Friday 29th of March 2024

growing up...

Europe

Angela Merkel and François Hollande have responded curtly but defiantly after Donald Trump cast further doubt on his commitment to Nato and gave strong hints that he would not support EU cohesion once in office.

“We Europeans have our fate in our own hands,” the German chancellor said after the publication of the US president-elect’s interviews with the Times and German tabloid Bild. “He has presented his positions once more. They have been known for a while. My positions are also known.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/16/europes-fate-is-in-our-h...

polishing the turd of brexit..

The president-elect promised to draw up a trade deal with the UK “quickly” after Brexit and said he could understand why voters chose to leave in last year’s referendum. “You look at the European Union and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany. That’s why I thought the UK was so smart in getting out,” he told Gove.

Gove, the first senior Conservative to meet Trump, spent an hour chatting to the president-elect in what he called his “glitzy, golden man cave” in Trump Tower, New York, for an interview with the Times.

Trump stressed his fondness for the UK and said other countries could follow its lead and leave the EU, something Gove predicted during the referendum campaign. “I believe others will leave. I do think keeping it together is not gonna be as easy as a lot of people think,” said Trump.

Asked whether he would press ahead with a trade deal with the UK that would come into force after Brexit, Trump told the former justice secretary: “Absolutely, very quickly. I’m a big fan of the UK. We’re gonna work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly. Good for both sides.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/15/trumps-first-uk-post-ele...

 

Time for Europe to grow up and be responsible beyond the skirts of the USA. Time for Europe to trade back with Russia with less hypocrisy and more grown-up respectful diplomacy. Time for the naked monkeys on this small planet to embrace peace and honesty. Ahah...

Anyone who has read my old pertinent comments on this site would know that Brexit should have happened way before, because the UK has always been a double agent on behalf of the USA, implanted in Europe. The UK should never been part of the EU and should have been expelled a long time ago. 

war is our business...

President-elect Donald Trump may want to make a deal with Russia, award-winning journalist John Pilger told RT, adding that the “US intelligence and national security monolith is pointed towards war.”

“It seems that he [Donald Trump] wants to make a deal with Russia, it makes sense from everyone’s point of view,” Pilger told RT’s Rory Suchet during a lengthy interview. “There is a great pressure on him not to do it”.

The US president now has “enormous military power,” noted Pilger. Trump is currently under pressure from fellow Republicans calling for tougher sanctions against Russia and those standing for softening rhetoric towards Moscow.

“The US’ biggest business is war. Lockheed Martin and all other major armament companies have a great halt on the US administration, on the US Congress. The so-called intelligence community and national security monolith is pointed towards war.”

The ultimate ambition of ‘Washington Hawks’ is regime change in Russia – “to dismember the Russian Federation,” according to the veteran journalist. He reminded about interventions US conducted since the end of the WWII against numerous nations.

“If Trump is going to drawback from that, that’s very good news. The US usually only attack defenseless countries. They rarely attack countries that can stand up for themselves.”

That’s why “this reckless provocation” on the western borders with Russia and in the Asia Pacific against China is “slightly unusual,” as it’s taking things up to “another level of risks and provocation,” he added.

Pilger was referring to the NATO deployment in Eastern Europe. Earlier in January, some 2,800 pieces of military hardware and 4,000 troops arrived at the German port of Bremerhaven to be transferred to various NATO bases.

“NATO is a war-making machine, it’s an American operation. Why is it doing this? I think there is a real strategic extremism in the US.” And the “prize in this operation” is Russia, he concluded, adding that such a prize was almost won in the times of Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), the first Russian president to serve after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“And what really has been upsetting in the US is that Russia is again independent, and that’s intolerable.”

Pilger called outgoing US leader Barack Obama “one of the most violent presidents.”

“He initiated a worldwide terrorist campaign with hellfire [air-to-surface] missiles being fired by drones at so-called terrorists certainly at weddings and funerals,” Pilger said, referring to numerous incidents when US missiles targeted civilians during their campaign in the Middle East.

The European Parliament “came up with good liberal initiatives” long ago, but now it has merely become an “echo chamber of the US,” according to Pilger.

“Much of Europe has … become a place of financial extremism, central banks that trash small members like Greece,”he added.

read more: 

https://www.rt.com/news/373835-pilger-russia-nato-war-us/

a refugee crisis? blame obama...

According to first deputy head of the committee on defense in the Russian Federation Council Yevgeny Serebrennikov, such accusations arise from the fact that certain forces in the European Union are afraid of a possible rapprochement between Russia and the United States, which is why they are trying to do everything to preserve the old system.

