.
Europe
European Commission
28.05.2025 The European Union plans to deepen cooperation with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Türkiye, Armenia and Azerbaijan, while advancing regional projects focused on connectivity. The new strategy aims to boost connections and growth by linking Europe with the South Caucasus, Central Asia and beyond, according to an official statement. A Black Sea maritime security hub will be Europe's early warning system in the Black Sea, enhance situational awareness and help protect critical infrastructure, like offshore installations and subsea cables, EU Foreign Policy chief Kallas, 4 said. Alongside upgrades, we want better screening of foreign owners in ports and key facilities, Kallas told. She emphasized that the EU would step up demining operations in the area. Kallas also underscored the importance of improving military mobility by upgrading regional ports, railways, and roads ’for transporting heavy military equipment’. (Source: Anadolu Agency - Turkey)
European Parliament
28 May 2025 How to finance Europe’s ’long-overdue rearmament’ has dominated political discourse of late, particularly since the Munich Security Conference in February where the message from the United States was clear: Europe must assume greater responsibility for its own defence. The initial response has been fiscal. ’The European Union has championed ReArm Europe - a rearmament programme worth €150 billion of direct investment in defence and a temporary exemption from deficit rules that could unlock a further €650 billion in additional national defence spending’. ’Germany has pledged further investment, alongside other countries’. What’s missing is a parallel conversation about the role of monetary policy. Many member states remain wary of increasing debt levels. Decisions taken now will affect spending well beyond the exemption’s expiration, leading to a natural hesitancy in planning long-term defence outlays. In an environment where EU governments have committed to gradual debt reduction, investors may punish states that simultaneously increase defence spending. Eurozone members are acutely aware of their exposure to bond markets and ratings agencies, and will act cautiously as a result. ’The danger is that this caution will leave Europe under-equipped’. What matters is delivery: air defence systems, munitions, logistics, and personnel readiness. Monetary policy has historically been the EU’s first responder. The central bank’s secondary mandate: to support the general economic policies of the EU. The ECB should consider how it can support the EU’s defence buildup within its mandate. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which ’yields begin to rise for member states investing heavily in defence’. The Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), created in 2022 to prevent unwarranted fragmentation in bond markets, could be adapted or deployed in defence-related contexts. Targeted asset purchase programmes or conditional refinancing mechanisms could be considered. "In its current form, the ECB primarily has a focus on price stability and cannot directly finance member state governments". The entire standing of the institution depends on its insularity from politics and policy goals that may be perceived as temporary. ’Aligning monetary policy with defence goals’ raises questions about ECB’s institutional positioning. (Source: The Parliament magazine – based in Brussels, Belgium)
by Šuvajevs is a member of the Parliament of Latvia and vice-chair of the Latvian Budget Committee
Russia
(28 May 2025) Russia’s first textbook on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been added to the official list of educational materials for 8th- and 9th-grade students. According to the publishers, the textbook was developed to encourage young people to explore careers in drone operation and management. (Source: Conflict Intelligence Team - investigative group, relocated from Moskow to Tbilisi, Georgia)
Ukraine
May 28, 2025 What Europe can gain from Ukrainian arms exports? The EU’s recent establishment of a €150 billion defense fund under the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative 'enables Ukraine’s participation in joint defense procurement and borrowing in partnership with EU members'. These funds can only be spent on defense products where at least 65 percent of components are produced by an EU country, Norway or Ukraine. ’Kyiv has already successfully established joint ventures with European defense partners, like Rheinmetall or Thales’. Opening up Ukraine’s defense industry would allow Ukraine’s economy 'to benefit directly from European rearmament'. Ukraine’s private defense sector has the capacity to produce over 1,700,000 more drones and electronic warfare systems (EWs) than it currently does. Ukraine’s production capacity ’has grown beyond’ what its state contracts cover and what the government has funds to procure. 'Ukraine’s parliament is currently discussing easing wartime restrictions on domestic arms exports'. ’Building on the country’s experience for European rearmament’ would allow the country’s economy ’to directly benefit from European rearmament'. Several ways ’to take advantage’ of this: international partners purchase weapons from domestic producers on behalf of Ukraine; duties and revenues from exports would provide a financial boost to further develop new capabilities. For Europe, 'it would open up a supply of field-tested capabilities and equipment'. Providing a technological edge over the enemy, defy the purpose of ’stockpiling for the possibility of a future conflict’. ’European armies would greatly benefit from access to Ukrainian domestic arms production, allowing them to train soldiers in drone warfare and integrate drone units in command structures, thereby adapting to the realities of modern warfare at low cost’. Over 40 percent of weapons currently used by Ukraine’s army are domestically produced, with a heavy focus on innovative weapons systems. The industry ’needs to scale up its production of strategic weapons, particularly cruise and ballistic missiles and strategic air defense — - which is where cooperation with European partners and investment is most needed’. (Source: Politico - U.S.)
by Parzonka, a coordinator for Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program.
