Tag Archives: Europe

European Union: Closing the Borders? by Judith Bergman

Posted on March 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

With the coronavirus some are questioning Europe’s open borders, but don’t expect Europe’s powers that be to abandon their commitment to a policy that’s undoubtedly spreading the malady. From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Even Germany is unwilling to take any of the migrants shuttled by Erdogan to the Greek-Turkish border.
  • “I thank Greece for being our European ‘aspida’ [the Greek word for shield].” — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, March 3, 2020.
  • The “solidarity” with Greece expressed by leading EU representatives seems to have come from having no alternatives other than relying on Greece to struggle with the situation.
  • Even if the EU manages to resolve its issues with Erdogan, which is doubtful and bound to be only temporary, Europe’s fundamental problem will remain: As long as migrants think that a better future awaits them in Europe, the welfare states, which have shown themselves extremely accommodating in receiving migrants and granting them all sorts of social rights, can continue expecting migrants to try breaching Europe’s borders.
Since February 27, Turkish officials have sent busloads of migrants — predominantly young men from Afghanistan and Iran, according to several reports — to Turkey’s border with Greece. Pictured: Masked migrants throw rocks at Greek border guards along the fence at Pazarkulke border crossing in Edirne, Turkey, on March 7, 2020. (Photo by Burak Kara/Getty Images)

On February 27, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made good on his many threats to send millions of migrants and refugees to Europe, despite a 2016 deal between Europe and Turkey to hold them. Apparently seeking to make Europe experience the full force of his intentions, Turkish officials sent busloads of migrants — predominantly young men from Afghanistan and Iran, according to several reports — to Turkey’s border with Greece.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Economy, Geopolitics, Governments, Law, Medicine, Politics

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Most Americans Unaware of Largest US War Game in Europe in 25 Years, by Col. Ann Wright (ret.)

Posted on March 10, 2020 | 1 comment

Most Americans don’t understand Russian “paranoia,” perhaps because they have no idea what the US military does in Europe and on Russia’s borders. From Col. Ann Wright (ret.) at antiwar.com:

99.9 percent of citizens of the United States have no clue that the new “Cold War” against Russia is manifesting in the largest U.S. military war practice in Europe than in more than 25 years.

They have not heard that the US military is sending 20,000 soldiers from the US to Europe to join 9,000 US troops already in Europe and 8,000 soldiers from ten European countries to practice waging a war against Russia. 37,000 military from the US and Europe will be a part of the war maneuvers named Defender 2020.

The US political environment is so confused that many in the US will question why the US is having provocative actions against Russia such as these big war games on the border of Russia when US President Donald Trump seems to be such a good friend with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It’s a valid question that brings into the focus of the need of the US bureaucracy to have an enemy in order to justify its huge $680 billion military budget. With war games against North Korea suspended in South Korea over the past year and reduced military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, confrontation in Europe is the next best location for attempting to keep the military-industrial complex, with all of its major election donors, in business during the 2020 US Presidential election year.

In an effort to generate US national support and publicity for the revival of the Cold War, US military units will come from 15 US states, including important electoral states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia.

In an effort to spend all the money allocated to the US military, over $680 billion for 2020, 20,000 pieces of equipment will be sent to Europe for the division-size mobilization. The equipment will depart from seaports in politically important electoral states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Texas.

While Europeans will know of these military events because US soldiers will disrupt civilian transportation routes across the 4,000 kilometers of convoy routes as they travel by bus throughout Europe, most Americans will have little knowledge of the massive, provocative military preparations for a war with Russia.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was a US diplomat for 16 years and served in US Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the U.S. diplomatic corps in March 2003 in opposition to President Bush’s war on Iraq. She is a board member of the International Peace Bureau and a member of Veterans for Peace. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.

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“Political Anarchy” Is How the West Got Rich, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on March 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

One of the main and generally unattributed factors behind the West’s rise since the Middle Ages was the lack of political centralization. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

It is not uncommon to encounter political theorists and pundits who insist that political centralization is a boon to economic growth.  In both cases, it is claimed the presence of a unifying central regime—whether in Brussels or in Washington, DC, for example—is essential in ensuring the efficient and free flow of goods throughout a large jurisdiction. This, we are told, will greatly accelerate economic growth.

In many ways, the model is the United States, inside of which there are virtually no barriers to trade or migration at all between member states. In the EU, barriers have been falling rapidly in recent decades.

The historical evidence, however, suggests that political unity is not actually a catalyst to economic growth or innovation over the long term. In fact, the European experience suggests that the opposite is true.

Why Did Europe Surpass China in Wealth and Growth?

