b]Everyone knows Europe has chosen a totalitarian Eastern regime over a democratic Western regime. The E.U. wants to end the translantic alliance and prevent America from freeing people.[/b]
From The Scotsman, a very anti-EU newspaper -
thescotsman.scotsman.com . . .
FRASER NELSON
GIVING a group hug to the whole of Europe is a task which President George W Bush has risen to with aplomb. He embraced the former "axis of weasels", broke bread with the French and cracked jokes for everyone.
Jacques Chirac would be invited to his ranch in Texas, he said, because "I’m looking for a good cowboy." As for old arguments, let’s leave them "in the past". He has a new 2005 message: free love for everyone.
The president comes at a crucial juncture: the European Union constitution has been drafted, and threatens to tear NATO apart. Yet throughout all this, the president is constantly, suspiciously sanguine. Why?
There is much going on in Brussels which should give the White House cause for grave alarm. The EU constitution proposes a "solidarity clause" for mutual defence: ie, a NATO without the Americans.
It fits a pattern. Throughout the Iraq conflict, Mr Chirac saw Europe (and himself) as a counterweight to America. The EU was being designed to make itself Athens to America’s Rome.
The NATO headquarters that Mr Bush visited on Monday would be a museum to the Cold War - replaced by a new building for the EU defence headquarters. The Brussels military project is designed to sever the Atlantic link.
So why is President Bush so keen to cheer all this on? Neither he nor anyone else in Washington can miss the EU’s ambitions because they are so explicit - and embodied in the Galileo satellite project. America has already ringed the world in satellites, used as navigation tools by anyone, free of charge. Taxi drivers and Scottish trawlers navigate by them. So, too, can the next generation of military equipment, which will be digital.
But rather than use the ready-made American satellites (which most countries are allowed to use), the EU is sinking £1.6 billion into setting up a new satellite system to rival GPS - and this for one reason: it doesn’t like the idea of relying on America.
In the old days, politics decided defence alliances. Now, military procurement decisions make their own realpolitik: every country must choose either GPS (pro-America) or Galileo (rival to America).
Mr Chirac has been busy signing up other beacons of democracy to the defence project: China signed up in September last year. And this has profound implications in America. Any EU-China deal opens the prospect of military secrets shared with Britain slipping down the EU grapevine and ending up in Beijing - perhaps even in North Korea.
That is why the US Congress last year refused to grant Britain the "trusted partner" status afforded to Canada. It doesn’t matter what Tony Blair says if he’s signing up to an alliance which stretches to China.
While President Bush was warning Mr Blair against China yesterday, Gordon Brown was giving his own group hug to the cronies of this Communist superpower, talking for all the world as if China was Britain’s new best friend. "China produces 90 per cent of the world’s toys," he said cheerfully. Little wonder the country’s labour is cheap when eight million Chinese languish in forced-labour camps.
It’s 15 years after Tiananmen Square, but people are still jailed, tortured and murdered for speaking out against the Communist Party. Tibetan Buddhists, the Falun Gong, the Uighurs of Xinjiang and a host of other political activists are relentlessly persecuted.
Instead of intensive pressure to reform, China is rewarded by warm words from the British Chancellor and the offer of arms sales by the European Union. This all speaks a special diplomatic language, saying very clearly: keep up the good work.
Mr Bush may well have asked Mr Blair why his Chancellor is in China in the first place, given that his job is to stay at home and run the British economy. After all, he met his Chinese counterpart in London a fortnight ago. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was in China last month and Mr Blair himself went 18 months ago. So why is the Chancellor now off glad-handing those running one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes on the planet?
Trade with China can carry on without our politicians endorsing theirs. Any unnecessary diplomatic support given to China’s authorities weakens the human-rights cause. Yet its new wealth has made European politicians forget their qualms.
The Bush administration visits China (though without Mr Brown’s relish) - but will not sell arms to Beijing. Mr Bush made as much clear yesterday. But if Europe wants to join China in its satellite project, then let it.
The Americans are relaxed because they see the EU as weak - and growing weaker. "It’s like a corpse," a US State Department official once told me. "Only the fingernails are growing." It is, therefore, not to be taken seriously.
