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French authorities reopened one of Jerusalem’s most magnificent ancient tombs to the public for the first time in over a decade, despite a dispute over access to the archaeological-cum-holy site in the city’s volatile eastern half. After several abort…
November 8, 2019Read More
While US military says mission is to defeat Isis, president insists taking oil is fair ‘reimbursement’, but violates rules of war US forces at an undisclosed location in Syria in October. They returned to Syria to protect oil fields, days after Preside…
November 8, 2019Read More
North Korea has lashed out against “reckless military moves” by South Korea and the US after they opted to go ahead with a joint aerial drill amid deteriorating relations with Pyongyang over stalled nuclear diplomacy talks. In a separate jibe, the North called Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, an “idiot and villain” who should not even dream of setting foot in Pyongyang after he criticised one of their recent weapons tests. The US and South Korea have cancelled or scaled back their regular joint military exercises since talks over the North’s nuclear and weapons programme began in 2018. Last year’s “Vigilant Ace” airforce drill was cancelled to allow diplomacy with Pyongyang some breathing space. However, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that a flying event would proceed in December on a reduced scope. “The most important thing to us in the Korean theatre is maintaining readiness, being ready to ‘fight tonight,'” said US Joint Staff Vice Director Navy Rear Admiral William Byrne. “A year ago, we canceled the exercise Vigilant Ace, and that was based on the environment on the peninsula at the time. This year, we are conducting a combined flying event.” North Korea, which views any joint military ventures as a rehearsal for invasion, reacted with fury, warning that the exercise would amount to “throwing a wet blanket over the spark” of nuclear negotiations that are “on the verge of extinction.” Kim Jong-un and President Trump first met in June 2018 Credit: Evan Vucci/AP Kwon Jong Gun, a roving ambassador for the North, said on Thursday that its patience was nearing the limit and that North Korea “will never remain an onlooker” to “the reckless military moves.” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has set an end-of-year deadline for Washington to make progress on denuclearisation talks. Nuclear proliferation experts have warned that failure to do so could see a return to hostilities and a revival of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests. Diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington has not recovered from the failure of the Hanoi summit in February when Kim and Donald Trump, the US president, walked away with no deal. An attempt to kickstart working level negotiations in early October also ended without any progress or agreement for a future meeting, although Mark Lambert, the US envoy for North Korea did meet this week for five minutes with a senior regime official at a Moscow conference, reported Yonhap. Pyongyang reserved some of its ire on Thursday for Japan’s Prime Minister Abe after he criticised its test of a “super-large multiple rocket launcher” on October 31. Japan believes the test likely involved ballistic missiles that violated UN sanctions. “Abe is an idiot and villain as he is making a fuss as if a nuclear bomb was dropped on the land of Japan, taking issue with the DPRK’s [North Korea’s] test-fire of super-large multiple rocket launchers,” the North’s KCNA state news agency said. The statement, attributed to Song Il Ho, the North Korean ambassador for ties with Japan, put paid to Mr Abe’s stated ambition to meet Kim. “Abe would be well-advised not to dream forever of crossing the threshold of Pyongyang as he hurled a torrent of abuse at the just measures of the DPRK for self-defence,” said the statement, according to Reuters.
November 8, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — In a remarkably frank interview with the Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a vision of a European security architecture that includes more cooperation with Russia and less with the U.S. than today. It’s courageous but flawed.“To my mind, what we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Macron announced, due to “no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies.” The U.S., according to him, doesn’t share its European allies’ interests. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. treats Islamist terrorism and Russia’s actions in Ukraine as Europe’s problems because they play out in Europe’s neighborhood, far from U.S. shores. All that the U.S. does is provide a defense umbrella in exchange for an exclusive commitment to buy U.S. products. “France didn’t sign up for that,” Macron said, making it clear that he doubts Trump’s commitment to NATO’s mutual security guarantee, spelled out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.This insecurity explains Macron’s efforts to involve more European countries in defense cooperation, which he admits won’t yield immediate results. It also explains his reluctance to go along with what he calls a “really tough” U.S. stance on Moscow. Russia, to Macron, has no long-term alternative to “a partnership project” with Europe, and so Europeans must engage with it and figure out on which issues there can be immediate cooperation (for example, fighting terrorism) and on which it’s advisable to start with mere deconfliction (for example, cyberwarfare). To make this possible, Macron wants to discuss what guarantees Russia needs to feel more secure, and he’s even open to talking about “an EU and a NATO guarantee of no further advances on a given territory.”This worldview has an obvious internal logic, especially if the U.S. isn’t a fully committed ally: “We have the right not to be outright enemies with our friends’ enemies.”The problem with this logic is that it appears to be built on a long-term view of Russia’s options and a short-term view of U.S. ones. That’s what undermines Macron’s agitation for a European