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EU chief von der Leyen survives no-confidence vote

EU chief von der Leyen survives no-confidence vote

Al Arabiya2 days ago
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen attends a press conference with Spain's acting Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and European Council President Charles Michel on the day of the informal meeting of European heads of state or government, in Granada, Spain October 6, 2023. (File Photo: Reuters)
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Author: Georgios Varouxakis How did 'the West' come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did 'Westerners' begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by 19th-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in 'The West,' his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. 'The West' was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders. It gradually emerged as of the 1820s and was then, Varouxakis shows, decisively promoted in the 1840s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (whose political project, incidentally, was passionately anti-imperialist). The need for the use of the term 'the West' emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of 'Europe.' The two overlapped, but were not identical, with the West used to differentiate from certain 'others' within Europe as well as to include the Americas.

NATO needs more long-range missiles to deter Russia, US general says
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NATO needs more long-range missiles to deter Russia, US general says

BERLIN: NATO will need more long-range missiles in its arsenal to deter Russia from attacking Europe because Moscow is expected to increase production of long-range weapons, a US Army general told effective use of long-range missiles in its war in Ukraine has convinced Western military officials of their importance for destroying command posts, transportation hubs and missile launchers far behind enemy lines.'The Russian army is bigger today than it was when they started the war in Ukraine,' Major General John Rafferty said in an interview at a US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany.'And we know that they're going to continue to invest in long-range rockets and missiles and sophisticated air defenses. So more alliance capability is really, really important.'The war in Ukraine has underscored Europe's heavy dependence on the United States to provide long-range missiles, with Kyiv seeking to strengthen its air recently completed an assignment as commander of the US Army's 56th Artillery Command in the German town of Mainz-Kastel, which is preparing for temporary deployments of long-range US missiles on European soil from a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Monday, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is expected to try to clarify whether such deployments, agreed between Berlin and Washington when Joe Biden was president, will go ahead now that Donald Trump is back in the White agreement foresaw the deployment of systems including Tomahawk missiles with a range of 1,800 km and the developmental hypersonic weapon Dark Eagle with a range of around 3,000 has criticized the planned deployment of longer-range US missiles in Germany as a serious threat to its national security. It has dismissed NATO concerns that it could attack an alliance member and cited concerns about NATO expansion as one of its reasons for invading Ukraine in PLANSFabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at Oslo University who specializes in missiles, estimated that the US provides some 90 percent of NATO's long-range missile capabilities.'Long-range strike capabilities are crucial in modern warfare,' he said. 'You really, really don't want to be caught in a position like Ukraine (without such weapons) in the first year (of the war). That puts you at an immediate disadvantage.'Aware of this vulnerability, European countries in NATO have agreed to increase defense spending under pressure from European countries have their own long-range missiles but their number and range are limited. US missiles can strike targets at a distance of several thousand air-launched cruise missiles, such as the British Storm Shadow, the French Scalp and the German Taurus, have a range of several hundred km. France's sea-launched Missile de Croisiere Naval (MdCN) can travel more than 1,000 are all built by European arms maker MBDA which has branches in Britain, France, Germany and Germany, Italy, Poland, Britain and Sweden are now participating in a program to acquire long-range, ground-launched conventional missiles known as the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA).As part of the program, Britain and Germany announced in mid-May that they would start work on the development of a missile with a range of over 2,000 km.

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