This screen shot of a Times report from November 29, 2019  The Times has finally caught up with one of its columnist:

The above from November 13, 2019 that links to this Economist interview of November 7, 2019. On Russia :

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My idea is not in the least naive. I didn’t by the way talk about a “reset”, I said it might take ten years. If we want to build peace in Europe, to rebuild European strategic autonomy, we need to reconsider our position with Russia. That the United States is really tough with Russia, it’s their administrative, political and historic superego. But there’s a sea between the two of them. It’s our neighbourhood, we have the right to autonomy, not just to follow American sanctions, to rethink the strategic relationship with Russia, without being the slightest bit naive and remaining just as tough on the Minsk process and on what’s going on in Ukraine. It’s clear that we need to rethink the strategic relationship. We have plenty of reasons to get angry with each other. There are frozen conflicts, energy issues, technology issues, cyber, defence, etc. What I’ve proposed is an exercise that consists of stating how we see the world, the risks we share, the common interests we could have, and how we rebuild what I’ve called an architecture of trust and security.

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What guarantee does he need? Is it in essence an EU and a NATO guarantee of no further advances on a given territory? That’s what it means. It means: what are their main fears? What are ours? How do we approach them together? Which issues can we work on together? Which issues can we decide no longer to attack each other on, if I can put it that way? On which issues can we decide to reconcile? Already, sharing, we have more discussions. And I think it’s very productive.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/11/07/emmanuel-macron-in-his-own-words-english

It is hard to be patient with Macron, who is the self-appointed leader of Europe with a vision, while he still violently tries to suppress the continuing rebellion, that has disappeared from the Corporate Media, which approaches it 56th weekend of demonstration, as I write this. In this portion of the Economist interview he sounds just like a respectable ‘Bourgeois Liberal’. For the Neo-Liberal ‘The Market’ is the sine qua non. ‘The Community’ is  a political prop. Macron is selling himself. Hoping that his audience will forget, that in final vote in the French election, 36.5% of the voters rendered their ballots ‘spoiled’ or otherwise ‘uncountable’ !

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Europe was built on this notion that we would pool the things we had been fighting over: coal and steel. It then structured itself as a community, which is not merely a market, it’s a political project. But a series of phenomena have left us on the edge of a precipice. In the first place, Europe has lost track of its history. Europe has forgotten that it is a community, by increasingly thinking of itself as a market, with expansion as its end purpose. This is a fundamental mistake, because it has reduced the political scope of its project, essentially since the 1990s. A market is not a community. A community is stronger: it has notions of solidarity, of convergence, which we’ve lost, and of political thought.

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Old Socialist