good diary Frank! and good point, CH.
it was squirm-inducing watching brown and berlu sucking up to obama, i am not surprised he's not very interested in europe right now. bigger fish to fry.
like many here i am so ready to de-atlanticise europe's priorities, unless and until the u.s. military industrial complex stops hegemonising the planet.
who knows how things will shake out for all the west? we should stop carrying america's water, and support the ideals obama paid such excellent lip service to while campaigning. what the us admin is most obnoxiously codependent about with europe is fobbing off GM and military adventurism in return for our fawning adulation and soldiers' lives.
enabling the empire may seem a short term winning strategy, but i think we'll rue it ere too long. many of us already do...
obama has his hands full without worrying about us, we are the least of his problems. what i hope won't stand any longer is our subservience to the bushist, new world american century mindset that has caused so much pain and destruction.
equally we should focus on smartening up here for all of our sakes, instead of always reaching out for approval from the likes of obama, who janus-like, embodies simultaneously the best and the worst of america.
and as long the us admin admires barroso over rompuy or ashton, we know we have a problem, though the latter two haven't made any serious positive waves as far as i can see yet.
if the usa can dump bolton, surely we can dump barroso to return the favour... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
as for a russian partnership, it'd be a gaz, gaz, gaz...
hey, i know, we'll trade our deathware/gizmo/technotope/ideology for their commie markets!
now we just need to source another 7 planet earths to resource despoil...
maybe the whole rest of the planet can just say no, if they get fed up enough of being unca-sammed into oblivion.
or we're all haitians, down the road. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
In practice there is a Euro-Russian partnership over gas and, increasingly, over a wide range of other goods and services as well.
But do the Americans realise this? They didn't realise the development of the EU from a "free-trade" zone to a confederal entity until it was too late to block it, after all. And most of the positive EU-Russia relations take the form of commercial deals (which American agit-prop may have indoctrinated them to view as 'apolitical') and takes place in funny languages like German and Russian. Meanwhile, the 51st State of the Union (complete with its state press) is busy telling everybody how Euro-Russian relations are going to Hell in a handbasket.
It wouldn't be the first time the Americans drank their own koolaid.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
E.g., Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, etc. E.g., U.S. troops in Germany, 65 years after the war.