A thousand years ago, a visitor from another planet might have easily overlooked European civilization as a poor backwater. Instead, China and the Islamic world may have looked far more likely to be the world leaders in wealth and innovation indefinitely.

Why is it, then, that Europe became the wealthiest and most technologically advanced civilization in the world?

Indeed, the fact that Europe had grown to surpass other civilizations that were once more scientifically and technologically advanced had become apparent by the nineteenth century. Historians have debated the question of the origins of this “European miracle” ever since.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Economics, Governments, History, Labor

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A World No Longer Shaped by Atlantic Powers, by M. K. Bhadrakumar

Posted on March 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

The headline is somewhat inaccurate. The world has been shaped by one Atlantic power—the US—and the Atlantic countries of Europe have had to go along. Now their willingness to do so recedes as Russia and China rise and pull together the middle of the world in the Belt and Road Initiative. From M. K. Bhadrakumar at counterpunch.org:

53rd Munich Security Conference 2017 – Public Domain

The annual Munich Security Conference that took place February 14-16 this year turned out to be an iconic event, drawing comparison with the one held in the same Bavarian city on February 10, 2007, where in a prophetic speech Russian President Vladimir Putin had criticized the world order characterized by the United States’ global hegemony and its “almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations.”

If Putin’s 2007 Munich speech was prescient about an incoming new Cold War and the surge of tensions in Russia’s relations with the West, 13 years later, at the event this year, we witnessed that the transatlantic ties that evolved through the two world wars in the last century and blossomed into a full-fledged alliance system have reached a crossroads.

Deep cracks have appeared in the transatlantic relationship. In an extraordinary opening address, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, an éminence grise in European diplomacy, accused Washington of rejecting “the very concept of an international community.”

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Posted in Business, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

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Erdogan’s Attempts to Blackmail Europe are Doomed to Fail, by Con Coughlin

Posted on March 5, 2020 | 1 comment

The rest of Europe is fed up with Turkish president Erdogan’s delusions of grandeur and rebuilding the Ottoman empire. From Con Coughlin at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • If the current crisis facing Turkey is entirely of Mr Erdogan’s own making, that has not prevented the Turkish president from trying to deflect attention away from his own mishandling of the conflict by seeking to provoke a new migrant crisis in Europe.
  • When Turkey took the controversial decision last year to purchase Russia’s state-of-the-art S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, Mr Erdogan calculated that it would herald new era of friendly cooperation with Ankara’s long-standing rival in Moscow even if, by pressing ahead with the deal, the Turks risked jeopardising their relationship with NATO, which bitterly opposed the deal.
  • Russians now find themselves in a direct confrontation with Turkish forces in Idlib province, where the Turks are trying to protect a number of Islamist militias committed to overthrowing the Assad regime… [A]s the recent escalation in fighting has demonstrated, the Russians’ main priority is to support the Assad regime.
  • Mr Erdogan is also about to discover that there has been a hardening of attitudes among European leaders about dealing with unwanted migrants since the Turkish leader last used his blackmail tactics five years ago…. These days, senior politicians in Mrs Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats take a more hard-nosed approach to the migrant issue, with one senior party member warning the migrants this week, “There is no point coming to Germany. We cannot take you in.”
If Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes he can bully European leaders by provoking a fresh migrant crisis in southern Europe, then he would be well-advised to think again. (Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images)

If Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes he can bully European leaders by provoking a fresh migrant crisis in southern Europe, then he would be well-advised to think again.

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The Myth of Moderate Nuclear War, by Brian Cloughley

Posted on March 4, 2020 | 1 comment

Moderate nuclear war is like being a little pregnant. From Brian Cloughley at strategic-culture.org:

There are many influential supporters of nuclear war, and some of these contend that the use of ‘low-yield’ and/or short-range weapons is practicable without the possibility of escalation to all-out Armageddon. In a way their argument is comparable to that of the band of starry-eyed optimists who thought, apparently seriously, that there could be such a beast as a ‘moderate rebel’.

In October 2013 the Washington Post reported that “The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, US-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war,” and the US Congress gave approval to then President Barack Obama’s plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to fight against Islamic State extremists. The belief that there could be any grouping of insurgents that could be described as “moderate rebels” is bizarre and it would be fascinating to know how Washington’s planners classify such people. It obviously didn’t dawn on them that any person who uses weapons illegally in a rebellion could not be defined as being moderate. And how moderate is moderate? Perhaps a moderate rebel could be equipped with US weapons that kill only extremists? Or are they allowed to kill only five children a month? The entire notion was absurd, and predictably the scheme collapsed, after expenditure of vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

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The threat of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is now at its greatest since 1983, by Scott Ritter

Posted on March 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

The US reserves the right to launch a first-strike nuclear attack and is conducting massive military exercises in Europe which that have put unprecedented NATO power on Russia’s border. It makes the Russians understandably nervous, and in such circumstances accidents can happen. From Scott Ritter at rt.com:

When the Commander of NATO says he is a fan of flexible first strike at the same time that NATO is flexing its military muscle on Russia’s border, the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is real.

