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Ed Webb

Trump move to take US troops out of Germany 'a dangerous game' | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ut-of-germany-a-dangerous-game

US USA military NATO Europe Trump Germany

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Jun 20 - Cached
  • British politicians and European military experts have warned that Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw 9,500 troops from Germany risks handing a strategic advantage to the Kremlin and undermining the postwar western military alliance.
  • would also affect the United States’s ability to operate in the Middle East and Africa
  • the proposal to remove a quarter of the US troops in Germany is yet to be confirmed publicly, and Berlin said on Monday it had yet to be formally notified of the mooted withdrawal
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • pointed observations to the Nato 2030 conference: “The challenges that we face over the next decade are greater than any of us can tackle alone. Neither Europe alone. Nor America alone. So we must resist the temptation of national solutions.”
  • Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs committee, said Trump’s surprising decision would encourage European nations “to listen less to the US” while he remained in power.
  • The move has been widely interpreted as a personal rebuff to Angela Merkel following what was reportedly a frosty phone call between the two at the end of May, when the German chancellor torpedoed Trump’s hopes to hold a G7 summit in the US in June.
  • US troops have been deployed in Germany since the end of the second world war, and although the numbers are sharply down from the 400,000 at the height of the cold war, their presence is partly designed to deter Russian aggression
  • troop numbers “were always an exercise in political psychology” but one that mattered given that, with troops stationed in all three Baltic states, Nato faces as many as 500,000 Russian troops in its western military district.
  • Experts say the US cannot operate in the Middle East or Afghanistan without the vast Ramstein air base in western Germany, which acts as a logistics staging post, while Stuttgart is also the headquarters of the US Africa Command as well as its European operations.
Ed Webb

The West's Poor Climate Track Record Is Spilling Over to Other Policy Areas - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - 0 views

carnegieendowment.org/...o-other-policy-areas-pub-87174

opinion analysis politics climate diplomacy

shared by Ed Webb on 24 May 22 - Cached
  • COP27, scheduled for Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November, is almost guaranteed to showcase the Global South’s frustration with Western climate hypocrisy and its impatience for the rich world’s excuses. The West’s poor climate track record is threatening to harm its interests in other policy fields and undermine any reputational advantages it has over authoritarian states like China
  • Egyptian Foreign Minister and COP27 President Sameh Shoukry has called for the world to focus on implementing its commitments to cut emissions, deliver climate finance, and phase out fossil fuel subsidies, adding that he feels a responsibility as an African host to “highlight the priorities of the continent which has suffered the most, and which has contributed the least to the problem.” 
  • While the war in Ukraine should catalyze Europe’s energy transition in the medium term, Europe’s immediate response has been to prioritize energy security and price stability over the climate crisis
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Europe’s scramble to buy up the global supply of liquified natural gas to replace Russian gas has left fuel-starved Pakistan and India with little choice but to burn more coal for air conditioning amid a record-breaking heatwave. The same wealthy Europeans who have been promising to remove fossil fuel subsidies since 2009 have shown little compunction about subsidizing oil and gas in 2022.
  • the U.S. administration is breaking a promise to stop selling leases for new oil and gas drilling on public lands and crossing its fingers in hopes that the Supreme Court does not gut the executive branch’s authority to regulate power plant emissions.
  • What does an Egyptian diplomat hear when the United States warns about new natural gas capacity “lock[ing] in decades of new emissions”  when the Biden administration cannot prevent its own postal service from spending billions on new fossil-fueled trucks in 2022?
  • concrete agreements where wealthy democracies pay to help countries like South Africa phase out coal remain rare bright spots in a murky picture.
  • A perception of Western dishonesty is among the varied economic and historical reasons why forty countries—including large democracies like India, Brazil, and South Africa—declined to condemn Russia’s invasion at the UN
  • Admittedly, domestic politics and a hard-nosed perception of the national interest are the main drivers of policy everywhere—Global South countries expect the West (and others) to think of itself first and global public goods second. Yet Western claims to uphold the “liberal, rules-based international order” are undermined by repeated failures to protect that order from climate stress.
Ed Webb

Barack Obama's great test | open Democracy News Analysis - 1 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...barack-obama-s-great-test

obama foreignpolicy diplomacy USA Europe G7 G8 G20 Iran China analysis opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Sep 09 - Cached
  • the limitations of Obama's style and approach
  • His administration, he promised, would do its best to revive the world's economy, to address climate change, to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. These are all admirable aspirations, and it is perhaps unreasonable to hope that the president might have admitted that the United States has been largely responsible for each of these problems.
  • Barack Obama is increasingly coming to look like Lyndon B Johnson, a brilliantly gifted politician whose ambition to build a "great society" was sacrificed because of the war in Vietnam. The heart of the Obama approach is now clear. He genuinely wants to move away from the frozen folly of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, but he is not willing to take the political risk of acknowledging America's responsibility for the problems he wants to solve.
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  • Still less does anyone in Washington seem to understand that "Gitmo" itself was always an absurd colonial anomaly of the kind Americans used to denounce. Nor does there seem any will to undo the creation of an even more scandalous, though militarily more useful, colony in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
  • Washington's instinct is to treat China as a potential partner in the domination of the world
  • Because Europe is divided into many different states, and no doubt because many American politicians and policy-makers find European attitudes annoying, American policy does not recognise that collectively Europe has a bigger economy than the United States and far bigger than China (even if China's growth has been spectacular).
  • No one questions Barack Obama's personal goodwill, still less his political intelligence. But on the basis of his first nine months in office, his commitment to a serious reassessment of the limitations of American power - let alone to an acknowledgment of the implications of the country's relative decline - is not yet clear.
Ed Webb

