Even though the “almost imminent” war with Ukraine has been dominating the media in Russia, another important issue has been debated almost constantly: the recent actions of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a person with the unique status in Russia’s political elite of not being subject to any laws existing in the Russian Federation.
The U.S. government should not repeat the mistake made by the Nigerian government of designating the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as a terrorist group.
In October, an American scholar argued in a Washington Times op-ed that the United States should designate the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group in Nigeria’s South East region, as a terrorist group. To the casual onlooker, this could seem logical: IPOB has long been proscribed as a terrorist group by Nigeria’s government, and it reportedly boasts a 50,000-strong army. But doing so would be a mistake that risks causing a massive human rights crisis in Nigeria and West Africa.
Reports out of Washington suggest worry over a Russia-China partnership that would facilitate Vladimir Putin’s presumed ambition to absorb Ukraine and undermine the NATO-based European security system. So let’s examine that relationship to assess the US concern.
Sometimes the hypocrisy of the US government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, is just too much to let pass.
The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a trained bird), accusing Russia not just of preparing for an “imminent invasion’ of Ukraine, but of violating international law and “rules-based international order,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken likes to put it.
The statement comes amid a standoff between the Kremlin and the West over the list of security demands Russian authorities made last year, which Moscow says are needed to defuse the crisis in Ukraine and lower tensions in Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron is pursuing a poisoned peace plan, say critics in Europe, who fear the outcome of his talks this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin could be to strengthen Moscow’s hand in the crisis over Ukraine.
Top Russian commanders arrived in neighboring Belarus on Wednesday, set to oversee 30,000 Russian troops as they train for 10 days with the Belarusian military in the latest show of Moscow’s force along the Ukrainian border.
Russia has moved two battalions of S-400 surface-to-air missile systems and numerous fighter jets into Belarus for the exercises, with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian armed forces’ General Staff, in command of the drills that start on Thursday.
The Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, is one of the building blocks of the EU’s Defense policy. It was set up in 2017 to enable EU member states to work more closely together in the area of security and defense. This permanent framework for defense cooperation allows willing and able member states to jointly develop defense capabilities, invest in shared projects, and enhance the operational readiness and contribution of their armed forces. To date 25 EU Member States have joined PESCO and subscribed to more binding commitments to invest, plan, develop and operate defense capabilities more together, within the Union framework. The objective is to jointly arrive at a coherent full spectrum of defense capabilities available to Member States for national and multinational missions and operations. The Council European Union today established the general conditions under which non-EU countries could exceptionally be invited to participate in individual PESCO projects, thereby paving the way for stronger and more ambitious defence cooperation with partners in the EU framework
The biggest stories this week are likely to be the continuing standoff between NATO (led by the United States) and Putin in the Ukraine, the new Russo-Chinese detente, and the Republican Party’s continuing drift toward Trumpism. One way of tying these together to reveal a larger pattern is to talk about the expanded Child Tax Credit. You heard me right. The fate of the expanded Child Tax Credit illustrates a basic problem that runs through all this.
Slippery slope
However, interesting as those experiments and observations might be, they are still the result of specific parameters within a particular setting and an environment that doesn’t resemble real life. Serious and honest behavioral economists both understand and freely admit this. Just because there was one experiment in which 12 university students chose to receive 1 chocolate today rather than 2 tomorrow, one cannot extrapolate from it that the entire country needs a public pension system and a central authority to oversee it, since all citizens are clearly incapable of saving.