Who's Next for Berlin's Financial Blitzkrieg?

What is rattling France and the other indebted countries of the eurozone is that Berlin will now turn its fiscal dictates on them.

France, with its relatively generous social welfare system and publicly owned state assets, presents rich pickings for Germany if it is forced into privatization and austerity by the Berlin paymaster.

The added attraction is that Germany would then become the undisputed economic and political heavyweight in Europe, having sidelined Paris.

In this European showdown, Washington is also alarmed, but for very different reasons. It is afraid that if Berlin exerts too much financial discipline on EU members, the tensions and splits that have arisen over Greece will lead to wide-open cracks that may crash the 28-member bloc.

Washington, to be sure, is not primarily concerned about austerity and poverty across Europe. What concerns the Americans is that the EU will become fragmented from rivalries and mutual enmity -- particularly between the principals Germany and France. In that case, the EU will no longer function as a cohesive bloc for Washington's geopolitical project of confronting and isolating Russia. A divisive EU will also fatally damage the US-led NATO military alliance, which is crucial to Washington's hegemony over Europe and indeed the Western hemisphere.

That is why Washington and its close ally in Britain are also calling on Berlin to moderate its financial dictate to Greece. If Berlin pursues its scorched-earth policy too zealously, Greece may implode totally, taking the rest of the EU and NATO with it.

Only days after Athens surrendered to Berlin's ultimatum over financial looting, Washington reiterated its call for debt restructuring for Greece. Last week, US President Barack Obama urged Germany's Merkel to write off part of the debt. She ignored Obama then.

Now the Washington-controlled IMF is repeating the admonition to Berlin. And French Finance Minister Michel Sapin was quick to endorse the latest IMF advice for debt write-off, no doubt out of a sense of self-preservation for his own country. It seems strange that the IMF, which has been dubbed a "debt-collecting agency," should on the face of it show concern for Greece and its people. The real concern in Washington is that German financial dictate to other EU members is threatening to inflame divisions and social unrest both within and between countries.

Washington doesn't have a problem with financial fascism. Its enslavement to Wall Street banks and corporations is testimony to that. The US apprehension is that Berlin's financial blitzkrieg will not stop at Greece, but will proceed to other European capitals, with deleterious geopolitical consequences for Washington's unspoken objective of undermining Russia. Dirty tricks from Washington are thus on the cards for Berlin.