TAKE the Galileo project. It comes from the same geniuses who are still working on the Eurofighter - an aircraft originally designed to dogfight with Soviet MiGs, and still not finished. If China is waiting for Galileo to navigate its military, then great - it will have quite a long wait as committees of Eurocrats argue about the design, cost and jobs of the project as they always have done.
And what about the EU’s stated ambition to overtake America as the "most competitive economy in the world" by 2010? This, too, is a joke: since the pledge was made five years ago, the Eurozone has made its name only as an unemployment blackspot.
No matter how much Europe may aspire to be an equal economic partner to the US, it is hooked on high taxation and protectionism - which hold back the creation of wealth and jobs. It can’t seem to break the cycle.
The prospect of the EU as a military superpower is just as laughable, because its members won’t spend the cash required for a modern military (only Britain's can rival America's technologically). It has troops, but lacks the equipment and rapid-response units needed for a post-Cold War world.
It also lacks the willpower. America’s 18 NATO allies have 1.4 million active troops and another million in reserve - as Lord Robertson pointed out in his final speech as its secretary general. "Yet with only 55,000 soldiers currently deployed on multinational missions, most of your countries plead they are overstretched and cannot do more," he said 15 months ago. "This is not acceptable."
In the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, NATO was so deeply split that it was not used at all. The war on terror will involve ad-hoc coalitions - even now, the Iraq contribution is on a country-by-country basis.
The White House stopped taking NATO seriously long ago - and this is why President Bush is so relaxed about a rival EU alliance. He’ll play along - speaking about NATO as if it still exists in a meaningful sense. Yet they all know that NATO’s role now is diplomatic - to befriend countries such as Ukraine who may fall into Russia’s military orbit.
So what’s to defend? Even Britain has already thrown in its lot with the EU - its military is moving towards the EU orbit and its Chancellor is making up reasons to go to Communist China, to which British ministers now want to sell arms.
Yes, it’s a shame, America may argue, but if Britain wants to go that way why fight it? And why complain? As Mr Bush stood at the NATO table yesterday, he was drawing a veil over an alliance that effectively died a long time ago.
From The Scotsman, a very anti-EU newspaper -
thescotsman.scotsman.com . . .
FRASER NELSON
GIVING a group hug to the whole of Europe is a task which President George W Bush has risen to with aplomb. He embraced the former "axis of weasels", broke bread with the French and cracked jokes for everyone.
Jacques Chirac would be invited to his ranch in Texas, he said, because "I’m looking for a good cowboy." As for old arguments, let’s leave them "in the past". He has a new 2005 message: free love for everyone.
The president comes at a crucial juncture: the European Union constitution has been drafted, and threatens to tear NATO apart. Yet throughout all this, the president is constantly, suspiciously sanguine. Why?
There is much going on in Brussels which should give the White House cause for grave alarm. The EU constitution proposes a "solidarity clause" for mutual defence: ie, a NATO without the Americans.
It fits a pattern. Throughout the Iraq conflict, Mr Chirac saw Europe (and himself) as a counterweight to America. The EU was being designed to make itself Athens to America’s Rome.
The NATO headquarters that Mr Bush visited on Monday would be a museum to the Cold War - replaced by a new building for the EU defence headquarters. The Brussels military project is designed to sever the Atlantic link.
So why is President Bush so keen to cheer all this on? Neither he nor anyone else in Washington can miss the EU’s ambitions because they are so explicit - and embodied in the Galileo satellite project. America has already ringed the world in satellites, used as navigation tools by anyone, free of charge. Taxi drivers and Scottish trawlers navigate by them. So, too, can the next generation of military equipment, which will be digital.
But rather than use the ready-made American satellites (which most countries are allowed to use), the EU is sinking £1.6 billion into setting up a new satellite system to rival GPS - and this for one reason: it doesn’t like the idea of relying on America.
In the old days, politics decided defence alliances. Now, military procurement decisions make their own realpolitik: every country must choose either GPS (pro-America) or Galileo (rival to America).
