Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

Bildt, like many Project Syndicate commentators, fears what will happen if Trump does scrap the Iran nuclear deal and reneges on American commitments under the Paris climate agreement. “These are two of the international community’s only significant diplomatic achievements in recent years,” he writes. “The consequences of a US retreat from them are anyone’s guess. In any case, global stability will certainly suffer.”

The West shouldn’t be confused with the “Occident.” While the West’s culture, norms, and predominant religion are broadly Occidental in origin, it evolved into something different over time. The Occident’s basic character was shaped over centuries by the Mediterranean region (though parts of Europe north of the Alps made many important contributions to its development). The West, by contrast, is transatlantic, and it is a child of the twentieth century.

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Bildt, like many Project Syndicate commentators, fears what will happen if Trump does scrap the Iran nuclear deal and reneges on American commitments under the Paris climate agreement. “These are two of the international community’s only significant diplomatic achievements in recent years,” he writes. “The consequences of a US retreat from them are anyone’s guess. In any case, global stability will certainly suffer.”

These are really what's most important to Europeans?!

Europe can probably afford its own defense. No?

Nearly two years ago, former US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that, “as we look around the world, we encounter upheaval and conflict.” As Kissinger observed at the time, “the United States has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.”

And what seemed true from the perspective of Washington, DC, was doubly so from a European perspective. To put it plainly, Europe feels as though it were surrounded by a ring of fire, from the revisionist and revanchist Russia in the east, to the multiple meltdowns in the Middle East and North Africa in the south.

Since the spring of 2014, when Russia started fueling the conflict in Donbas and other parts of Eastern Ukraine, ten thousand people have died there, and another two million have been displaced. And, of course, these figures pale in comparison to the humanitarian disasters in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

Now, NATO is planning to deploy troops to Northeast Poland and the three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – while the European Union struggles to manage continuous refugee flows and exert control over its external borders.
Moreover, the security threat from Russia has prompted a gradual increase in European defense spending and security cooperation. Whereas the EU has traditionally made peace and prosperity its primary objectives, it is now being forced to prioritize security above all else. That is a significant change.

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Whereas the EU has traditionally made peace and prosperity its primary objectives, it is now being forced to prioritize security above all else. That is a significant change.

Destroy Europe? 

In 2017, the Marine Corps is set to establish a new forward mission in Norway; Army cavalrymen are headed to Poland as part of NATO’s “enhanced presence” in the region; and the Fort Carson-based 3rd Armored Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, will be fanning out up and down eastern Europe. The linchpin to the campaign to showcase U.S. firepower — which is largely funded through the $3.4 billion European Reassurance Initiative — is the unglamorous business of the military’s logisticians.

For EUCOM and the Army in Europe, the arrival of the Fort Carson brigade in January, and its subsequent push into Poland, will be a test that will “help us measure, assess and then make any corrections we need to make,” Bertulis said.

As the tanks and artillery move across a commercial network, unloaded from ships docked at Bremerhaven, Germany, and then transported by rail and trucks, military planners will be looking for bottlenecks that slow the flow of equipment.
“They will be on the clock,” USAREUR Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges recently said. “How fast can we get them from Bremerhaven to assembly areas in western Poland?”

Ukraine Pays 20% More For EU Gas Than It Would Have Paid To Russia

We must be mad.

Energy security has a value.

BTW: Does anyone want to tell France that their dependence on nuclear energy is a threat to the EU?

Or, for that matter, that Germany's shuttering its nuclear energy infrastructure -for fear of tsunamis, for the love of Pete!