US Air Force Gen. Tod D Wolters told the Senate this week he “is a fan of flexible first strike” regarding NATO’s nuclear weapons, thereby exposing the fatal fallacy of the alliance’s embrace of American nuclear deterrence policy.

It was one of the most remarkable yet underreported exchanges in recent Senate history. Earlier this week, during the testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee of General Tod Wolters, the commander of US European Command and, concurrently, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) also the military head of all NATO armed forces, General Wolters engaged in a short yet informative exchange with Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican from the state of Nebraska.

Following some initial questions and answers focused on the alignment of NATO’s military strategy with the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the US, which codified what Wolters called “the malign influence on behalf of Russia” toward European security, Senator Fischer asked about the growing recognition on the part of NATO of the important role of US nuclear deterrence in keeping the peace. “We all understand that our deterrent, the TRIAD, is the bedrock of the security of this country,” Fischer noted. “Can you tell us about what you are hearing…from our NATO partners about this deterrent?”

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Pipelines Produce Peace and Prosperity So Why Oppose Them? by Brian Cloughley

Posted on February 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

The powers that be are the sworn enemies of peace and prosperity, which is why they oppose all sorts of things that would increase both. From Brian Cloughley at strategic-culture.org:

Pipelines convey fluids and gas within and between many countries and continents and in addition to making a profit for producers indubitably benefit those for whom the raw materials are destined. In India, for example, the most recent gas pipeline project is going to bring comfort to the neglected peoples of the north-east, as part of the grid being constructed to reach remote locations — which is expensive. So the government has stepped in with hundreds of millions of dollars to help complete the programme.

There are many other success stories about pipelines, but also some controversial instances of construction, as in Canada where some indigenous communities are objecting to a 600 km natural gas line in which some $5 billion is being invested. The benefits to Canada as a whole are potentially immense, but the Wet’suwet’en indigenous people of British Columbia are attempting to shut down the operation and have been joined by activists whose motives may not be altogether benign. These protestors have imposed a blockade of railways that has caused grave disruption to a vast number of passenger and freight services, thereby posing a serious threat to Canada’s overall economy. The protestors’ actions are in essence blackmail, and have wide-ranging effects including the inability of farmers to get their goods to domestic and international markets.

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Posted in Business, Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

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The West Displays Its Insecurity Complex, by Diana Johnstone

Posted on February 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

“The West” as currently used means the US and its confederated empire. Any country outside the empire is viewed as a challenge. From Diana Johnstone at consortiumnews.com:

The only complaint the U.S. allows is that the United States might not defend us enough, when the greater danger comes from being defended too much, writes Diana Johnstone on the Munich conference.

“The West is winning!” U.S. leaders proclaimed at the high-level Annual Security Conference held in Munich last weekend.

Not everybody was quite so sure.

There was a lot of insecurity displayed at a conference billed as “the West’s family meeting” – enlarged to 70 participating nations, including U.S. -designated “losers”.

Trump’s crude Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made nobody feel particular secure by treating the world as a huge video game which “we are winning”. Thanks to our “values”, he proclaimed, the West is winning against the other players that Washington has forced into its zero-sum game: Russia and China, whose alleged desires for “empire” are being thwarted.

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Posted in Collapse, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Imperialism, Military

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Europe’s Nuclear Weapons and the Arms Reduction Treaty, by Brian Cloughley

Posted on February 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

Much of Europe would like to make peace with Russia. Much of the US government would like to make war. From Brian Cloughley at strategic-culture.com:

It is intriguing but almost inevitable that examination of so many European policies must begin with reference to the United States. The reason is that the US is majestically (and the word is used advisedly) important to Europe, and no matter what opinions may be held of Washington’s policies under the erratic Trump, these will always have influence in Europe’s capitals.

One major Europe-US consideration is the Trump administration’s decisions on nuclear strategy which have an enormous impact that will be likely to shape international relations indefinitely.

This has been examined by President Macron of France whose recent speech on Defence and Deterrence Strategy has not received the attention it merits in the US media. He delivered his talk at the military’s War College on February 7, and opened by making the point that he was the first president to speak there since Charles de Gaulle “announced on 3 November 1959, sixty years ago, the creation of what he then called the force de frappe”. The force de frappe is literally the nuclear ‘Strike Force’ (now less combatively referred to as ‘deterrence’) and is comparatively modest, consisting only of some 300 weapons, as assessed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in 2019.

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