Colombia is first Latin American nation to join Nato as 'global partner'

One year after reaching partnership deal through a peace agreement with South America, Colombia on Friday (local time) has formally joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

As reported by the Deutsche Welle, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced the formalising of its global partner status.

"We will formalize in Brussels next week - and this is very important - Colombia's entry into NATO in the category of the global partner. We will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege," Santos said in a televised address.

Colombia joined the ranks of Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand and Pakistan.

The announcement was made on the same day that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said that Colombia would be officially invited to join the group.

Americans are murderers: Massive protest in Athens against Syria airstrikes

Thousands of Greeks turned up at a rally and march in central Athens organised by the Communist Party to protest the US-led airstrikes against Syria.

The protesters gathered Saturday at Athens' central Syntagma Square before marching to the US Embassy, chanting anti-US slogans and carrying banners.

Some wrote on the pavement in red paint: "Americans, murderers of people."

Police vehicles barricaded access to the embassy and protesters left peacefully.

Dimitris Koutsoumbas, the Communist Party's leader, blasted Greek politicians for believing "flimsy excuses about a use of chemical weapons" by Syria.

He also criticized their "subservience" to the EU and NATO, as well as their support for Israel.

He told the crowd "the imperialists once again spill the blood of the local people. They destroy and splinter states by using fabricated evidence.

Russia 'could cut UK's undersea internet cables', warns defence chief

The head of Britain's military says Russia could try to sever undersea communications cables, and protecting them is a defense priority for NATO.

Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach says cutting or disrupting the cables could have a "potentially catastrophic" economic effect.

Peach told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute that "along with our Atlantic allies, we have prioritised missions and tasks to protect the sea lines of communication."

In yesterday's speech, Peach said that Russia "in addition to new ships and submarines continues to perfect both unconventional capabilities and information warfare." He said NATO is working "to match and understand Russian fleet modernization."

Earlier this month the Policy Exchange think-tank highlighted how Russia had "easily" severed all digital communications to Crimea during its 2014 invasion of the Black Sea peninsula.
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The dangerous trend threatening the future of the nation-state

When the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published his bestseller The Disuniting of America in 1991, he didn’t seriously entertain the worst-case scenario suggested by the title. At the time, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were imploding, while separatist movements in Quebec, East Timor, Spain’s Basque country, and elsewhere were already clamouring for their own states.

But when it came to the United States, Schlesinger’s worries were principally focused on the far smaller battlefield of the American classroom and what he saw as multiculturalism’s threat to the mythic “melting pot.” Although he took those teacup tempests seriously, the worst future Schlesinger could imagine was what he called the “tribalization of American life.” He didn’t contemplate the actual dismemberment of the country.

Today, controversies over hate speech and gender politics continue to roil American campuses. These, however, are probably the least important conflicts in the country right now, considering the almost daily evidence of disintegrative pressures of every sort: demonstrations by white supremacists, mass shootings and police killings, the current dismantling of the federal government. Not to speak of the way cities and states are defying Washington’s dictates on immigration, the environment, and health care. The nation’s motto of e pluribus unum — out of many, one —is in serious danger of being turned inside out.

A country that hasn’t had a civil war in more than 150 years, where secessionist movements from Texas to Vermont have generally caused merriment rather than concern, now faces divisions so serious and a civilian arsenal of weapons so huge, that the possibility of national disintegration has become part of mainstream conversation. Indeed, after the 2016 elections, predicting a second civil war in the United States — a real, bloody, no-holds-barred military conflict — has become all the rage among journalists, historians, and foreign policy pundits across the political spectrum.
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Donald Trump pledges commitment to NATO's mutual defence pact

US President Donald Trump publicly endorsed NATO's one-for-all-and-all-for-one mutual defence pact during a keynote speech in Warsaw today, seeking to ease allies' concerns that the US safety net had frayed.

"The United States has demonstrated not merely with words, but with it actions, that we stand firmly behind Article Five," Trump said, referring to the mutual defence commitment.

But he said that more defence spending was needed on the eastern side of the Atlantic, "for its own protection, and you know this. Everybody knows this. Everybody has to know this. Europe must do more.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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As US influence wanes, Germany has the chance to step into the spotlight

Despite such efforts to reassure allies, concerns remain that the US has taken an isolationist turn. The Trump administration has failed to fill numerous international positions, proposed cuts to the State Department’s budget and seen several members of its diplomatic corps resign.

On May 28, German Chancellor Angela Merkel plainly expressed her view that America is no longer a reliable international partner. In a noteworthy speech in Munich, she recast Trump’s “America first” doctrine in a European light, saying that “we Europeans really must take our fate into our own hands”.

Germany in the lead?
Though it’s likely a temporary vacuum, American withdrawal from the international stage may present an opportunity for countries to play a larger global role, defending the liberal world order while the United States is on a break. Merkel’s pointed response to Trump’s wavering signals on NATO and the Paris accord suggests that Germany may be among them.

But it seems unlikely that even a large and economically strong European country will be able to wield international influence across the many areas the US has traditionally dominated. To become a truly global player, Germany would likely need to leverage the power of a supra-national platform such as the European Union.
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Worldwide effort set to keep Donald Trump happy on 1st trip abroad

When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia, caterers have ensured that his favorite meal - steak with a side of ketchup - will be offered alongside the traditional local cuisine.

At Nato and the Group of 7 summits, foreign delegations have gotten word that the new US president prefers short presentations and lots of visual aids.

And at all of Trump's five stops on his first overseas trip, his team has spent weeks trying to build daily downtime into his otherwise jam-packed schedule.

It's all part of a worldwide effort to accommodate America's homebody president on a voyage with increasingly raised stakes given the ballooning controversy involving his campaign's possible ties to Russia. For a former international businessman, Trump simply doesn't have an affinity for much international.

Even before Trump's trip morphed from a quick jaunt to Europe into a nine-day behemoth, White House aides were on edge about how the president would take to grueling pressures of foreign travel: the time zone changes, the unfamiliar hotels, the local delicacies.

Two officials said they feared that a difficult trip might even lead the president to hand off future traveling duties to Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump's final itinerary hardly eases him into the delicate world of international diplomacy on foreign soil. After departing Friday on an overnight flight on Air Force One, Trump will hopscotch from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican. He'll close his trip with a pair of summits in Brussels and Sicily, often-staid affairs that require leaders to be locked in lengthy plenary sessions.

"The chance of something going wrong - you insult the hosts, you get sick, your boss gets sick, you miscommunicate with your hosts, you make a scheduling error, you need to change the schedule just hours before a meeting, the motorcade get stuck in traffic, or the plane is stranded due to bad weather - is extremely high," said Julianne Smith, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. "Personally, I think they should cut it back now before they regret it," she said of Trump's long jaunt.
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