Mr Chirac has been busy signing up other beacons of democracy to the defence project: China signed up in September last year. And this has profound implications in America. Any EU-China deal opens the prospect of military secrets shared with Britain slipping down the EU grapevine and ending up in Beijing - perhaps even in North Korea.
That is why the US Congress last year refused to grant Britain the "trusted partner" status afforded to Canada. It doesn’t matter what Tony Blair says if he’s signing up to an alliance which stretches to China.
While President Bush was warning Mr Blair against China yesterday, Gordon Brown was giving his own group hug to the cronies of this Communist superpower, talking for all the world as if China was Britain’s new best friend. "China produces 90 per cent of the world’s toys," he said cheerfully. Little wonder the country’s labour is cheap when eight million Chinese languish in forced-labour camps.
It’s 15 years after Tiananmen Square, but people are still jailed, tortured and murdered for speaking out against the Communist Party. Tibetan Buddhists, the Falun Gong, the Uighurs of Xinjiang and a host of other political activists are relentlessly persecuted.
Instead of intensive pressure to reform, China is rewarded by warm words from the British Chancellor and the offer of arms sales by the European Union. This all speaks a special diplomatic language, saying very clearly: keep up the good work.
Mr Bush may well have asked Mr Blair why his Chancellor is in China in the first place, given that his job is to stay at home and run the British economy. After all, he met his Chinese counterpart in London a fortnight ago. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was in China last month and Mr Blair himself went 18 months ago. So why is the Chancellor now off glad-handing those running one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes on the planet?
Trade with China can carry on without our politicians endorsing theirs. Any unnecessary diplomatic support given to China’s authorities weakens the human-rights cause. Yet its new wealth has made European politicians forget their qualms.
The Bush administration visits China (though without Mr Brown’s relish) - but will not sell arms to Beijing. Mr Bush made as much clear yesterday. But if Europe wants to join China in its satellite project, then let it.
The Americans are relaxed because they see the EU as weak - and growing weaker. "It’s like a corpse," a US State Department official once told me. "Only the fingernails are growing." It is, therefore, not to be taken seriously.
TAKE the Galileo project. It comes from the same geniuses who are still working on the Eurofighter - an aircraft originally designed to dogfight with Soviet MiGs, and still not finished. If China is waiting for Galileo to navigate its military, then great - it will have quite a long wait as committees of Eurocrats argue about the design, cost and jobs of the project as they always have done.
And what about the EU’s stated ambition to overtake America as the "most competitive economy in the world" by 2010? This, too, is a joke: since the pledge was made five years ago, the Eurozone has made its name only as an unemployment blackspot.
No matter how much Europe may aspire to be an equal economic partner to the US, it is hooked on high taxation and protectionism - which hold back the creation of wealth and jobs. It can’t seem to break the cycle.
The prospect of the EU as a military superpower is just as laughable, because its members won’t spend the cash required for a modern military (only Britain's can rival America's technologically). It has troops, but lacks the equipment and rapid-response units needed for a post-Cold War world.
It also lacks the willpower. America’s 18 NATO allies have 1.4 million active troops and another million in reserve - as Lord Robertson pointed out in his final speech as its secretary general. "Yet with only 55,000 soldiers currently deployed on multinational missions, most of your countries plead they are overstretched and cannot do more," he said 15 months ago. "This is not acceptable."
In the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, NATO was so deeply split that it was not used at all. The war on terror will involve ad-hoc coalitions - even now, the Iraq contribution is on a country-by-country basis.
The White House stopped taking NATO seriously long ago - and this is why President Bush is so relaxed about a rival EU alliance. He’ll play along - speaking about NATO as if it still exists in a meaningful sense. Yet they all know that NATO’s role now is diplomatic - to befriend countries such as Ukraine who may fall into Russia’s military orbit.
So what’s to defend? Even Britain has already thrown in its lot with the EU - its military is moving towards the EU orbit and its Chancellor is making up reasons to go to Communist China, to which British ministers now want to sell arms.
Yes, it’s a shame, America may argue, but if Britain wants to go that way why fight it? And why complain? As Mr Bush stood at the NATO table yesterday, he was drawing a veil over an alliance that effectively died a long time ago.