Note: What good can gain? Nothing.
Asia
Afghanistan
May 28 2025 As per habit, I got ready and started towards the office (in Afghanistan, we work on Sundays). The moment I arrived at the entrance door of the building of PEN Afghanistan, things did not seem the way they usually did; there was something different about that day. I entered the building. We used to have images of famous writers hung on the walls, along with some pictures and mementos of PEN activities pinned and glued to the wooden boards, and several contemporary and classic pieces of art on the flat surfaces of canvases. However, that day, the walls were empty of images, the mementos were gone, and the canvases seemed soulless. As I kept walking, my eyes were not able to find any traces of the familiar objects in my surroundings. The whole two-floored PEN building was lifeless, as if its soul had been snatched away from its body. I started checking the news, as was my habit, when I was called to an urgent meeting. The moment I arrived in the meeting room, I noticed the worried look on the faces of my colleagues, and my heartbeat grew faster; something was definitely wrong. It happens sometimes that despite sensing something, you are still not able to put a finger on what it is. At the meeting, Dr. Hamed, general director of PEN Afghanistan, informed us that the Taliban had arrived at the gates of Kabul city, and at any time now they could enter the city. He requested that we leave the office and go home. The city has not changed its golden yet gloomy outfit since that Sunday, the 15th of August *, the day that changed the lives of everyone in Afghanistan forever, the Sunday that left a massive scar in the hearts of millions of people. (Source: Penopp - Sweden)
by Suhrabie
* year 2021
Caribbean
Haiti
May 28, 2025 The Haitian government has hired American contractors and has signed in recent months a contract with Mr. Prince, who founded Blackwater Worldwide to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members. The authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target. Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of President Trump, is working with Haiti’s government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation, killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory and threatening to take over its capital. After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Blackwater no longer exists, but Mr. Prince owns other private military entities. Security experts said he has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country. The full terms of the Haitian government’s arrangement with Mr. Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown. The State Department has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti’s National Police. It said it is not paying Mr. Prince or his company for any work in Haiti. Haiti’s crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021. Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About one million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters. U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control. A $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money. Haiti’s undermanned and underequipped police force is struggling to contain the gang. Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti’s finances are in shambles. Haiti’s experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When U.S. forces returned former president Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the U.S. military in places like Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.) Prince, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, The New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States. A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in Libya, which he denied. In recent years, in Haiti Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president Moïse. U.S. military contractors doing defense work overseas are required to obtain a license from the State Department, but those licenses are not public record. Mr. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has traveled overseas in search of new business, said McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of “The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.” 'It’s always worth noting where Prince is going, because it’s sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,” Mr. McFate said. (Source: The New York Times - U.S.)
