Canada will have to contribute more to NATO if the U.S. follows through on president-elect Donald Trump’s musings on withdrawing from the alliance, says the head of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.
Liberal MP Bob Nault cautions that Canada and its NATO partners need to see how U.S. foreign policy formally takes shape after Trump’s Friday inauguration.
But he says Canada remains committed to the 28-country alliance and can’t let it become weakened if the U.S. — its largest financial and military contributor — scales back its involvement.
“That means countries like ours will have to step up to the plate,” Nault said in an interview Monday.
Nault said the upcoming defence policy review will help Canada decide where and how it should deploy its military resources. With a federal budget coming this winter that could mean an increase in defence spending, he added.
The Turkish government is seeking to revive GUAM in order to form an alliance of states against Russia broader than the pan-Turkic groupings it had promoted in the past, Aleksey Fenenko says; but he adds that Ankara faces real difficulties in doing so and that Moscow has the means to block any such geopolitical effort.
In today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” the instructor on world politics at Moscow State University says that “Turkish diplomacy is trying to revive a block like GU(U)AM” consisting of “countries which have difficulties with Russia” and which thus could help Ankara in its conflict with Moscow (ng.ru/cis/2016-02-26/3_kartblansh.html).
GUAM was formed by Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Uzbekistan later joined and left the organization: hence, its acronym. Like Latvia, Turkey already has observer status in the group and like its members it wants to make the organization into “an alternative” to the Moscow-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The idea of creating such a grouping of states arose in the mid-1990s. In June 1996, Moldova and Georgia issued a joint statement. And in October 1997, they were joined by Azerbaijan and Ukraine in calling for a system of mutual consultations in order to “’counter Russian hegemony.’” That became GUAM at a meeting in Yalta on July 7, 2001.
But despite the aspirations of its organizers, the group has not become a truly effective grouping of states, Fenenko says. They are divided on many issues, and Uzbekistan has pointed to its dissolution by leaving as a result of differences with the others over relations with the United States.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper wanted to pull Canada out of one of Europe's leading security organization four years ago, but U.S. President Barack Obama helped convince him to stay, according to three European ambassadors.
The ambassadors described on Monday what happened in 2012, when Harper suggested Canada would withdraw from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a 57-country alliance that includes NATO and European Union countries.
The diplomats said Harper believed the organization was no longer relevant because Europe was mainly peaceful, a view that was widely shared at the time. The outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine would later change that.
Their account flies in the face of a heated denial issued by former foreign affairs minister John Baird in April, 2013 during testimony before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee.
Baird was confronted by New Democrat MP Helene Laverdiere who said she was "flabbergasted" to hear that Canada wanted to withdraw from the organization.
The western nation that shares the longest border with Russia is building up its military arsenal, just in case.
Having already moved as close as politically possible to NATO, Finland now wants to spend more on its own war ships, fighter planes and army personnel. Defense Minister Jussi Niinisto says his government has little choice under the circumstances.
“The crisis in Ukraine and increased global tensions have led Finnish policy makers to think that we must take care of our own defenses," Niinisto said in an interview in his office in Helsinki this week.
A lawmaker for the Finns Party -- the nationalist junior partner in Prime Minister Juha Sipila’s ruling coalition -- Niinisto has already pushed through Finland’s first increase in military spending in three years. That followed repeated incursions by Russian fighter planes into Finnish airspace in the aftermath of President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
The added cost of beefing up Finland’s military is putting pressure on an economy that has contracted for the past three years and that was stripped of its top credit grade at Standard & Poor’s in October 2014.
“Even though Finland is going through hard times, defense and internal security are the only sectors that will get more funding,” Niinisto said.
According to the Finnish Defense Ministry, spending is set to rise 9 percent next year to 2.89 billion euros ($3.1 billion), equivalent to 1.4 percent of gross domestic product. The government has agreed to raise the defense budget by 150 million euros from its current level by 2020.
he Turkmen arrived in what's now Syria centuries ago, as various different Turkic empires — first the Seljuks, then the Ottomans — encouraged Turkish migration into the territory to counterbalance the local Arab majority. Under Bashar al-Assad's rule, the mostly Sunni Muslim Turkmen in Syria were an oppressed minority, denied even the right to teach their own children in their own language (a Turkish dialect).
However, the Turkmen didn't immediately join the anti-Assad uprising in 2011. Instead, they were goaded into it by both sides. Assad persecuted them, treating them as a potential conduit for Turkish involvement in the Syrian civil war. Turkey, a longtime enemy of Assad, encouraged the Turkmen to oppose him with force. Pushed in the same direction by two major powers, the Turkmen officially joined the armed opposition in 2012.
Since then, they've gotten deeply involved in the civil war, receiving significant amounts of military aid from Ankara. Their location has brought them into conflict with the Assad regime, ISIS, and even the Western-backed Kurdish rebels (whom Turkey sees as a threat given its longstanding struggle with its own Kurdish population). Today, the Syrian Turkmen Brigades — the dominant Turkmen military faction — boast as many as 10,000 fighters, per the BBC, though the real number could be much lower.
The Turkmen role in the conflict has put them directly in Russia's crosshairs. The Russians, contrary to their stated goal of fighting ISIS, have directed most of their military efforts to helping Assad's forces fight rebels. The Turkmen have clashed repeatedly with Assad and his allies in the north — which led to Russian planes targeting Turkmen militants last week.
Turkey was not happy, and called in the Russian ambassador to register its disapproval. "It was stressed that the Russian side's actions were not a fight against terror, but they bombed civilian Turkmen villages and this could lead to serious consequences," the Turkish foreign ministry said in a description of the meeting provided to Reuters.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootdancing_serpent