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Notes -
This might be old news.
A Swedish newspaper published a report, ostensibly a leak from RAND that purports to be a cynical summary of what anti-atlanticist Europeans believe to be the US strategy - sabotage Europe by denying it Russian energy, forcing investments and people to leave for the safer haven of US. Example of that is this substack post by disgraced academic Noah Carl.
The report is not very long and could very easily be a fake.
My intuitiojn says I think it's probably a fake, well within the capabilities of some of the less stupid Russian disinfo experts to create. Certainly I can imagine Russian spooks may have at least one or two people like Ilforte, but rabidly nationalist, who could make that up during lunch break.
Anyway has anything to say about it? I'm assuming the newspaper isn't a well-regarded one or a very professional one. But then I've heard very dire things about Swedish journalism, namely that it was extremely well aligned in the service of the 'liberal' left agenda of endless migration and self-hatred. That was years ago, things may have changed.
The alleged article or the sentiment behind it?
The report is very likely a fake, for reasons already mentioned. I will note that the use of roman numerals isn't discrediting in and of itself- RAND does use sometimes publish reports and use roman numerals for the agenda / methodology / executive summary portion before the main report itself- but rather the cover page itself is a red flag. The image claims this is a research report, but RAND Research Reports have a general style of presentation, include front-page opening images and color. You can peruse RAND Research Reports via a search of their website, as the pictures show.
https://www.rand.org/pubs.html?pub-date=20211210%3A&series=Research+Reports
Another formatting red flag is the mis-classification label. The first page graphic- which says this is 'Confidential' under 'January 25, 2022'- is mixing a few things. For one, RAND isn't an American government agency, and while it's a common belief in various circles that it's a distinction without a difference, classification (mis)labeling is one of those areas where it matters. 'Confidential' is an American classification labeling, and when reports are classified, the documents have various formatting requirements such as having the label on each page, and portion-marking individual paragraphs. This is so that the readers can reference various parts of the document at various levels or contexts. If the implicit argument is RAND is part/an extension of the American government, this would be a job-retraining failure. If the more defensible position is that this is something RAND wrote for the government, it would be customer abuse. A lot of companies/groups with regular engagement with governments will develop their own, internal control measures rather than mis-use the government's own classification system.
A third red flag is the front page distribution list. Aside from the placement on the page- above the Executive Summary, which is where the RAND logo is placed? Really?- I assume by WHCS they mean White House Chief of Staff, but that's not an office, and wouldn't be in the same context as three letter agencies. Also conspicuously absent from the distribution list is the Treasury Department- a kind of big omission of any report nominally on economic analysis. Instead, the list is primarily the big spooky externally known 3-letter agencies... when there isn't a need for that information to be on the Executive Summary Page in the first place. That's the sort of information you track on a cover sheet, so you don't need to re-publish a report every time some new office is involved.
Overall, the formatting has a lot of red flags, and most of the potential explanations- 'they didn't follow their usual practices because of the need for secrecy'- ask people to be dumb in different ways. 'This was made by someone who thinks this is how the Americans work' is much more likely...
...not least because the article really doesn't reflect how the American government national-security types think about this general topic, or Europe, and so the report reads like 'this was written by someone who thinks this is how the Americans think,' or even 'this is written by someone who wants other people to think this is how the Americans think.'
The Americans don't talk about the Europeans in terms of 'sovereignty.' The American establishment viewpoint is that the Europeans already have it- it's the anti-American/anti-American-empire-ists who would frame the European alliances as non-sovereign, not a quasi-government report. Nor is a Biden-administration solicited report going to talk about Europe in terms of 'if one day we abandon Europe,' when the opening year of the Biden administration was ABT, or Anything But Trump, with even the exceptions subject to rebranding for the 'we're back' theme. Nor would the US of Jan 2022 been talking about Ukraine causing a 'controlled economic crisis' to plan for the duration of 2022... because the Americans were planning for a relatively quick and short Russia-Ukraine War. The Americans were flowing insurgency-friendly weapons into Ukraine, but not heavier conventional equipment, because of the expectation that Russia would have a conventional victory in short order. Second and third order effects of that would be the expectation that- as happened repeatedly before- German and other European interests would press for normalization of Energy supplies (and even currently, with the gas price cap, set a price above what was generally being charged, ie. not actually capping prices or flow). Broader pushback against sanctions primarily has not happened because Ukraine remained in the fight... but Ukraine remaining in the fight was manifestly not something the Americans were planning on. If Ukraine's government had toppled in the first month, months 2-10 of the war, and all the sanctions discussions that occurred, would have gone very differently.
Meanwhile, the report doesn't identify various things the American national-security types would raise about if it WAS an American product. Like the description of the German economic pillars: that wouldn't be Russian gas and 'cheap French electrical power.' The other pillar would be something akin to 'exports to China,' because that's something the Americans care about far more than French electrical imports, and is relevant to the strategic-level topic. There would be mentions that the German military under-spending, because that's been a long, long on-going complaint from the American perspective that goes hand-in-hand with the Russian energy reliance- both are decades-long-issues that have been persistent issues in mind.
Add to this the plethora of pejorative framings and boo-light words almost specifically driven to incite German/European emotions ('trap,' 'lack of professionalism of current leaders,' 'thanks to our precise action,' the whole 'French dependent on AUKUS' framing)- which just so coincidentally predicted a political context almost a year later after multiple unpredicted inflection points in the Ukraine unforeseeable at the time, which is just so coincidentally being leaked at a time when those framing devices and predictions are most salient to ongoing contexts...
...while also embracing the framing that Ukraine was an American trap, and that Russia was 'provoked' so that it would be 'possible' to declare Russia the aggressor...
...in a report nominally authored in late January 22, when the Russians had already been moving their invasion hardware along the various invasion axis assembly areas in the clear logistical buildup that the American government was publicizing at the time, but that this report makes no reference to...
Obvious false-flag information effort, targeting people who are only vaguely familiar with the alleged participants or Ukrainian context, or stroking the biases of those vulnerable to agreeing by what Stephen Colbert once called the truthiness of it.
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