Canada-Australia-U.K. Alliance Could Stand Up for Liberal Internationalism - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...rump-canada-australia-alliance

IR analysis opinion Russia China Canada Australia UK Britain institutions UN G7 G20

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jul 20 - Cached
  • This club of three—as a new C-3 grouping of Canada, Australia, and Britain—has legs. But the idea must be reclaimed from the nationalist right: Not only is deepening foreign-policy coordination among Ottawa, Canberra, and London increasingly attractive amid the accelerating decay of the American-led world order, but this grouping has shown itself over Hong Kong to be far more meaningful in world affairs than seemed possible
  • Canada, Australia, and Britain are all facing a moment of crisis in their foreign policies. Canada’s humiliating failure to make it onto the United Nations Security Council reflects that it can now be picked on by China, or even Saudi Arabia, as the United States weakens. Australia is faced with cyberattacks and growing Chinese pressure. Britain, now outside the European Union, has been repeatedly threatened by China over Hong Kong, Huawei, HSBC, and nuclear power plants. All three are struggling to make their voices heard in international politics, in the various G-groups, in global bodies, and in President Donald Trump’s Washington.
  • Sadly, for all three, Germany and France are in a very different place from them on the authoritarian powers. Berlin, constrained by huge exports to China, wants to find a middle way between Washington and Beijing and is not ready to throw the EU into greater competition that could jeopardize critical trade for the sake of the interests of either Canada, Australia, or Britain. Paris, similarly, thinks differently on Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron’s emerging vision for a European Security Council or “Eurogroup”-style body including Russia, Turkey, and Britain is well outside the anti-authoritarian frame than Ottawa, Canberra, and London share.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Chinese and Russian aggression against the democracies is likely to grow, the United States might critically weaken, and the EU seems firmly set on pursuing a middle path. Instead of worrying about looking back to the past, leaders in Ottawa, Canberra, and London should embrace the idea and propose a significant deepening of their foreign-policy coordination. This is most definitely not about “getting the band back together,” as one British Conservative member of Parliament greeted a trade talk announcement, but three middle powers building an anti-authoritarian group to resist great-power bullying in the 21st century.
  • A mini C-3 format would offer the best approach: a summit with follow-up that is both flexible and lightweight enough to get off the ground but with a permanent working group in foreign ministries advancing dossiers and initiatives. As the C-3 are all Commonwealth countries, summits could be timed to coincide with the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where the leaders of Canada, Australia, and Britain regularly meet anyway.
  • Drawing both on Britain’s joint initiative with Canada to block Putin attending the G-7 and on Canada’s humiliating experience at the U.N., among this C-3’s first tasks should be to coordinate joint positions inside the U.N., G-7 and G-20. As far as major goals are concerned, this could include supporting any future attempts of Canada to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council and for Australia to formally join the G-7.
  • This is not about replacing working with the EU or the United States but creating a group for Canada, Australia, and Britain to jointly present tougher anti-authoritarian packages to big powers than had they tried to individually present them alone. The C-3, like the E-3 to the EU, would be complementary to existing Euro-Atlantic bodies.
  • deeper cooperation between Britain, Canada, and Australia has an image problem
  • imperial nostalgia or conservative culture politics
  • too anchored on ethnic fraternity
  • the idea needs to be decolonized
  • what about other middle powers? Why not include, say, Japan? This is where two critical principles of international politics come into play: Does your grouping have enough like-mindedness to be able to function and enough load-bearing capacity to get anything done? What Canada, Australia, and Britain are after is mutual geopolitical support; adding members that aren’t willing to offer that risks creating another talking shop like the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism. That group, which stretches from Chile to Kazakhstan, lacks the ability to agree on anything of substance—and the power to act on it.
  • there are simply not a lot of like-minded democracies to go around
  • Ottawa, Canberra, and London didn’t need each other in a U.S.-led world order or in a relatively benign world without authoritarian superpowers. But that system has decayed. Deep divisions, not just between the Europeans and Donald Trump, but with much of the U.S. national security establishment, are breaking up the old Washington-led ideological West. The common anti-authoritarian frame that once glued together Western foreign policy has come unstuck
  • In this world, the C-3 is a liberal international, not a nationalist, cause
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