Reflectii

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Preface

The text has aim to investigate the situation of female representation in politics in the industrialized contemporary Western democracies. Though women are more and more visible in politics, we can not yet say they have taken an equal position compared to men. Of course, they have had to take a long road and there is certainly a positive evolution, but there are still some mechanisms that lead to different kinds and levels of political discrimination.

Understanding the actions and justifications behind territorial colonial behavior by the UN Security Council since 1945.

One of the underlying principles of the UN Charter is the protection of the sovereign rights of states. Yet since 1945, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Soviet Union/Russia, France, UK, U.S., and China) have consistently used military force to undermine this notion. And while acts of seizing territory have grown rare, ongoing military domination allows imperialism to further manifest through economic, political, and cultural control.

While the Ukraine war has seen an explosion in the collection and distribution of open source intelligence, the work of secret intelligence agencies remains as important as ever.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the world of secret intelligence is no more. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been a stream of opinion pieces arguing that traditional state-based agencies are struggling to keep up in the face of open source intelligence (OSINT). The volume and speed at which we can access publicly available information is a revolution that large secret intelligence agencies are struggling to cope with, or so we’re told. Whether it’s commercially sourced satellite imagery or social media posts, the US and UK intelligence communities are operating in an increasingly complex environment – that much is true.

Rivalries between great powers, even for regions like the Illyrian Empire, go deep into the twilight of history. For a long time, the competition for dominance in this region was between the big ones such as the USA and the USSR; whereas today the USA, Russia, Turkey and China face each other. Whatever the constellation of these powers with the EU, the geopolitical realignment of our two republics is clear.

In a world where consumerism is our religion and Ikea catalogs are our bibles, the subject of psychological warfare in the military might seem far removed, if not wholly irrelevant.

Psychological warfare, it’s not just for soldiers on some distant battlefield, no. It’s playing out every day in boardrooms and on social media. Whether we realize it or not, we are in the constant crossfire of psychological warfare.

The Costs of Expanding the Alliance Outweigh the Benefits

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, policymakers and pundits, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, are pushing for NATO to offer Ukraine what French President Emmanuel Macron calls “a path toward membership” after the conflict concludes. This is not just show. Ukraine’s membership aspirations will now be a central topic of debate at NATO’s summit next week in Vilnius, with Ukraine arguing—as its former defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk wrote recently in Foreign Affairs—that it “should be welcomed and embraced” by the alliance. The way in which this issue is settled will have serious consequences for the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The alliance is bolstering its military deterrent in Europe amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has expanded to include Finland.

Introduction

Founded in 1949 as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the pillar of U.S.-Europe military cooperation. An expanding bloc of NATO allies has taken on a broad range of missions since the close of the Cold War, many well beyond the Euro-Atlantic region, in countries such as Afghanistan and Libya.

My article “The Education of the Modern Socialist” deserves a follow-up. The first part showed that a change has occurred in the definition of “socialism”—a necessary change in view of the failures of this ideology during the last century. Socialism today is based on the ideology of “statism”—the conviction that the state must play a fundamental role in society. Ludwig von Mises’s wider definition of socialism as state intervention implies a modern social state that is involved in most if not all of the activities of society, whether commercial or not.