Migration, and interestingly, Proliferation ▶︎ note the absence of the customary non.
Who set the tone? Cluster Sample participants (and current roles):
Hard Power: Mark Rutte (NATO SG), Jens Stoltenberg (ex-SG), Gen. Chris Donahue (US Army Europe-Africa), Adm. Sam Paparo (US INDOPACOM)
Surveillance-Capital: Satya Nadella & Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Alex Karp (Palantir), Eric Schmidt (ex-Google), Scherf Gundbert (Helsing GmbH), Peter Thiel (Thiel Capital)
Media Chorus: Mathias Döpfner (Axel Springer), Zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)
The agenda’s most telling word: “Proliferation.” Not non-proliferation, but a frank recognition that nuclear sharing (Poland, Romania?) is moving from hush-hush to a talking point. Within days, GLOBSEC’s 2025 Forum (a Bilderberg-style offshoot funded by many of the same corporations but leaning toward tech and defense) released a policy brief urging NATO to
“explicitly extend to all three essential pillars of nuclear deterrence: capabilities, resolve, and communication. This holistic approach is critical not only for deterring Russia in a more dangerous security environment, but also for strengthening internal Alliance cohesion, ensuring public trust, and dissuading adversaries from testing NATO’s red lines.”
A poster-child for this converging tech–defense elite is Dr Gundbert Scherf ( a participant in 2025 Bilderberg’s meeting and 2024 Globsec conference):
2000s: Cambridge / Sciences Po / Free University Berlin (standard transatlantic grooming)
2014-16: special adviser, German MoD
2017-20: McKinsey partner for aerospace & defence
2021- : co-founder & co-CEO, Helsing AI, Europe’s hottest battlefield-AI start-up (already piloting NATO projects)
2024-25: speaker slots at Bilderberg-adjacent fora as well as Bilderberg (GLOBSEC, MSC “innovation track”, etc.)
Scherf has never faced an electorate, yet he moves through the same Atlantic Fellowship circuit as sitting ministers: a reminder that, in 2025, key policy levers rest as comfortably in cloud-computing start-ups as in parliaments. When Bilderberg discusses a topic called “Proliferation,” Helsing’s code base is already poised to appear, months later, as the new Rules-of-Engagement paragraph in a NATO white paper.
Consider this cascade of policy-making:
Bilderberg 2025 agenda: “Proliferation”
GLOBSEC 2025 forum & report: “NATO’s Nuclear Deterrence and Burden-Sharing”
Live tweet from GLOBSEC at the NATO 2025 summit:
”As Allies take stock of the #NATOSummit2025 underway, Jim Stokes, Director of Nuclear Policy at @NATO, elaborates on what role NATO’s nuclear sharing plays today amid shifting European security dynamics and burden-sharing debates.”
The idea first emerges in an off-the-record hotel ballroom, reappears as a panel theme in Bratislava, and finally solidifies into an operational directive in Brussels. These networks no longer merely discuss grand strategy; they prototype it and then sell it back to defense ministries as the next unavoidable step. Proliferation, hypersonics, AI target-selection: each cycle begins with “informal” diplomacy, migrates to a glossy policy brief, and finishes as a line item in someone’s procurement budget.
National inflections remain: Atlantic immersion is never a blank-slate exercise; each country imports its own historical sediment. In Germany, the process was intertwined with residual West German anti-communism and only partially completed denazification, leaving a political class that can denounce Moscow as an “eternal enemy” (according to German foreign minister Johann Wadephul) while recycling family lineages that once marched for Großdeutschland in Brilon or Breslau. Thus, the current escalation is simultaneously an act of transatlantic loyalty and a revival, however sublimated, of West German Cold War nationalism (and possibly, pre-Cold War nationalism). Every node in the elite network carries its own local flavor; the recipe, though, is still cooked in Washington.
Having traced the dollars that keep the conveyor belt humming, we can now watch those grants translate into actual résumés, following a few German decision-makers from their first Ford-funded semester abroad to cabinet rank.
V. The Biographical Assembly Line: Manufactured Consensus
Examine the CVs of Merz’s cabinet, and a pattern emerges, not just of career milestones but of ideological imprinting through three distinct phases of elite socialization: three sequential phases that manufacture consensus. Jacob Schrot and Lars Klingbeil illustrate the process from two angles, one through an academic fast-track, the other through an experience of crisis, yet they emerge with the same Atlantic reflexes.
