All posts tagged: Summits

NATO Mulls Nixing Annual Summits, Wary Of ‘Trump Drama’ Overshadowing

NATO Mulls Nixing Annual Summits, Wary Of ‘Trump Drama’ Overshadowing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Fresh reporting in Reuters says that NATO leadership is mulling ending its practice of holding annual summits as the Trump presidency has “cast a long shadow” over such meetings and as member states are looking for “less drama”. For example, at the 2018 summit Trump threatened to walk ⁠out after bitterly complaining over allies’ low defense spending. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general at the time, wrote in a recently published memoir, “Had he made good on his threat to leave ​in protest, we would have been left to pick up the pieces of a shattered NATO.” via Associated Press Also, in 2019 he exited summit early while lambasting then-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “two-faced” after Trudeau was caught on a hot mike blasting Trump’s behavior. One report recalls of the scene: Footage emerged late on Tuesday that appears to show world leaders joking about Trump at the summit, which has been marked by sharp disagreements over spending and future threats, including Turkey’s role in the alliance and China, as well as a clash of personalities that triggered …

Tusk says no ‘surprise’ Hungary leaks to Moscow from EU summits – POLITICO

Tusk says no ‘surprise’ Hungary leaks to Moscow from EU summits – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Szijjártó denied the claims in a post on X on Sunday, calling it “fake news.” Szijjártó was responding to a X post by Poland’s Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski that referenced the Washington Post claim. “This would explain a lot, Peter. @FM_Szijjarto,” Sikorski wrote. “Fake news as always,” Szijjártó responded to Sikorski. “You are telling lies in order to support Tisza Party to have a pro-war puppet government in Hungary. You will not have it!” The Post’s story also said that Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) had proposed staging an assassination attempt against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to boost plummeting public support ahead of next month’s parliamentary election in that country. It cited an “an internal report for the SVR obtained and authenticated by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.” Orbán goes head to head in the polls next month with conservative opposition leader Péter Magyar, for the Tisza Party, who has emerged as a serious challenger. Szijjártó extended his defense against the allegations in a post …

What May We Hope for After Thirty Years of Failed Climate Summits?

What May We Hope for After Thirty Years of Failed Climate Summits?

Published by Jenni Sidey

In his 1795 essay Towards Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant prophesied that the “spirit of commerce” would drive countries to unite in perpetual peace, not driven by morality, but profit. Since trade is incompatible with war, Kant thought, our self-interested nature would lead us to form a rule-based world-order. Two-hundred years later, globalization coincided with the development of the United Nations, the European Union, international human rights law, and other international institutions and treaties, from the World Health Organization to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. For many readers of Kant, at the end of the twentieth-century, human history seemed to be approaching its end, like a flower preparing to blossom after a cold winter. This spirit of commerce now risks destroying the very same world-order it promised. Global trade and the Scientific Revolution, with the “slight help” of colonization, served to rapidly industrialize the Global North. Humanity would soon discover that fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas—could multiply its economic productivity. In the process, we released tons of gases into the atmosphere, cranking …