EDITORIAL

The European “union” these days is in the roughest tumble of its short history.

Busy with devastating Greece via the German-inspired, Troika-implemented, bankrupt “solution” of brutal austerity and tax genocide, the “union” fools itself believing that it is, indeed, trying to find the formula that would lead to an exit from the current European existential crisis.

The European mess is such that the White House, alarmed over the possibility of another global economic crash triggered by a Greek default, sent Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to pay an unprecedented visit to a meeting of his European counterparts in Poland.

After a lull of a couple of months, Greece is again in the sights of the northern (or German) EU bloc, with Greece’s “saviors” throwing out open threats of cutting bailout aid immediately if the Papandreou regime does not act instantly to further strangle the Greek economy into extinction as agreed so many times before.

Responding to the brutal arm twisting, Papandreou, and his breathless cabinet of yes men and women, announced that a series of “rationalization” measures, already legislated, will take effect immediately with the effect of stirring up a storm of protest from every corner of an exhausted and moribund society. (If you haven’t noticed, by the way, this Greek society has been bled white by nearly two years of Troika-induced aimless, diseased austerity, designed exclusively to buy time for creditors, which has driven the economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s with no signs of abating.)  

Alexis Giannoulis
(RIEAS Research Associate & Security Analyst)

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

The definition of National Security is changing. The latter years have seen a rise in multidimensional threats to states and population including both man-made (e.g. terrorism) as well as natural hazards with the two sometimes interacting (shortage of a particular natural resource creating violence or terrorist activity or indeed foreign intervention).

Likewise, unemployment is the source of a series of social and, in extension, political problems a country, any country can face. In addition, unemployment is in itself an indicator of several possible malfunctions and wrongdoings as far as public policy or the very structure of a society and an economy are concerned. Whereas high unemployment rates in parts of Africa, Asia and Central and South America have been so far the norm with relatively high rates of criminal activity and state failure, the recent financial and consequentially social crises in both North America as well as Europe provide an interesting and challenging paradigm of the correlation of unemployment and an increase in the risks to National Security.

By Joseph Lerner
(Political Analyst)

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

After the recent Cyberattacks that have targeted the Lockheed Martin, Google, Sony, Nintendo's database, and the US Government and Military Websites and Canadian government’s Websites the reality of how the modern wars are fought is changed.

NATO has been dragged into a new battlefield that it was aware of, but hardly imagined that such an era would arrive so soon. Here and now, there are urgent needs to adopt a new paradigm when developing our new strategies and tactics as NATO allies, when it comes to the future of Modern Warfare that its main battlefield is the Cyberspace.

Ioannis Kolovos

(RIEAS research associate on the issue of illegal immigration and editor of the “RIEAS Newsletter on Immigration to Greece”)

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

The economic crisis is the most prominent issue facing the EU these days. But there is also another issue – a silently emerging one – that may have even more serious repercussions for the EU’s future than the economic crisis. If the mishandling of the issue of immigration - both legal and illegal – continues, it may well threaten the existence of the EU as we know it. Recently, the pressure is mounting on a basic pillar of the EU: the Schengen Agreement.