"Certain forces in the European Union, which are above the national governments, are very afraid of a possible rapprochement between the Russian Federation and the United States in the context of the position expressed by US president-elect Donald Trump," Serebrennikov said. In his opinion, these forces have repeatedly been trying to "add a spoonful of tar in a barrel of honey" and form a negative information environment around Russia and present it as evil. This is not the first time that Moscow has been accused of trying to undermine the EU's stability.

Earlier, the outgoing President of Bulgaria Rosen Plevneliev said that Russia was trying to destabilize Europe through the Balkans. According to Plevneliev, the Kremlin used various tools to undermine the EU's unity, including "propaganda" and "financing of ultra-left and ultra-right forces that are hostile to European integration." Officials in Poland and the Czech

Republic expressed a similar point of view, saying that Moscow intended to destabilize Europe by triggering a refugee crisis.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/politics/201701151049619766-eu-afraid-russia-us/

 

The refugee crisis in Europe has squarely been created by Obama who decided to flatten Libya and destroy Syria. After the disaster of Iraq, do you think the Yanks would have learnt how to create PEACE? No way. War and chaos is the hot engine of trade for many US enterprises and bugger the poor people who are in the way. Ugly. Europe should wake up to this US deceit but it won't...

charlemagne something macron...

Europe can no longer count on the US in defense and must take matters into its own hands, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated during a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, who also said: “Something should be done.”

“It’s no longer the case that the United States will simply just protect us,” Merkel said in a speech honoring President Macron, who came to Aachen to receive the prestigious Charlemagne Prize. Receiving a round of applause, Merkel stated: “Rather, Europe needs to take its fate into its own hands. That’s the task for the future.

Europe has to “act together and speak with one voice,"she said, as cited by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper. “But let's be honest: Europe is still in its infancy with regard to the common foreign policy.”

Speaking after Merkel, Macron said that “We should not be waiting, we must do something right now. Let us not be weak,” added the French president.

Last year, Merkel had made a similar statement, urging Europe to become less dependent on its transatlantic ally. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out. I've experienced that in the last few days,” she told a crowd a day after attending the G7 summit in Italy.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/426356-europe-us-protection-merkel/

 

Europe's foreign policy may be in its infancy, but the empire foreign policy is in its death throes... Read from top.

slowly taking up the challenge...

“Do we want the United States to be the economic policeman of the planet? Or do we Europeans say that we have economic interests, we want to continue to trade with Iran as part of a strategic agreement?” he asked, adding: “It's time for all European states to open their eyes.”

His interview comes on the back of Washington’s decision to pull out of a milestone 2015 deal that sought to curb Iran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting decades-long sanctions and wider economic cooperation. The move was coupled with renewed restrictions targeting trade with Iran.

On Thursday, US individuals and entities were barred from doing business with six Iranian individuals and three companies that the Treasury claims have ties to the Revolutionary Guards. The US also says companies doing business in Iran now have six months to halt economic activity, and cannot sign new contracts or they will face sanctions.

Addressing the sanctions, le Maire said he had called his US counterpart Steven Mnuchin and asked him “about either exemptions for a number of our companies, or longer deadlines [to comply with renewed sanctions].”Plane-maker Airbus, oil giant Total, and car manufacturers such as Renault and Peugeot could be among the French companies affected the most.

In the meantime, the minister urged other European nations to step up their economic sovereignty. In the coming weeks and months, France will reach out to other countries and look at “how to endow Europe with financial tools to become independent from the United States.”

At the end of May, le Maire will meet British and German finance ministers to also look at “what we can do in response to these US decisions on extraterritoriality,” the minister said, adding that “It is urgent to go from words to deeds.”

The French minister told reporters that European countries do realize that “we cannot keep going in the direction we are headed today whereby we submit to American decisions.” He said France, together with other European partners, “hopes to present proposals to the European Commission which go in this sense.”

READ MORE: Washington’s Iran sanctions bite: Germany trying to ‘minimize’ damage, France wants exemptions

Other European powers have advocated regaining independence in world affairs in last days. Honoring French President Emmanuel Macron, who came to Aachen, Germany, to receive the prestigious Charlemagne Prize, Chancellor Angela Merkel said “it’s no longer the case that the United States will simply just protect us,” urging Europe “to take its fate into its own hands.”

France, the UK and Germany have all said earlier that they will continue to work with Iran to try to save the 2015 nuclear agreement. Berlin, in particular, promised it would help affected companies to “minimize the negative consequences” of the US move, with Economy Minister Peter Altmaier saying: “That means, it is concretely about damage limitation.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/426470-france-us-vassal-sovereignty/

 

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