1 Acquisition Phase │ Ideological Baptism
Worldviews are gradually established here. The process begins with U.S.-funded programs that target young people at career or even personal inflection points.
Jacob Schrot (Chief of Staff to the Chancellor & Head of the newly established National Security Council) – embraces Atlantic orthodoxy via curricula:
TransAtlantic Masters, 2013-2016: A joint M.A. in Transatlantic Relations rotated him through the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Humboldt-Universität, and Freie Universität, Berlin.
Washington Semester, American University 2012-2013: A research year at American University’s Washington-Semester Program in U.S. Foreign Policy dropped him inside the Beltway. Mornings at the German Marshall Fund (a NATO advocacy think tank), afternoons on Capitol Hill as an intern to Rep. Eliot Engel (House Foreign Affairs), who was also the chief architect of CAATSA/Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.
Age 25, NGO founder (2014): Founds Initiative junger Transatlantiker; a year later, chairs the Federation of German-American Clubs (30 alumni groups).
By the time Schrot turned 30 and returned to Berlin, his worldview had been cast in concrete: NATO and Atlanticism had become the only legitimate worldview. U.S. leadership was a moral fact, to the extent that German interests became synonymous with those of Washington.
Lars Klingbeil (Vice-Chancellor & Finance Minister) – learns through crisis and socialization:
9/11 Internship (2001, Manhattan): The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) - the SPD's political foundation - placed the 23-year-old political science student in a Manhattan-based NGO during the September 11 attacks. This formative experience became the emotional cornerstone of his Atlanticist worldview. In his own words:
"After that, I engaged very intensively with foreign and security policy. I later returned to the U.S. to Washington and wrote my master's thesis on U.S. defense policy there. My relationship with the Bundeswehr and military operations changed fundamentally through these terrible attacks. Without 9/11, I might never have discovered my interest in security policy and perhaps wouldn't have ended up on the Defense Committee."
Georgetown exchange & Hill internship, 2002-2003: Lars Klingbeil returned and took part in a U.S. exchange program in 2002–03 at Georgetown University in Washington to study American defence policy; this U.S. exposure gave Klingbeil a transatlantic outlook from the start, effectively a “soft capture” baptism into American strategic thinking. During his time in Washington, he interned on Capitol Hill in the office of Congresswoman Jane Harman (then a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the future president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a CIA-linked think tank). Harman’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence oversaw: NSA mass surveillance programs and post-9/11 "Global War on Terror" legislation.
2 Conversion Phase │ Networked Ascension
Where loyalty and compliance are rewarded with belonging:
In the conversion phase, we could describe Schrot as an entrepreneurial networker. As stated above, at 25, Schrot founded a youth NGO (Initiative junger Transatlantiker) while still a student and chaired the Federation of German-American Clubs (30+ alumni associations). Thus, unlike most, he created transatlantic associations from within.
In contrast, Lars Klingbeil took a more traditional path in this phase as a board climber with a slight progressive veneer, as his SPD membership would suggest.
Back home in Germany, he plugged into legacy ladders: becoming an Atlantik-Brücke member. Interestingly, in a 2018 Atlantik-Brücke report, Klingbeil appears alongside U.S. Ambassador Amy Gutman and Friedrich Merz, now the Chancellor of Germany, as well as the former head of BlackRock Germany.
In summary, Schrot manufactures elite social capital while Klingbeil taps it. The result is the same garden-party circuit but with a different entry ticket.
3 Reinforcement Phase │ Systemic Reproduction
Graduates become gatekeepers; the loop closes.
Finally, Jakob Schrot is now Chancellor Merz’s Chief of Staff and National Security Council coordinator. He vets advisers’ shortlists and drafts every security memo. Schrot now controls personnel pipelines in the Chancellery; Klingbeil pushes a €100 billion Zeitenwende rearmament fund and revives talk of a TTIP-lite accord. Klingbeil (among several other German politicians) attended Bilderberg 2025 (as did Friedrich Merz in 2024), securing his place within the whisper network with NATO SecGen, U.S. generals, tech CEOs that functions as an “informal alliance” of policy-planning elites.
Schrot chooses who writes the briefings; Klingbeil decides what gets funded. Together they weld Germany’s policy machinery. But most importantly, they do so on Washington’s terms. And they couldn’t do it any other way with such biographies.
