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Post by neels on Nov 21, 2016 11:39:21 GMT
Everything had been so perfectly planned. Construction of the new NATO headquarters building near the Brussels Airport, a giant glass-and-steel structure to house the world's most powerful military alliance in the future, will have cost more than €1 billion ($1.07 billion) by the time it opens next year. The mammoth building was supposed to be officially dedicated at the next NATO summit, in the spring of 2017, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had planned to extend a hearty welcome to the new US president, Hillary Clinton. At least that's how officials at NATO headquarters planned it. Anything else seemed unthinkable. So unthinkable that even the female English pronouns "she" and "her" had crept into internal written correspondence to refer to the future occupant of the White House. www.spiegel.de/international/world/worry-grows-over-trump-threat-to-european-security-a-1121536.html |
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Post by Trog on Nov 21, 2016 12:31:53 GMT
Maybe one could give NATO the benefit of the doubt, in as far as it has become the fashion in PC-speak to refer to 'her' and 'she' instead of 'him' and 'he' when the gender of the person spoken of is indeterminate. This could possibly revert to normality, come the next few years.
However, I believe that the relations between the US and NATO must remain intact. The ideal would be for Trump to, through diplomatic means, de-emphasize a Russian threat to NATO by persuading Russia to scale down on the things that irks NATO, and to work towards eventually even incorporating Russia as a part of NATO.
The understanding of what underlies the sources of conflict throughout the world has been becoming much more lucid, of late, and it will continue to do so. The world is moving towards a conflict where Europeans will have to defend themselves against the non-European world, including China, and clearly Russia must be part of the European world, rather than otherwise.
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Post by cjm on Nov 21, 2016 14:24:57 GMT
What struck me about this interesting article/report is how little Europe contributes to *her* (!) own defence. No wonder they can fund all those social benefits (and immigrants). If I were Trump I would at least do a little arm twisting. The American soldiers stationed in Germany, is another issue. They were initially kept there after the war also to prevent Germany from rearming etc. Although mr Merkel can be a tough cookie, I think that danger has passed. An article of a while backed stressed how nervous Russia is about being attacked on its open western flank. A few vodka parties with Putin could go a long way building trust between the super powers. I also think that Putin has explicitly called for a balance of power truce with the US. He was very uneasy about NATO moving fire-power into former USSR territories. Such a balance of power understanding would go a long way to saving both the US and Russia money and face.
So, there is a lot of room for Trump to maintain a reasonable level of security against Russia at a lower price to the US.
I think Trog's observation about/ desire for the US and Russia ganging up on the rest of the world is also spot on !
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Post by cjm on Nov 22, 2016 7:22:51 GMT
Putin moves his missiles in new threat to Europe... Russia is deploying short-range ballistic missiles to its western European enclave, it emerged yesterday as President Putin threatened “counter-measures” against Nato expansion. A senior Russian MP said that Moscow would permanently station the nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, a region between the Nato states of Poland and Lithuania, in retaliation for a military build-up by the alliance in eastern Europe. ...
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