NATO, idąc do przodu z rozeznaniem zagrożeń, zawsze stawia o dwa kroki za mało. Nie z braku odwagi, ale z wewnętrznej różnicy interesów.
Nie przyłączę się do chóru entuzjastów ustaleń madryckiego szczytu NATO. Owszem, nie zapiszę się też do klubu tych, którzy całkowicie lekceważą postanowienia, jakie tam zapadły. Ale mimo wszystko „najpotężniejszy sojusz wojskowy w historii” stać na jeszcze więcej.
International condemnation is growing against Morocco and Spain as more details emerge about the violent deaths of at least 37 migrants during an attempt last week to cross Morocco’s border with the Spanish enclave of Melilla.
Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date.
Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of “good intentions.” Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” destroyed anything that could be seen to invite or reflect sin. The notorious 1933 Nazi book burning… in Berlin torched some 20,000 books deemed subversive or “un-German”. During Communist China’s decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, the vast majority of China’s traditional scrolls, literature and religious antiquities went up in smoke.
Puternica imagine din Vechiul Testament a celor patru călăreți ai Apocalipsei a fost readusă în discuție în mod repetat atunci când omenirea s-a confruntat cu pericole și război. Profeții Ezechiel și Zaharia au descris cei patru călăreți ai apocalipsei ca fiind: ciuma, războiul, foametea și în cele din urmă moartea.
MIGRATION
Authorities found 51 migrants dead of heat exhaustion, dehydration and related causes in the back of an airless lorry abandoned on an interstate highway near San Antonio, Texas, on Monday. Most of the migrants – men, women and children – were from Mexico and Central America. It is the deadliest single human smuggling incident in U.S. history, coming amid a surge of attempted border crossings. Crisis Group expert Tiziano Breda says the horrific incident illustrates the impossibility of suppressing northward migration in the Americas when Mexicans, Central Americans and others are willing to take such risks to escape increasing privation and violent crime in their home countries.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than six in 10 Americans (61%) now have little or no confidence in the Supreme Court after its decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade — a near-total reversal from the 70% of voters who expressed at least some confidence in the court right before conservative justices gained a 6-3 majority with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020.
Part 4. Mental escalators of violence in US policy and media makers. Part 4B. A competitive, threat-orientation towards international relations: Psychological patterns described by Lakoff, Spranger, and Allport
False Bias #2. Life Is Competition; the Goal Is to Beat Adversaries and Stay on Top. Let’s take a look at actual, representative lines from Damon Wilson’s 2019 testimony, two years before he became president of the National Endowment for “Democracy,” and three years before Russia’s military action in Donetsk, Lugansk, and Ukraine. As we do so in this and the next several essays, I’ll point out several biases that I find in Wilson’s way of thinking, a pattern of thinking common to many of the minds that are forever leading our foreign policy. These biases of thought—cognitive biases—skew the mind and allow only certain perceptions of life, international relations, and human dynamics. I write about them at greater length and with more examples in my unpublished works, but I’ll provide some condensed ideas here.
This summer blockbuster lived up to the hype. In Madrid this week, NATO allies substantially boosted their forces in Eastern Europe, struck a deal to invite Sweden and Finland into the club, and dropped a once-in-a-decade strategic concept that strove to break new ground on China and climate change. What do these developments mean—and which ones flew under the radar? How will history judge this consequential gathering? From Madrid to Washington, our experts are here with answers.
This one was a decade in the making. On Wednesday, NATO released its new Strategic Concept—a sixteen-page document of dry diplomat-speak sketching out the Alliance’s future path as it takes on threats posed by Russia, China, climate change, and more. But what were the allies really saying amid all the jargon? And what did they leave out? Experts from the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative carefully combed through the document and dropped their insights in the margins.
Amid the horror that has befallen Ukraine and its people, one rare uplifting aspect of the tragedy is the remarkably warm and generous reception that Ukrainian refugees fleeing the carnage have received from European nations.