David Cameron explicitly, and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite implicitly tell us that the deal struck yesterday on Britain’s relationship with the EU and the EU’s overall prospects for the future hang on one issue: the consensus view on Russia.
Continue reading “Whence the EU compromise with David Cameron on Britain’s “special status”?”
The Russians and all of ‘progressive humanity’ have been jumping up and down about this pseudo-documentary film. The sound bite from one War Room participant that “I wouldn’t mind killing tens of thousands of Russians” has been trumpeted as a major provocation. Baltics politicians on both sides of the issue are furious. However, seeing the film through to its unexpected ending, one is left with big questions about the intentions of its producers and of its high level participants that so far no one has addressed.
The activities of aggressive nationalist and neo-Nazi armed movements in present-day Ukraine are the focal point of Moreira’s documentary. Their existence is not denied by any of his leading critics in France even if they try to find excuses. Meanwhile, the ability of these same nationalist extremists to control parliament on the key questions of war and peace even if their own electoral support is tiny by using intimidation and violence makes a mockery of Ukrainian democracy.
Our Western colleagues sometimes declare with passion that there can no longer be ‘business as usual with Russia. I am convinced that this is so and here we agree: there will be no more ‘business as usual’ when they tried to bind us with agreements which take into account above all the interests of either the European Union or the United States and they wanted to persuade us that this will do no harm to our interests. That history is over and done with. A new stage of history is dawning which can develop only on the basis of equal rights and all other principles of international law. (From Lavrov’s opening remarks to his press conference, 26 January)
Cold intellectual superiority would not have had the effect on Putin’s interlocutors that his going the extra mile and reaching out to them in German did, all the more so in an area of high culture that revealed his respect. This was in counterpoint to his critical words at the start of the interview about the unconstructive role played by Bild and the German media generally
What follows is not an unqualified endorsement of Donald Trump for the November elections. But it is a call to reason among American intellectuals who are as skeptical of voting for a populist, one of the unwashed, as the Russian intelligentsia is skeptical of their country’s own populist, Vladimir Putin.
Continue reading “Trump and ‘The National Review’: we are defined by our enemies”
Can Angela Merkel, “the most powerful woman in the world” per Time magazine’s designation of her just a few weeks ago as 2015 Person of the Year, finally be on her way out? An overview of the German press suggests that may be the case.
The new confrontation over European Values between Poland and Brussels acting as the proxy for Berlin relates nominally to new Polish laws giving the government the power to appoint chiefs of civil service departments including the chiefs of the public media. It is, simply put, legalizing patronage or ‘Nomenklatura’ practices, but when the media is frankly and openly part of this patronage, official Europe gets very huffy.
The net result of the growing public row heralded by the bitter rebuke to Warsaw of European Parliament president Martin Schulz may be to unravel one of the key foreign policy achievements of Angela Merkel’s 10 years in power – consolidating her country’s hold over Mitteleuropa.
Continue reading “Germany, the European Union and the Polish Question”
Though the latest issue of Foreign Affairs shows continuing decline in professional standards, it has upside surprises that the editors may yet regret. In a newsworthy essay, by hit or miss, the author rejects current U.S. policy on Russia for its abject failure to deliver on expectations.
Gilbert Doctorow 