Apart from incentives, there is another side: The Schröder Effect: Dissenters to the transatlantic discourse face professional annihilation. The ex-Chancellor’s advocacy for Nord Stream 2 and diplomacy with Moscow led to him being stripped of the official perks accorded to former chancellors, citing his refusal to sever ties with Russian energy giants as a failure to uphold the obligations of his office. As a result, he was practically erased from media discourse.
The Operational Outcome: A Closed Epistemic Universe
This assembly line produces policy alignment. But more importantly, it manufactures a shared perceptual prison. When a majority of Germany and also Europe’s political elites pass through the same U.S. programs:
Their cognitive boundaries shrink: détente becomes “appeasement.” Neutrality equals "collaboration". Energy deals with Russia are "geopolitical treason"
Their emotional responses are conditioned: A Pentagon official’s frown sparks more fear than voter anger. The Economist’s approval feels more valuable than domestic polling.
Their imagination atrophies: They cannot fathom alternatives like OSCE-based security architectures. They dismiss China’s rise as a "temporary deviation" from U.S. unipolarity.
Worst of all, they (possibly) don’t experience this as coercion. By the time they enter office, Atlanticism has become political common sense, as instinctive as breathing.
The tragedy lies in what’s lost: leaders such as Willy Brandt, whose years in exile taught him that sovereignty begins with the courage to disobey. In today’s Berlin, by contrast, there is little space for politicians shaped by unorthodox biographies; the pipeline produces cadres who no longer have to decide to comply, because they cannot imagine anything else. Small wonder, then, that during a 2022 visit to Washington, then-Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck could promise that Germany stood ready to exercise a “serving leadership” — a phrase so sure of its own logic that no one bothered to ask the obvious questions: lead whom, and serve what?
Before we talk about breaking hinges, it’s worth recalling a few European leaders who managed to step outside the pipeline altogether and how that widened the realm of the possible.
VI. Biographies that once widened the horizon and could again
The transatlantic pipeline has not always been airtight. A handful of post-war European leaders slipped free of the Atlantic school and, in doing so, expanded the range of what their countries could imagine. Their life stories read more like detours marked by exile, neutrality, and decolonization work. They prove that when a politician’s formative network is built outside Washington-centric fellowship loops, the menu of “realistic” policy options suddenly gets larger.
Willy Brandt, the exile who knelt
Fled the Reich in 1933 and lived in Norway and Sweden: Brandt fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and lived in Oslo and Stockholm during the war years, working as a journalist and being cut off from Nazi and West German patronage networks.
Political socialization through Scandinavian social democracy and Norwegian resistance: His political development was influenced by Scandinavian social democracy and contacts with the Norwegian resistance, rather than by Western postwar institutions such as the Marshall Plan network.
Returned to West Berlin in 1948, fluent in Nordic coalition-building: Brandt regained German citizenship in 1948 and became active in Berlin politics, bringing experience from Scandinavian coalition politics.
Saw Moscow as a negotiable neighbor, not an existential foe: Brandt’s Ostpolitik (1969–74) was a pragmatic policy of détente and normalization with Eastern Bloc countries, treating Moscow as a partner for negotiation rather than an absolute enemy.
Olof Palme, the neutral who spoke
Born into Sweden’s upper class but radicalized in the labor movement: Palme came from an upper-class background but became a leading figure in the Swedish Social Democratic Party, embracing progressive labor politics.
Sweden’s non-alignment limited NATO or U.S. establishment ties: Sweden’s strict neutrality meant Palme had limited engagement with U.S. foreign policy institutions; his only notable U.S. connection was a scholarship at Kenyon College (1948–49). He did not enter the revolving door of think-tank fellowships to become part of the transatlantic foreign policy establishment.
Mentored by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld; focus on Global South: Early in his career, Palme worked with the UN and was deeply engaged with newly decolonized states in Asia & Africa, shaping his worldview around global justice rather than Atlantic alliances. Global-South conferences shaped his moral vocabulary more than Atlantic summits.
Treated superpowers symmetrically; critical of U.S. actions like Hanoi bombings: Palme was outspoken in criticizing U.S. actions in Vietnam, likening the bombings to Guernica, and even suspended Swedish-U.S. relations for a year while maintaining dialogue with Moscow.
Championed European “common security” outside NATO: Palme advocated for a European security framework independent of NATO, emphasizing détente and cooperation.
