G7 summit: what for?

2015 G7 summit at Schloss Elmau, Germany. (Source: EC - Audiovisual Service, Pierre Teyssot © European Union 2015)

Next Thursday and Friday the leaders of the G7 (US, UK, France, Japan, Germany, Canada and Italy) will meet in Ise-Shima, Japan. But will this summit actually matter or is it just another archaic piece of an international system that is so often put in question these days? I will review both the official agenda and the underlying issues to try to make sense of the summit and its larger repercussions.

Europe, are you ready for prime time?

President Barack Obama meets with Eurozone leaders on the Laurel Cabin patio during the G8 Summit at Camp David, Maryland, May 19, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) Will the EU need to build a retreat in the outskirts of Brussels to convene informal summits with world powers?

The primary season for the 2016 presidential election in the United States is drawing to a close. And despite primaries in some states (such as California or New Mexico) are still a few weeks away, there is already a de facto candidate from the Republican Pary, Donald J. Trump.

In this article I won't discuss about the possibilities of a Trump White House versus either Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, some kind of trick from the Republican establishment (people like Paul Ryan, John Kasich or Mitt Rommey) to force a second vote in the National Convention (in which delegates' vote is free); or an eleventh-hour independent candidate. On the contrary, it is about the effects of a possible Trump administration for US leadership and the European Union.

This article isn't a thorough analysis about Trump's ideas on foreign policy either. Rather, I argue that at least during the first couple of years of a Trump administration, regardless of the actual policies he would pursue, the perception created about him internationally would have big enough an impact in the role the United States plays in the world which may leave the European Union as the actual "leader of the free world".

A small personal update

NATO Secretary General Javier Solana smiles during a press conference following the NATO 50th anniversary summit in Washington D.C., April 1999. It was his last summit as Secretary General (Official NATO photo).

Dear reader,

You could very well have thought that this project was already dead: it's been more than a month since I published the last post; I'm aware. Nevertheless, I have not given up on it, at least not yet. So, I would like to bring you up to speed on the reasons for such a delay.

Truth is, in the last month I've been involved in three different research projects: one on the new forms of understanding power in the 21st Century, one on the future of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (so badly needed these days), and one on the civil-military relations during the first Gulf war. Tight deadlines are making me use time and brain thrust previously devoted to the blog for these projects. Indeed, I have already finished one, and I'm currently halfway through the second. Therefore, I think I won't be able to publish new posts until mid-April. At least, hopefully two of the projects will be published, so that you will be able to read them in due time.

Be as it may, I'm not at all short of ideas for future posts, so that I'm truly looking forward to publishing again. Meanwhile, be sure to follow me on twitter and linkedin, where I do continue to post regularly.

See you very soon,

Enrique.

Ps. So that your read isn't in vain, I have attached what I find as a beautiful and somewhat nostalgic photo I found researching for the essay on the CSDP. It shows then-NATO SG Javier Solana, soon-to-be High Representative of the European Union, laughting during the press conference following the 1999 NATO Washington summit. It was a key summit for the transatlantic relationship because it was there that the alliance as such encouraged European countries to pursue the establishment of an "european pillar" within NATO, paving the way for the establishment of a common defence policy for the European Union.

Looking for a strategy to solve the refugee crisis?

Embed from Getty Images

For almost a year now, the European Union has been in shock over a constantly increasing flow of migrants and asylum-seekers arriving at Europe's shores. This should have surprised no one: there has been a bloody civil war in Syria for five years now, violence in Iraq dramatically worsened with the reappearance of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (turned ISIS) in late 2013, Libya had already started the downward spiral towards a second civil war in two years by that time... And I won't go into structural reasons.

Already in October 2013, after a tragic drowning near Lampedusa, Italy had to establish its own operation in the Mediterranean to rescue migrants coming mostly from Libya. Other European countries did not only reject any involvement in the operation, but some criticized it because of its alleged "pull factor effect". So, when the Italian government asked for burden-sharing one year later, Operation Mare Nostrum was replaced by Operation Triton, an under-resourced European operation that could only patrol up to 30 nautical miles from the coast due to its focus on border protection.

What this shows is that by mischaracterizing and underplaying the situation, European leaders were unable to deal with a developing disaster up to this point, when they openly admit that the end of the free movement of people, one of the four liberties that are the bedrock of the European project, may be "6-8 weeks away". 

So, it needs to be asked, how it is possible that the European Union, a project that could handle the disintegration of the Soviet Union or the reunification of Germany, can be on its knees due to a number of asylum seekers and migrants that, foreign observers admit, is not that big in relation to the EU's population of 500 million?