North America
United States
May 28, 2025 America depends on ocean shipping. The U.S. needs ships to deliver nearly 90 percent of its armed forces’ supplies and equipment, including fuel, ammunition, and food. Commercial shipyard capacity is essential for surge construction of warships and sealift-support ships that transport equipment and troops in times of national emergency. Yet the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity. Of the tens of thousands of large vessels that dot the oceans, a mere 0.13 percent are built in the United States. China fulfills roughly 60 percent of all new shipbuilding orders and has amassed more than 200 times America’s shipbuilding capacity. Most U.S. imports and exports travel on foreign-built ships, owned and crewed almost exclusively by nine giant carriers based in Europe and Asia. By the end of 2024, these carriers had organized into three cartels that controlled about 90 percent of the U.S. containerized-shipping trade. After a ship arrives at a U.S. port, the crane that lifts containers from its cargo hold will probably have been made by a single Chinese corporation that produces 80 percent of all ship-to-shore cranes in the United States. China also makes 86 percent of the truck chassis onto which containers are loaded. Some 95 percent of the containers themselves are built in China. In the early days of the pandemic, foreign cartels raised the cost of spot contracts on certain shipping lanes by up to 1,000 percent while making a record $190 billion in windfall profits. ’They also rejected hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. agricultural exports, preferring to race back to China with empty containers to fill with more profitable Chinese imports while American-grown food rotted on the docks’. Because so few commercial ships fly the American flag and employ American mariners, the U.S. faces a critical shortage of civilian sailors needed to crew Navy support vessels. In November 2024, the Navy confirmed that it would lay up 17 support vessels, some delivered as recently as January, because of crew shortages. More alarming are shortages of support ships themselves. The U.S. would need more than 100 fuel tankers in the event of a conflict in the Pacific. It has access to about 15. After World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States was so reliant on European shipping, freight rates soared. Foreign lines increased the rate to charter a vessel or ship key goods by about 20 times. The United States was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. The domestic economy went into a recession as goods piled up on the docks and imports stopped arriving in American ports. Congress passed a series of bills that poured public funds into bolstering U.S. shipping and shipbuilding capacity. Extensive public investment led to the construction of more than 2,300 vessels for World War I and more than 5,500 vessels during World War II. The United States became the world’s preeminent shipbuilder. Congress created a new agency, the United States Shipping Board (later replaced by the Federal Maritime Commission), which was charged with regulating the industry like a public utility. During the 1980s, however, Congress and Reagan abandoned the regulated-competition approach. Reaganites argued that the FMC, which at the time had a budget of just $11.8 million, had become a bloated bureaucracy. Congress passed a series of bills during the Reagan and Clinton administrations that stripped the FMC’s ability to regulate ocean-carrier cartels. As the rise of containerization led to ever larger ships, fixed costs grew. This increased carriers’ incentives to fill empty space on ships, even at steep discounts, because at least they would lose less money than if the space were unsold. American-flag carriers, which had higher costs than foreign counterparts, were particularly hurt by the rate wars, especially after the Reagan administration withdrew subsidies that had helped U.S. carriers defray the costs of paying crews livable wages. Shipyards in Asia began to enjoy massive government subsidies. Shipbuilding all but disappeared in the United States. At a time of escalating tensions with China, the United States has virtually no surge capacity to build naval or sealift ships. In fact, China builds all the commercial ships that the U.S. government contracts to provide military support. The central problem is not just inadequate investment or insufficient tariffs. It is the abandonment of a system of regulated competition that structures the industry to meet public purposes. Carriers would be required to offer all shippers, big and small, similar prices and terms of service. Combined with robust public investment in shipping, shipbuilding, port services, and mariner training, this system would re-create the market rules once used to address the challenge of unregulated monopolies in ocean shipping. (Source: The Atlantic - U.S.)
by Rao, a transportation policy analyst at the Open Markets Institute.
Global
May 28, 2025 Nostalgia ruins economies. The profound economic disruptions of the last few months might push analysts to revisit the idea that nostalgia is a grave, even life-threatening condition. The most notable example came on April 2, 2025, when U.S. President Trump rolled out a suite of massive, ostensibly reciprocal tariffs designed to restore the glory days of American manufacturing - resulting in a market crash. Trump’s announcement prompted a great deal of intellectual, as well as economic, shock. But he is not the first world leader to try cutting off his country. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, China sealed up its empire out of fear of outside influence. Japan did the same for much of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, during its shogunate era. They were united by the belief that closing off the nation to preserve traditions would bring about economic and even spiritual health. Each of these cases ended poorly. Europe, unlike China and Japan, did not try to avoid economic development. European countries embraced new technologies that allowed them to build up powerful governments and militaries - with the purpose of building vast colonial empires. As the continent urbanized, many began to fret about the dwindling numbers of farmers and peasants, particularly during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. The widespread misery of that era made the old image of rural life appear more attractive than ever, resulting in specifically peasant political movements that promised a return to an idyllic, agrarian past. The rural ideal