The President of the European Commission is reported to have opened the debate on whether Europe should have its own army. It already has NATO. A European Army without a government to control it is a bad if not worse than a currency without a government. No wonder the Kremlin is nervous. It looks West and sees a Europe with all sorts of disagreements and problems, its economy in the doldrums, becoming ever more strident and expansionist and now there is talk of an army.
Yesterday the veteran Dr Henry Kissinger was interviewed on BBC radio and said some very interesting things. He said NATO could not go on expanding, it lacked a clear strategy, Russia had been mishandled and its historical position and current security anxieties mis-read. The Ukraine crisis was unnecessary, the diplomacy used was misguided and Ukraine would end up with less territory under its control than if it had been more perceptive of the realities of its situation at the beginning. He said there needed to be countries between Russia and Europe who had ties with both and who should not be forced to choose. He ended up by fearing that there was a real risk of Cold War conditions returning and recalled that in 1914 various countries which did not want, or expect, war did a number of things which seemed perfectly reasonable but which in combination created a chain of events nobody was able to control.
The advice of this blog is listen to Kissinger, not to Junker. He went on to say sooner or later the West would have to sit down with Russia and talk. Why not do that?
Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. Downfall in Downing Street catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.