New World Order – Tony Blair Set To Become First President of EU

Recent convert to Catholicism, Tony Blair has emerged as the leading candidate to become the first permanent president of the European Union after Gordon Brown gave his grudging blessing to the plan. The former prime minister has stepped up his campaign for the job, which he wants to use to build a bridge between Europe and the new Obama administration.

His return to the global stage would be a shock to his critics over the Iraq war and dismay many in Europe.

But The Independent on Sunday has learnt that Mr Brown has accepted that his old rival should be in pole position for the appointment, on the basis that Britain needs to have a key figure in the architecture of the “new world order”.

A senior British official said: “He [Brown] will have to swallow hard to sit down in meetings once again with Blair. But he accepts that there needs to be someone from the UK in the new global architecture. There is no opposition to the plan. Things have moved on, people have moved on.”
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Russia Uses It’s Most Effective Weapon – Gas Monopoly

Cold War Redux is off to an early start this year. Gazprom, Russia’s state within a state natural gas monopoly, shut the taps to Ukraine this morning after talks broke down over 2009 delivery prices.

When Russia cut supplies to Ukraine two years ago in a similar pricing dispute, it caused tremendous consternation in European capitals. Western Europe depends heavily on energy supplies from Russia — and Ukraine is a key transit route for gas. Forget nukes. Russia has found that energy can be a much more effective weapon.

Bloomberg has an excellent roundup of the situation. The takeaway? “The repeat of an energy standoff between the former Soviet neighbors risks further souring Russia’s ties with the West, months after its war with U.S. ally Georgia,” the article notes.

Gleb Pavlovsky, Russia’s Karl Rove, blamed the Ukrainians for trying to start an “artificial crisis” that would worsen relations between Russia and the European Union. “Ukraine deliberately creates the crisis, blackmailing Russia,” he told Interfax.

Nonetheless, Russia is in a somewhat weaker position than it was two years ago. European supplies have diversified, and the once-mighty Gazprom is reeling from a drop in global energy prices.

via Wired.com.

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And Now For A One World Government

I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.

A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.

First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.

Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible.” Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.

But – the third point – a change in the political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.

Barack Obama, America’s president-in-waiting, does not share the Bush administration’s disdain for international agreements and treaties. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, he argued that: “When the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following.” The importance that Mr Obama attaches to the UN is shown by the fact that he has appointed Susan Rice, one of his closest aides, as America’s ambassador to the UN, and given her a seat in the cabinet.

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