Group items tagged

erbia’s president has compared European Union demands of the country in exchange for membership of the bloc to an ultimatum the Austro-Hungarian empire presented to Belgrade on the eve of World War One.

Germany has dismissed the accusations as “unfounded” and Western diplomats say little is being asked of Serbia that it has not already signed up to under an EU-brokered accord with Kosovo in 2013 that is slowly being implemented.

Kosovo has been recognized by more than 100 countries, including the major Western powers, but not by Serbia or its big-power ally Russia.

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

A separate draft declaration, prepared by the commission for the Belgian government, says that CETA “constitutes a radical reform in investment litigation resolution,” because it will lead to the establishment of an arbitration tribunal and appeals court with judges from the EU and from Canada.

There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.

these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.

The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.

most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.

So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.

And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive

Many still imagine that Britain’s decision-makers were all decently reluctant to plunge into war, and that they did so only at the last moment. According to the long-lived legend, Britain went to war only for high ideological goals, to face down German authoritarianism and to stand up for democracy. The British government and people, some insist, were instantly united behind a war that was embarked upon essentially to protect Belgium’s neutrality.

The private papers of the major players reveal that in 1914 the Cabinet of Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was deeply divided. While the Cabinet’s Radicals struggled to keep Britain focussed upon diplomatic mediation, the inner executive, dominated by Liberal Imperialists, forced the pace, manipulated the Cabinet and parliament toward war, and rushed to a premature choice for war – before Belgium’s invasion. There was intense opposition.

It is hardly realized today that Britain’s decision for war in 1914 was a very close-run thing. Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, was the leader of the powerful faction of neutralists inside the nineteen-man Cabinet. His cabinet journal has only recently become available. It reveals that on Monday 27 July, at the beginning of the crisis, Harcourt listed eleven ministers as pledged disciples with him in a “Peace party which if necessary shall break up the Cabinet in the interest of our abstention.”

The Beirut-based journalist Alex Rowell argues that “the Iranians are very astute readers of the region, and also understand Washington better, frankly, than many Washington pundits.” But it doesn’t take carefully calibrated sensibilities to bet that a president who balked on his threats against North Korea, who obviously wants to disengage from the wars the U.S. is fighting, who has left unchecked Iran’s use of Hezbollah and other proxy forces to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and who, in the midst of a crisis over tanker attacks, claimed, “We just don’t want them to have nuclear weapons,” wouldn’t risk a war with Iran

The president’s reprehensible behavior makes it virtually impossible for him to bring the country together, convince it that war is necessary, and, on the basis of that support, persuade America’s allies to join the fight

In foreign policy, and Iran policy in particular, chaos rules. There appears to be no interagency process to vet alternative approaches or include the talent from departments in deliberations on policy

I was arguing with some of my fellow conservatives about the insanity of finding any common cause whatsoever with the so-called alt-right. The issue wasn’t that every avowed nationalist who claimed membership in the alt-right was a Nazi or Klansman. It was that the alt-right was open to Nazis and Klansmen. And why wouldn’t these newly minted white supremacists welcome such pioneering organizations to their cause?

In Bannon’s case, and in the case of so many on the right who pulled their oars to the beat of Bannon’s drum, the motivation wasn’t racism or anti-Semitism; it was the need to win at all costs (or to make a profit).

the real threat to traditional conservatism is the mindset that made it possible to form even a theoretical alliance with the alt-right in the first place: the idea that winning and fighting are self-justifying.

An email Wolff describes as “purporting to represent the views” of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn neatly summarizes what campaign workers and White House staff have been telling me about Trump for two years. He is an “idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”

“Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron.”

US has made preparations to withdraw diplomats after warning Baghdad it could shut its embassy amid attacks.

Iraq’s foreign minister has said his country hopes the United States will reconsider its decision to close its diplomatic mission in Baghdad

the decision is a wrong one, it was taken at the wrong time and the wrong place

Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship.

Mr. Putin’s gamble has failed.

Mr. Putin — whose instinctive cautiousness I’ve observed at close quarters for two decades — has a record of withdrawing at the first sign of real conflict. When Russian mercenaries were killed by U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, for example, he had the perfect opportunity to retaliate. Instead, Russia denied the slaughter ever took place.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-GreenfieldLinda Thomas-GreenfieldRussia delivers written response to US over Ukraine-related proposal US, Russia face off over Ukraine at Security Council meeting The Hill's Morning Report - What's Putin's next move? MORE, on Tuesday characterized the recent U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine as an "absolute success."

When asked how the public meeting affected efforts to resolve tensions through quiet diplomacy, Thomas-Greenfield said it was "one more diplomatic effort to give the Russians an opportunity to explain what they are doing on the border with Ukraine."

Russia denies that it has plans to invade but has issued security ultimatums to the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that include denying Ukraine any entrance to the alliance in the future and committing to never placing offensive arms in the former Soviet state.

In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army – the oprichnina – he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats

His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship i

And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.

But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.

For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.

Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.

The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.