Both men acquired their formative networks in settings that were geographically and ideologically peripheral to the main Atlantic indoctrination belt:
Brandt’s circle was the Nordic anti-Nazi diaspora;
Palme’s was the UN/decolonization circuit.
Because their careers were already viable before U.S.–funded fellowships became the EU default, they could borrow Atlantic tools without adopting Atlantic reflexes. These outliers demonstrate that distance from the Atlantic socialization network doesn’t guarantee wisdom or an absolute distance from them; yet, having an essentially outsider biography widens the thinkable. Their lanes have since narrowed; reopening them is the precondition for any sovereign German or European strategy.
Breaking the grip: realistic hinges
What can be done? In a way, this will be and has to be the labor of both the people within these Western countries within the transatlantic spiderwebs, and of the newly emerging multipolar world:
Prestige competition: In these early stages, an EU-BRICS Peace Fellowship (or just BRICS) with the same stipend and photo-op pomp as Fulbright. So, young students also understand that even non-NATO security can be good for their career (and even better for the world).
Mandatory multipolar secondments: No promotion to a governmental-political office without a 12-month rotation at OSCE Vienna, AU Addis, or UNIDIR Geneva.
Foreign-influence register: Bundestag members, for example, already disclose their shares; add every foundation-funded trip, board seats, and Bilderberg (and similar) invitation.
Think‑Tank Matching Fund: Parliamentary Research Service to match private defense‑industry donations euro for euro, diluting capture. Even though more could be done here.
These are hinges that creak open only when exogenous shock pries them: a U.S. debt default that ends Ukraine funding, or a protest wave the police cannot kettle. However, none of these destroy the existing network. They inject some pluralism.
Closing Notes: Hegemony or Survival
The evidence traced across foundations, think-tank pipelines, and invitation-only conclaves leaves little doubt: the trans-Atlantic elite project is hard-wired for self-preservation.
Its cultural hegemony obliges Europe to underwrite a U.S.-centred imperium and the elites of all its allied countries, even when that imperium sabotages Europe’s material interests. Hegemonies rarely collapse out of ethical embarrassment; they yield only when external pressures or domestic ruptures make compliance more costly than defiance. One of three things (or all of these together) could put a dent in this machinery:
Narrative Rupture from Below
Organised refusal, whether through mass strikes, boycotts, electoral realignments, or sustained media counter-campaigns, can delegitimize the war-economy consensus and make Atlantic allegiance politically toxic.Systemic Shock from Outside
A decisive loss of U.S. financial or military primacy (for instance, a petrodollar fracture or a failed proxy war) would compel European elites to reassess their allegiances.Accountability from Above
Nuremberg-style tribunals, however improbable today, remain the one mechanism that historically deters elite adventurism by attaching personal risk to strategic folly.
Every rung in their career ladder has normalized the next escalation. Contemporary European leaders do not consciously choose perpetual war; they inherit it as the safest path within an ecosystem that equates Atlantic conformity with professional legitimacy.
A Call for a New Circuitry
Replacing personalities will not suffice. The task is to dismantle the biographical assembly line that begins with foundation-funded youth exchanges, runs through think-tank fellowships, and terminates in cabinet offices or corporate boards. Unless that conveyor belt is broken or at least diversified beyond the Atlantic echo chamber, any “fresh faces” will replicate the same strategic reflexes.
The alternative is stark: witness your nation bleed in service of another’s empire’s elites or reclaim the capacity to decide its own future.
The choice, then, is no longer between status quo and reform, but between hegemony and survival. The window for peaceful de-alignment may be closing, but it has not yet slammed shut. Learning from history offers no guarantees, but it offers opportunities for interruption.
If this analysis resonated or infuriated you, leave a comment, forward it, or translate it. The conversation about war and functional elites belongs to all of us, not just to the taskmasters in conference rooms.
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Stay curious,
Nel
Brilliant! I was looking for an exposé like this for a while.
“Why are European elites torching their own house?
As we begin to see, the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. It is far more banal and far more effective. The answer also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions.”
This is a question my friends and I have been puzzling over for the last two or three years. Here is another essay I found that takes a stab at answering it—using a different focus and approach, but ultimately complementary. https://open.substack.com/pub/aurelien2022/p/digging-deeper?r=145k0&utm_medium=ios