The Underappreciated Risks of Catastrophic Escalation

The vision of Europe’s future which the Republic of Srpska perceives as the one that best serves the long term interests of different European people is one that affirms sovereignty, patriotism and neutrality – a Europe of its people that is truly democratic

The debate on the Balkans has been dominated for far too long by Western diplomats and academics who deny what is obvious to almost everyone on the ground: that multiethnicity in the region is a beautiful idea and a miserable reality

The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.

A Nato membership action plan – straight from the war room of Dr Strangelove – is General Breedlove's gift to the new dictatorship in Ukraine. "Rapid Trident" will put US troops on Ukraine's Russian border and "Sea Breeze" will put US warships within sight of Russian ports.

Western policy is navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. Aligning with the Russians to prop up Assad would be both unconscionable and futile. Invading Syria would reproduce the folly of Iraq.

Nabucco West would have delivered non-Russian Caspian natural gas to Central and Southern European countries that have been looking for a way to circumvent Russia, which they believe was bullying them with its energy resources.

Could it be the case that nowadays we are facing, broadcast live, the opening for a new grammar for thinking and acting politically? Could rebellion, resistance and protest be no longer considered as the bitter spice of the institutional designs and state politics?

Will Assange be a replay of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty who on November 4, 1956, sought asylum in the US embassy in Budapest as Soviet tanks poured into Hungary to put down the anti-communist revolution? Cardinal Mindszenty lived for 15 years in the US embassy. Today it is “freedom and democracy” amerika that is copying Soviet practices during the cold war.

It was increasingly difficult to dispel the sense that Germans harbored, and continue to harbor, a good deal of Schadenfreude about the plight of the Greeks. The suddenly unhappy southerners, so the German thinking went, were being punished for their previous hedonism.