France: Which are the world's most influential countries?

France has risen to the top of a list of the world’s most influential countries following the election of Emmanuel Macron.

It replaced the US in the number one position in the Soft Power Index complied by the University of Southern California and PR firm Portland Communications.

Soft Power is a term used to describe the influence of a country beyond traditional political or military strength. It includes aspects such as culture, education, economics and even sport.

The Soft Power Index uses polling in 25 countries as well as measures such as the number of Michelin-starred restaurants and levels of digital engagement to rank nations against each other.

The report’s authors noted that the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK, weighed on both country’s statuses.

Read more: Which are the world's most influential countries? | Euronews

EU: "US Losing Leadership in Solving International Problems" - says EU Foreign Minister Mogherini

The current situation is an “opportunity for the Europeans and the European Union to position itself as a strong, reliable, predictable partner to all our interlocutors in the world, being it on the big global issues where maybe Washington is losing leadership and where others around the world are looking for partners,” Mogherini, EU Foreign Relations VP Presiden,t said at the State of the Union Conference in Florence.

According to Mogherini, during her recent tour in Asia and Russia, she has repeatedly heard the same call for a closer cooperation with Brussels not only in trade and economy, but also on security issues, climate change and issues of foreign policy, such as Syria, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

“People want to work with the European Union in this moment not because they always like us, there are many things they don’t necessarily like from us, but [because] they know what to expect from us.

We are predictable, and in this moment of the geopolitical dynamic being predictable, and reliable, and strong like we are is quite an added value,” Mogherini explained.

Speaking on whether US President Donald Trump is an asset or a liability, Mogherini stressed that “the European way is not that of playing with predictability or unpredictability.”

As the New York Times noted: "For Europe there is a new threat in town:  the USA "

EU-Digest

EU must say no to participating in any further costly US military adventures : war=destruction=refugees=terrorism

EU It's high time to stop these disastrous wars

Previously completely opposed to any U.S. action against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Trump ordered a cruise-missile attack on a Syrian airfield—and then the next week criticized President Obama in a Fox Business interview for following the very advice that citizen Trump had pressed since 2013. Might the president yet reverse himself on the European Union too?

As new advisers replace the former Breitbart crew, President Trump might dial back the expression of hostility to the EU. European leaders can never again be certain, however, what might happen if those new advisers are in turn replaced. America has been immeasurably strengthened by its allies’ trust. Even as Trump’s aggressive words fade into reassuring conventionality, those allies will not soon forget their accumulated and well-grounded reasons for mistrust.

Within weeks of his inauguration, President Donald Trump had already wrought a strategic revolution in U.S. foreign policy. Russia, formerly an antagonist, has been promoted to preferred partner. In its place, Team Trump has identified a new enemy. With this enemy there can be no coexistence, no cooperation. It must be humbled and divided, not merely defeated but utterly overthrown. This enemy is the European Union.

Meanwhile, Trump has offered sharp personal comments on Chancellor Angela Merkel. One of his top advisers has called for Germany to flout the EU and negotiate bilaterally with the U.S. so as to reduce German trade surpluses. In a meeting with Merkel, Trump also called for direct negotiations, and suggested that Germany had outmaneuvered the U.S. On bad days, the U.S.–German relationship looks more strained than at any time since the end of the Cold War, including during the Iraq War. The Trump administration seems determined only to widen the breach.

Of course, it's easy to spot signs of disarray. Modern Europe is messy, and its institutions and policies are imperfect. Some of the threats facing the EU are real: slow growth and austerity, for instance, within the eurozone. Others, like rising right-wing nationalism and migration, are less so.

Yet amid all the hyperbole and hysteria, a basic point gets missed. Europe today is a genuine superpower and will likely remain one for decades to come. By most objective measures, it either rivals or surpasses the United States and China in its ability to project a full spectrum of global military, economic, and soft power. Europe consistently deploys military troops within and beyond its immediate neighborhood. It manipulates economic power with a skill and success unmatched by any other country or region. And its ability to employ "soft power" to persuade other countries to change their behavior is unique.

If a superpower is a political entity that can consistently project military, economic, and soft power transcontinentally with a reasonable chance of success, Europe surely qualifies. Its power, moreover, is likely to remain entrenched for at least another generation, regardless of the outcome of current European crises. In sum, Europe is the "invisible superpower" in contemporary world politics. Here's why.

Before turning to Europe's specific military, economic, and soft power assets, let's dismiss the nearly universal belief that Europe is too decentralized to act as a superpower. Europe is not a sovereign state. Yet in practice, it generally acts as a single force in world politics.

We ignore European unity at our peril. