The Prometheans were not alone in eyeing Ukraine. Adolf Hitler saw the region as a key to the eastward expansion of German lebensraum — or “living space”. During the war, parts of the Promethean League became willing collaborators of the Nazi war machine, feeding it intelligence from what Germany deemed its “Wild East”. The project continued after the war, with the US Central Intelligence Agency taking the place of the German Abwehr. The CIA actively recruited fascist collaborators from Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and beyond — absorbing them into security agencies and establishing intellectual centers in exile that aimed at powering reaction back home. Declassified CIA documents reveal the intention to “exploit nationalist cultural and other dissident tendencies in Ukraine” and “exploit the minority nationality question in the Soviet Union” in the service of the global anti-communist project. With the defeat of socialism in Eastern Europe, these tendencies re-emerged in a vicious tide of reaction, and the long-suppressed echoes of Prometheanism began to sound throughout the region.

The collapse of the socialist counterweight to US power also unleashed a series of wars that dismantled any illusions that the “post-historic” era would bring peace. The assault on Yugoslavia, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, reminded an occasionally-intractable Europe of US suzerainty. But if the governments of Western Europe sometimes greeted US wars with determined, if feeble, protest, their Eastern neighbors were unburdened by such qualms. In 2003, the US war against the Iraqi people found vigorous cheerleaders in all the new Eastern European entrants to NATO.

...

The Atlanticist project arrived not only with guns. It arrived with bureaucrats and neoliberal dogmas — accelerating processes of “shock therapy” already underway. Across Eastern Europe, industrial production had already collapsed in the post-socialist period. Our cultural institutions were defunded. Education was “depoliticized”, substituting a left curriculum critical of capitalism and imperialism with one seeped in bourgeois ideology. By the time Joe Biden outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO in 1997, his prescriptions fell on trained ears. “Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized,” he said. For fulfilling what many Eastern European reactionaries saw as their destiny — membership in “civilized”, Christian Europe — the hegemon would extract a bounty.

For the US, this partnership would prove fruitful. For decades, the US had been eyeing control over Eurasia — the “chief geopolitical prize”, as Polish-US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1997. Ukraine, he said, was an “important space on the Eurasian chessboard” and “a geopolitical pivot” that would contain Russia and secure “unlimited” US control over the sprawling landmass and its resources. But the flimsy Franco-German attempts at securing what is sometimes termed Europe’s “strategic autonomy” undermined the US’s eastward advance. From the Druzhba to the Nordstream pipelines, projects of Eurasian integration threatened to undermine the US hegemonic project. “New Europe” became an important vehicle for containing these impulses. And their strategies — and the myriad institutions created to advance them — increasingly echoed those of the Prometheans from a century ago. In 2015, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and Polish President Andrzej Duda launched the Three Seas Initiative — the NATOfied brood of Piłsudski’s Intermarium. The Initiative would seek to shift trade across the Eurasian landmass from an East-West to a North-South axis, advancing the US objective of decoupling Europe from Russia and China

...

As the war in Ukraine escalated in February 2022, that transformation gained new strength. Emboldened by the US nuclear umbrella, and elevated politically within a fragmenting order that continues to disadvantage its peripheries, the Prometheans emerged as the lynchpins of a new, militarised, and subordinated Europe. In 2023, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki warned that Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy “means shooting into our own knee and making with China the same mistake as with Russia”. So here we begin to see why (certain) Eastern Europeans are so excited about a federated Europe that auspiciously excludes Russia — even while extending into Turkey and Azerbaijan. And we see why that story may be far from over. A Trump presidency will bring challenges to NATO that might see European strategic sovereignty reappear on the agenda. Will he turn to the New Prometheans to keep Europe in check once again?