The old post-cold war order is now forever over. A quarter century after the falloff the Berlin Wall, a new and highly volatile geopolitical landscape is emerging in Europe. Its contours and content are not yet clearly evident, however. But in this tumultuous year of 2014 (marking a hundred years since the start of the “Great War”, and two hundred years after the Congress of Vienna) global events as in the past, are again(and with a vengeance) re-shaping or determining the way the map of Europe might look likein the coming decades. The extremely violent ructions in Ukraine showcase such a trend. This “semi-autonomous”and relatively stable former Soviet republic was once known as the “bread basket” of the USSR. It’s today just an impoverished basket case, left for the IMF to pillage and plunder in the name of “freedom and democracy”.
Tag: Europe
The US supreme allied commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove (left), leaves the Marriot hotel in Copenhagen after discussing Ukraine Just before lunch on Friday, two cars left the Marriott hotel in Copenhagen…
A specter is haunting Europe and Western world — it is this time, the specter of fascism. It came quietly, without great fanfare and parades, without raised hands and loud shouts. But it came, or…
Yet the sanctions game will persist (like it did with Cuba, Iraq, Iran). The White House is already concocting more of the same. No adults in Europe will follow. Even poodles are able to sniff…
Britain and the rest of the world must take President Putin’s aggression “much more seriously” because Russia’s belligerence poses a severe threat to Europe’s energy security, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, Ed Davey,…
The United States has always tried to do its best to weaken Russia. Driving a wedge between Russia and the European Union is a priority mission. But Crimea and Ukraine frustrate the plans. Entangled in the Ukrainian crisis, Europe starts to doubt the expediency of following the US policy and displays its unwillingness to escalate the confrontation with Russia. As they say «Mutiny on the Bounty» is getting ripe, though most likely the revolt will go no further than undermining some US initiatives… Looks like Brussels is going to quietly let Ukraine go. Revolutionary frenzy behind, the EU is not prone to take further anti-Russian actions. They gradually start to listen to the Kremlin. Russia has taken diplomatic initiative away from Washington and takes a more adamant stand insisting that an all-Ukraine dialogue should be a foundation for crisis management. The Western hopes for Moscow’s at least indirect recognition of the illegal government in Kiev are getting stymied.
The EU is taking seriously President Vladimir Putin’s letter to 18 European countries, in which he warned that Ukraine’s debt crisis could affect gas transit from Russia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. “There are many reasons to seriously take into account this message […] and for Europe to deliver a joint European response,” Itar-Tass reported Merkel as saying. She said the issue would be discussed in a meeting between European Union foreign ministers Monday. Speaking in Athens on Friday, Merkel stressed that the price on natural gas should be negotiated. She also said that EU Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger and representatives of European states should talk to Russia’s biggest gas producer, Gazprom.
NATO Sets PACE of Aggression towards Russia with ‘Fogh’ of War When asked on the foundational purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, its first Secretary General, Britain’s Lord Ismay, famously said: “To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. Ismay, the military advisor to Britain’s World War II leader Winston Churchill, was like his pugnacious boss an ardent imperialist, anti-communist and pro-American. His refreshing, if distasteful, candor about the strategic purpose of NATO has since been varnished over down through the decades. The US-dominated military pact has been reinvented as a humanitarian mission with faux political correctness and spurious lofty claims of maintaining world peace. But Ismay’s terse words on NATO’s more sinister foundational purpose are starkly pertinent to present developments.
[The 4th Media Editorial Note: This Global Research article was originally posted on April 27, 2012.] The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The…
Western leaders’ attempts to create the illusion that everyone approves of the idea of imposing sanctions against Russia is coming up against the obvious discrepancy between this made-up picture and the real state of…