Political Observer comments.
The first three paragraphs of the Ganesh essay are carefully assembled with Ireland as the key state, in fact, the paradigmatic case for NATO. His talent as a Story Teller is not quite the same as his sometime, once, talent as author of beguiling aperçus! The periphery of NATO becomes in the ‘thought’ of Ganesh its very virtue, in propaganda terms! These three paragraphs reminds this reader of his literary Hero Tom Wolfe Silver Fork fictions.
To Dublin, where “triple lock” has an altogether different meaning. In Britain, it is a rule that protects the real value of the public pension. In Ireland, it is a set of tests the government must pass to send armed forces abroad. If unpicking the British lock is too provocative for politicians to consider, imagine fiddling with the Irish one, bound up as it is with the republic’s non-belligerent self-image.
Yet the government proposes change. Allies have long nudged Ireland to do more, noting that democratic Europe has enemies who might not exempt a “neutral” state from their menaces. (Subsea cables near the Irish coast are candidates for sabotage.) And while Nato membership isn’t even a remote prospect, Ireland has signed up to a new co-operation scheme with the alliance.
In fact, Ireland, where support for EU membership amounts to a near consensus, is a good spot from which to observe one of the under-told stories in the world: the resilience of the west’s two most important institutions. Having been diagnosed “brain-dead” in 2019 by no less an eminence than the president of France, Nato is now wider, in that Sweden and Finland have joined, and deeper, in that member states are spending more on defence. Some are even mulling the revival of conscription. Whatever is missing from the alliance that convenes in Washington this week — a vigorous US president, for example — it isn’t a raison d’être. The Kremlin has seen to that.
Editor: The cast of characters from Irish seedlings, to The Kremlin ( Putin The Terrible), follows in its meandering way of Western Corporate Press hysteria! Ganesh produces a very particular kind of political confection! I’ll proved some selective quotation, of the remainder of this obvious propaganda:
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And Nato might be the second most resilient Brussels-headquartered entity.
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The EU is popular. And has become more so in recent times. Readers who find this implausible should take it up with various polling companies.
Editor: Ganesh offers irreputable polling data? Yet the Polling Data, is bought and paid for by Political Operatives, of many Parties, that use this ‘data’ to secure by the publication of such ‘information’ to ‘massage’ political outcomes. This seems to this writer to be axiomatic!
According to YouGov last month, a referendum on membership would result in a crushing Remain win in each of the large EU democracies. German support for Leave is 18 per cent. In Spain, it is in the single digits. Eurobarometer, a pan-continental pulse check, finds that 74 per cent of respondents now “feel” like citizens of the EU, against 25 per cent who don’t. Those numbers were 59 and 40 around a decade ago. The Pew Research Center reports that supermajorities think well of the EU throughout Europe (save Greece) and as far afield as South Korea, having not always done so.
Survey after confounding survey reveals the same trend: a reputational slump for the EU in the mid-2010s, amid the sovereign debt crises, then a recovery to remarkable highs ever since. It explains some odd twists of events in national politics. To get as far as she has, which isn’t far enough to govern France, Marine Le Pen had to soften her line on Europe. The Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, has been constructive with an EU that some expected her to fight. The return of Donald Tusk as Poland’s leader happened, in part, because his predecessors’ tiffs with Brussels sat ill with a pro-EU electorate. Across the continent, lots of voters with ultraconservative instincts on immigration, crime, net zero and, yes, Brussels, balk at EU exit, or anything close to it.
Editor: The spot diagnosis’s of the problem:
None of this assures the EU a serene future, or even a future. While populists didn’t sweep the European parliament elections last month, they did well enough to intensify their spoiling role.
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And the idea of an existential crisis for the EU on that front is much harder to stand up now than it was circa 2015, whatever the surge of anti-establishment politics since then. Because, in Britain, someone who is nationalist in general will be anti-EU in particular, the Anglo-American intelligentsia tends to assume the same of Europeans. In fact, millions are able to decouple the two things.
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Apart from its co-authorship of the single market in the 1980s, Brexit stands out as the UK’s kindest service to the European project. (Both happened under the Tories, which will gall that party to a degree that no landslide election defeat ever could.) What a parting gift. And how true, on such different levels, when Brussels says: “You shouldn’t have.”
Editor: How might The Reader look to Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in Britain or :
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