defense bloc that would exist parallel to NATO.Macron told the Economist that Russia faces a menu of just three strategic options: trying to be a superpower in its own right; becoming China’s vassal; and “re-establishing a policy of balance with Europe.” According to Macron, only the third option is viable. Obviously, Russian President Vladimir Putin would feel uncomfortable making his country China’s junior partner. And the superpower path is difficult because Russia’s shrinking, aging population can’t sustain it, and Putin’s “identity-based conservatism” prevents him from having “a migration policy.” So only rapprochement with Europe remains.That’s a mistake. For starters, Russia is a big country of immigration. Its official statistics on population flows are unreliable because of visa-free policies with former Soviet countries, but it’s the sixth biggest source of international migrant remittances, just behind Germany and well ahead of France. Putin’s ideological constructs only exist for propaganda’s sake. His real policies are focused on taking Russia down the solitary great power path. In his mind, and in the minds of his foreign policy advisers, Russia has no other options. One of the Russian president’s favorite quotes — which he has used ostensibly in jest — belongs to Czar Alexander III: “Russia only has two allies, its army and its navy.” Within this mindset, Putin is happy to take any concessions Europe may offer him, such as Macron’s intervention in favor of giving back Russia’s vote in the Council of Europe. But they’re not going to make him drop what Macon calls his “anti-European project” born of his “conservatism.” Europe is not a potential ally for Putin, it’s a playing field in what he sees as Russia’s big game with the U.S.Putin’s great power project isn’t necessarily forever and the possibility exists that a future Russian leader will think of Russia as part of some broad European project, as Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin did for a while after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But waiting for that requires an extremely long-term view. With the U.S., the situation is almost exactly the opposite. Trump’s isolationist project is as new as his presidency, and none of his realistic Democratic rivals in the 2020 election would like to continue with it. The U.S. already has a long-standing cooperation project with Europe, which started with the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift and hasn’t quite ended with Trump, given the strong EU-U.S. trade relationship. There’s a high likelihood that whenever Trump leaves office, be it in 2020 or four years later, the U.S. will try to patch things up — and it’ll be much easier for Europe to accept its advances than to establish a cooperative pattern with Russia.Just as Macron says, it’s getting harder and harder to pin down what NATO membership really means and what threats the bloc is capable of confronting. But it’s a working structure that has conducted real military operations and practiced coordinating national armies; Macron himself calls the interoperability within NATO “efficient.” Setting up a parallel defense architecture can only undermine this working mechanism, no matter how many times Macron repeats that any EU military project is going to be complementary to it. Is that worth doing because of what looks to many like a temporary threat from Trump — and for the sake of a long shot with Russia? That’s the underlying question that makes it difficult for Macron’s EU military ambitions to go beyond talk, pilot projects and some defense industry coordination. More decisive progress will only be possible if Trumpian behavior becomes the norm in the U.S. — and if Russia suddenly turns demonstrably pro-European, reversing, for example, its current policy on Ukraine.Macron sounds bold, strategic, even prophetic at times — but his geopolitical judgments aren’t indisputable or even universally attractive. Most of all, they’re unproven. Waiting seems more attractive at this point than feverishly developing an expensive, politically iffy project. It’ll take much more than his eloquence to make Europe’s geopolitical repositioning a reality.To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 8, 2019Read More
Human rights groups have condemned the decision by Seoul to repatriate two North Korean fishermen accused of murder, insisting that the men will not receive fair trials and face “torture and almost-certain execution”. It is the first time since the end…
November 7, 2019Read More
The man had not been seen for several days when he was found in the tube more than 20 feet under the surface. The authorities believe he was clipping bushes in his yard when he fell in.
November 7, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Diana Lehman was six when the Wall came down. A month or so later, she remembers, her parents drove the family to Bavaria in their East German-built Trabant to try out this strange new freedom they’d been handed. With $50 each of “welcom…
November 7, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — After three decades of unprecedented advances in incomes and living standards, the European Union’s eastern economies that abruptly swapped communism for capitalism after the Berlin Wall fell are facing new challenges.Like much of the co…
November 7, 2019Read More
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck northwestern Iran early Friday, killing at least five people and injuring over 300 others, officials said. The temblor struck Tark county in Iran’s Eastern Azerbaijan province at 2:17 a.m., Iran’s seismological center…
November 7, 2019Read More
The death of a pedestrian struck by the self-driving vehicle in Arizona last year highlights safety concerns and calls for regulating the testing of such vehicles.
November 7, 2019Read More
The withdrawal of forces is a precondition for the first face-to-face talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. The summit, whose date has yet to be set, will be mediated by French President Emmanuel Macro…
November 7, 2019Read More
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