In both cases the respective citizens end up paying a far higher price by letting others pay for the "service" than it would cost them were they to insist on doing it themselves. The fault is not in our politicians, but in ourselves. The USA gets to be looted by an elected cleptocracy in the service of business and banking. Europe gets to be jerked around by senseless conflicts generated by sociopathic US administrations for domestic political ends.
For its own security and future I believe Europe needs to develop its own integrated military forces and then either pull out of NATO or downgrade and reign in the US influence in NATO. Creating such a force would, of itself, immediately transform NATO into an alliance of equals. Doing so would be doing a big favor to the true interests of the USA, though it would be fought by the current administration, and possibly resisted by any successor administration.
It may be that this can only be accomplished by starting with a subset of EU members, such as the original members, who agree to coordinate and integrate their military forces and to add capabilities to them as required so that those forces can be brought to bear so as to deter any potential threat from Russia or the USA, even should such scenarios seem unlikely. That would put Europe in control of its own security, rather than playing the Seven Dwarfs to the US's Snow White. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Today, we have to get rid of the notion that the US military protects us in any way. All it does is create, inflame and perpetuate enemies on our doorstep, ie it actively endangers us.
We don't do war, we do stupid bureaucratic fights. It may sound silly, but it actually works for two things: (i) peace and (ii) economies not completely dominated by big business. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Looked at on a purely military basis, could the EU prevail, without any US involvement, in any conceivable conflict with Russia? If that be the case, why do you put up with NATO? Are your leaders under some evil spell? Or is it that you are so fragmented that this power cannot be effectively brought to bear? Is adequacy of European military power the general perception of the European population? How is it that Europe does not more effectively thwart insane US activities that are detrimental to your own interests? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
habit? sentiment for bygone days?
both?
the premise that the evil bear would eat europe for breakfast is long gone, we're their cash cow, why eat your milk supply?
great diary, J.
we are very fortunate russia's leaders have cool heads, considering the abuse they've put up with from our idiotically patronising attitudes.
we are almost as bad as the yanks when it comes to illusions of entitlement, sigh...
and as for georgia, we should not be trying to take too much responsibility for their fate, especially if they are so foolish as to poke a sullen bear.
U.S. posturing is, as usual, unhelpful, even damaging to all interests.
the west has betrayed russia, we owe an apology, and we should be grateful to them for treating us correctly.
their first affair with capitalism brought organised crime and social anarchy, that was america's contribution...
one window of opportunity, for russia to emulate a more democratic system, lying in shards on the ground.
now it's our turn as europeans, we would be wise not to repeat the same mistakes, especially the hypocrisy of pretending we know better than they do how to run their country, or even where to place their borders. we should be feting medvedev, for example, as a pro-western, moderate leader, thereby encouraging him to be more so, instead of winding him up like a clock.
very. very. dumb. indeed...
let's treat our own minorities with more dignity, then politely ask russia to observe and share better values, not before.
or we risk looking even more stupid than we do now!
yes, and reduce demand, become sovereign of our own supplies of what we need, because energy is the new capital, and the sun, wind and tides will extract less rent in the long term than russia.
we have to identify, name and shame those fossil fool interests that are keeping us in thrall, and continue to raise public awareness about the vulnerability we suffer because of the narrow interests of a very few, but still powerful, bad-faith actors in this global drama.
the MSM will not be our friends in this endeavour, they will come late, if ever, kicking and screaming all the way.
so it's up to us, cheerful thought, as TBG might say!
beats 'we are so doomed' anyway... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Furthermore, without the Americans we would se huge nuclear proliferation in Europe. To put it bluntly, most people don't think the French or British are as aggressive and badass as the Americans when it comes to the nuclear posture. Does anyone seriously think they'd risk Paris or London for Tallinn or Bratislava?
Europe would not be a safer place with Hungarian, Polish, Swedish and German nuclear weapons. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
If you take a narrow view of national interests, then neither will. If you ask which one is the most likely to act, I'd still say France, today. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
France isn't even a full member of NATO. This does create a certain image when it comes to solidarity.
Of course Sweden is even worse, but we don't claim to protect anyone else with our non-existant nuclear weapons. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
That seems to be the USG single-source (tank) thinking because it guarantees their mil/ind friends permanent source of income: They spread fear daily through the media, interfering everywhere and causing unnecessary threats that otherwise would not exist. Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.
'Course, the locals whose turf you occupy usually lose even more. But that's beside the point from a Grand Chessboard perspective.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Because the EU is egalitarian, there is a strong political inertia which prevents going forward on practically all issues. Pick any topic you like, and you'll find some states willing to go forward, yet other states within the EU will block the move.
The solution has been known and opposed for many years: break up the egalitarian constraint, and introduce a multi-speed Europe. Let some countries integrate more quickly, and thereby become stronger and more influential than others as a consequence. The differential will break the balance, and allow some policies, any policies, to be followed.
Note that I'm not suggesting Franco-German hegemony over Europe, which is the obvious fear for some. I'm rather suggesting a kind of break-up of the EU into a small handful of larger groupings, and each of those groupings splitting again into smaller groupings, down to the level of individual states. The point is that policies are always easier to implement or to try out in smaller groups, and it is more efficient to coordinate and argue among a few larger hierarchical groupings, than among many equal and atomic states. This is no different than the way individual countries are structured.
I see the NATO issue similarly. With the exception of the US, which can impose its will for obvious reasons, NATO has no clear hierarchical structure, which is funny for a military organization. There are no countries which are more important than others, and therefore there is no credible policy direction other than US policy to follow.