was strong enough that it formed a key component in building new coalitions of a populist right. In fact, farmers constituted such a large part of the electorate that these movements even acquired power within the center and the left. It was in Germany that the most striking - and devastating - use of agrarian romanticism occurred. The National Socialist Party rose to power in large part by capitalizing on agricultural depression, with the Nazis relying heavily on rural propaganda to win the votes of German farmers. We must recognize that without our own land, without our own peasantry, there can be no economic prosperity in Germany, that all notions of export and import and of the global economy are nothing to us but concepts that may be useful but can never replace our own living space and our own peasantry These are the foundation of every healthy economy, Hitler declared in one typical 1932 election speech. When he wooed rural audiences in the south of Germany, he even wore antiquated peasant dress, with traditional rural jackets and, sometimes, lederhosen. The principal architect of the Nazis’ rural political program was Darré, the author of the tract New Aristocracy of Blood and Soil, Darré had a reputation for being both a student of technical farm matters and a feverish proponent of German expansion, which he believed was necessary for Germans’ well-being. In his view, pure-blooded Germans should abandon the poisonous big industrial cities for a healthy life of the land. After being appointed minister for agriculture, Darré pushed for Germany to conquer territory so that the country’s city dwellers would have fields to plow and settle. But he was hardly the driving force behind Germany’s efforts to expand its borders. His efforts focused on creating a compulsory corporatist guild-style organization of farmers and pushed through a law prohibiting farms from being split up or sold by German peasants. But in reality, farmers continued to feel overburdened, abandoned by a government that wanted to industrialize quickly, largely for military reasons. The number of agrarian workers in Germany continued to drop. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Nazi leader lost patience with rural policies - and with Darré - once he no longer needed peasant voters. By 1937, Hitler openly expressed his contempt for 'peasant philosophy stuff' and refused to receive Darré or entertain his requests. After 1939, his only response to farmer demands was to send forced laborers to work in their fields. The rural dream at the heart of German nostalgia ultimately ran counter to the Nazis’ drive to assert a racial hierarchy rooted in technology and industrialization. After World War II, 'Europeans' ’embarked on an alternative: encouraging a move out of the countryside while paying the remaining farmers substantial subsidies’ - ’more an effort to keep the dwindling losers of globalization on its side while still moving the economy forward’. In the 1980s, the Common Agricultural Policy (as it is called) accounted for over 70 percent of the European Community budget. Today, however, it consumes just over 25 percent of the EU’s budget. The continent’s people accepted that peasant life was firmly in the past rather than something that one could resuscitate at full capacity. Nostalgia now it has come roaring back into mainstream politics, again fueling European populism. This time, however, the nostalgic sentiment surrounds the loss of manufacturing. Italy, whose household appliances, textiles, and clothing trade were most vulnerable to the China shock, fell first, bringing about western Europe’s first postwar populist government by making Berlusconi prime minister in 1994. Now, even Europe’s industrial motor, Germany, is tottering as the populist Alternative for Germany grows in popularity, particularly in the eastern parts of the country most conspicuously left behind. But no country appears more afflicted by nostalgia than the United States. Anger about globalization and the country’s growing diversity is, after all, part of what propelled Trump to the White House. And especially since winning his second term, Trump has worked to make good on his atavistic promises. The president explicitly sold his sweeping tariffs as restorative. His commerce secretary, Lutnick, likewise depicted the tariffs as Washington seizing back its glorified past. China, Lutnick said, had created an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” - jobs that would once have belonged to Americans. Now, he said, that kind of activity would return. Trump replaced most of his tariffs with a flat ten percent levy after the stock market tumbled. But no matter how high the rate, tariffs are unlikely to restore lost jobs, especially as the automation revolution looms. AI now threatens office workers in a way analogous to robots in factories during the first wave of industrialization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the world changes around voters, the familiar image of men working in the mines while their wives prepare meals at home is so comforting to many Americans that they are willing to make radical sacrifices to get it back. It is why U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent can argue that any tariff-induced pain is really a detox period, and why Trump can talk of tariffs as an operation and as medicine. The economics of nostalgia, its inevitable failure only breeds a cultural nostalgia that may be even more dangerous than the cutoffs. When the United States doesn’t get its jobs back - and in fact loses more as a result of the disruption caused by tariffs - Washington, might double down on assertions of American superiority. After all, someone must be to blame for the failure of economic policies that so many Americans endorse. Nostalgia, then, becomes both the cause of problems and a coverup for them. People are worried about the radically transformative technology of today. The twin forces of globalization and technology are upending jobs, communities, families, and social relations. The idea of going back to an airbrushed, idealized version of the world is thus highly attractive. As an individual feeling, it may be comforting. But as a policy prescription, it poisons discourse and breaks apart the body politic. Returning to an imaginary lost homeland is not an option. (Source: Forreign Affairs - U.S.)
by James, Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University, the author of Seven Crashes;
James, a visiting doctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, working on a Ph.D. on the history of nostalgia.
.5 5 31 17:57
