Tag: Nord Stream 2

Lublin Triangle: Foreign ministers approve plan to counter Russian disinformation

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Lublin Triangle: Foreign ministers approve plan to counter Russian disinformation

At the meeting of the Lublin Triangle, the Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish foreign ministers paid key attention to security challenges in the region: Russian aggression against Ukraine, the militarization of the Black Sea region, the situation in Belarus, and threats from the Nord Stream 2 project.

…

A separate topic of their conversation was Ukraine’s further integration into NATO in accordance with the decisions of the 2008 Bucharest Summit and the 2021 Brussels Summit. Lithuania and Poland called for giving Ukraine a clear understanding of further steps towards membership in the North Atlantic Alliance.

The NATO Summit: Front for Democracy or Return to the Cold War?

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The NATO Summit: Front for Democracy or Return to the Cold War?

To drive home this point, Biden stressed during a press conference after the summit that article 5 of the North-Atlantic Treaty remains “rock-solid” and “sacred” 72 years after its adoption. Article 5 obliges all thirty member states to consider an attack on one of the allies as an attack on all of them. Yet, NATO invoked it only once in its history, and this in support of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

…

The final communiqué of the present NATO summit underscored that article 5 can now also be invoked as a reaction to aggression in space and cyberspace.

China, the U.S., and the Idea of National Competition

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

China, the U.S., and the Idea of National Competition

What appears to be meant in the U.S. by ‘competing with China’ can be inferred by the rising Pentagon budget, by the failure to raise the minimum wage, by hiring private corporations to get around restrictions on domestic spying, and by appointing a high-level administrator to shut-down inconvenient political opinions on the internet. The political parties are now balkanized to the point where their adherents trust members of their own party, but not the other. What this likely means is an iterative process between ‘wealth of nations’ style economic nationalism and neoliberal internationalism where the only constant is the consolidation of political control by oligarchs and corporate executives. I believe that Italians in the 1920s and 1930s had a name for this type of governance.

Biden-Putin summit is on

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Biden-Putin summit is on

At Iceland, Blinken has given a “wish list” to Lavrov — North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan — and apparently sidestepped the explosive issue of Ukraine and the Crimea, leaving it, perhaps, to Biden and Putin. The US expectations are: Moscow should not side with Beijing over North Korea to undermine the US-led alliance system in the Far East; Moscow should give a free hand to the US to “tame” Iran; Moscow should not be a spoiler in Afghanistan and Central Asia vis-a-vis continued American security presence on the borders of Xinjiang.