The first step should be to elevate some countries in NATO as senior members, with power over junior members, and the ability to control local and global policy to various extents. How seniority is computed is not clear. Article 5 has got to go, replaced by a gradated response which favours the senior members over the junior members (salami tactics), just like in a real military structure.
Again, the point isn't to make some more equal than others for racist or nationalist reasons, but rather the point is to break the egalitarian deadlock among non-US states, to allow the organization's policies to be shaped by members in ways which fit their own aims better.
Needless to say, both these ideas would lead to making various members rethink whether they truly want to remain in these organizations, and -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
The reason many European still like the EU is that it isn't very effective or efficient as a superpower - it can't really play the superpower game - and they don't want it to be able to - in much the same way as Switzerland isn't an actual player on the world stage in the military sense, but still quite influential all the same.
Most Europeans don't want to compete with the US, or with Russia, in military terms. Neither do we want to get caught between them. Hence the utter stupidity of Georgia's actions. It's time I got out of this game....
Is Germany considered broken into pieces because the Laender have some independence? Even France has regional level structures, it is not just a hundred different departments, wouldn't you say?
You have an excellent point about the issue of superpower status. That's something the people of Europe as a whole need to sort out. I myself (as a frenchman) am not sure what direction I'd like to see, but I do believe that the world is not going to wait until organizational issues can be settled. And unfortunately the old Roman dictum si vis pacem, para bellum appears to still be valid. Europe does not have the kind of natural geographical protections that Switzerland enjoys. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
It's a piece of LaTeX which represents the defining property of a martingale.
The simplest example of a martingale in this sense is a double or nothing gambling strategy in certain games of chance(*), but a better way of understanding them is that they are purely random processes, which cannot be predicted based on historical observations: if you try to predict their future, your best guess is to duplicate the present, regardless of what you've seen in the past.
(*)wherein one proves that double or nothing fails to help one win: when the strategy has no statistical trend, then there is no advantage from using it. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
As I was not staying in academia, I did not really care and did not fight this. Thus the dissertation was never published anywhere and was quickly forgotten.
I had done an executive summary in English but can no longer find the file; I'd need to draft it again; it's probably worth it... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Sinon, tu peux aussi m'envoyer le fichier par email, l'addresse que j'ai indiquee sur ET lors de l'enregistrement est bidon, mais fonctionne. -- $E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$
Hence the utter stupidity of Georgia's actions.
Saakashvili is a tool in several of the common senses and, it would appear, a very naive one at that. He does have GWB standing behind him, way behind him, all the way back in Crawford, on vacation. But the problem was that he had a very different agenda than the older members of the EU. He thought that he could parlay his US backing, purchased in part with $800,000 from the Georgian treasury to his US lobyist, into neo-cold war glory by reasserting control over South Ossetia.
He failed to appreciate that the $800,000 only purchased the ringing endorsements, not any effective military assistance come the crunch. His goal was not irrational, but his means were rash and he walked right in to a trap set by Putin. What the EU needs is to realize that they have to more forcefully repudiate putative future members of the EU and NATO which Washington would like to arrange for them.
The EU might be spending about as much, per capita, as the USA on military forces, but, as suggested by others above, it is not getting similar bang for the buck. The existing arrangement can only really be directed by the US. The US abuses this arrangement to suit the needs of domestic politics, as with Georgia. The US is very unlikely to abandon that ability voluntarily. The arrangement has the potential to become an attractive nuisance, like an unfenced swimming pool, but one that can start WWIII, just so that one US political party can gain an electoral advantage. If this nuisance is ever to be adequately fenced, it must be done by Europeans. Doing so would be a service to the entire world.
The only one to come out of this with any advantage is Putin and possibly McCain. Should this ploy work for McCain it could be much more difficult for the EU to ever get control of its own foreign agenda. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
But what is the use of higher military spending? Alone France and Germany for sure are spending a similar amount of money as Russia. There is just no way how Russia could win a conventional war against the EU, even if the US would stay out completely. Even during the cold war, most likely the Warsaw pact would have lost a conventional war in Europe. Now the Baltics, Poland, eastern Germany,.... have joined the west. If at all our defending capabilities against an conventional land strike are unecessary big, not too small. Furthermore it is possible, that Russia is especially suspicious of NATO enlargement, because NATO is already so strong. One can reasonably ask, as a non-NATO member, what are these guys preparing for with all their weaponry? Who is spending so much money he could spend for other things on defense, if he doesn't want to do provocative things? Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den MenschenVolker Pispers
The logic is - the stupider the US Government - riven by internal dissension, driven by narrow special interests etc. - the more other powers - and even the EU will gain by comparison - especially if they are effectively led in terms of their own national interest - as Russia, China, India etc. seem to be now.
My major concern with that scenario is that:
The last couple of election cycles in the US really haven't been anything special in US history. Vote stealing, gerrymandering, a jingoistic press and an electorate - or parts of same - with the cognitive skills of dead sheep have been standard issue in US politics since the end of the Civil War.
What changed - partly as a result of wishful thinking - was the realisation that better choices were possible. The earlier labour movements were powerful but reactive. The DFHs were proactive but not nearly as powerful. Even so - there was an understanding that a better reality was possible.
That's still around, but it's been marginalised as an extremist view in the US.
Given what's likely to happen next, I wouldn't be surprised if there were parts of the US where it's about to become mainstream again.
...the most advanced democracy in the world.
How can this phrase be made to drip with sufficient irony, sarcasm and venom to convey the pathetic standard which it describes? As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
What?? Why're you looking at me like that? It does sound like an empty slogan, and I've just been travelling for seven hours straight...
