At a
joint EU-US news-conference on 26 March 2014, Presidents Barroso, Van Rompuy,
and Obama discussed the problematic Russian invasion of the Crimea province of
Ukraine. The “chairman” of
the European Council and the “chief executive” of the European Commission both
responded to concerns that the European Union had not stood up to its business
interests in order to enact economic sanctions capable of putting Putin back in
his pen. Even though the two EU presidents sought to "puff up" the
force latent in the sanctions already in place, Barroso insightfully made the
more significant point that aggressively sending tanks across a border was no
longer tolerable. Perhaps from “lessons learned” from Hitler’s exploits in the
twentieth century, global challenges such as global warming (and, relatedly, the
species’ over-population), and an internet-enabled closer world in the
twenty-first century, a paradigm-shift in international relations may harken
some sorely needed progress in international relations (i.e., political
development) in the new millennium. The
key would be a stark refusal to tolerate a practice that had been tacitly accommodated,
even in opposition, just decades earlier.
The essay is at WR-International Relations: "New Rules: Invasions and Anti-Semitism in the Twenty-First Century"
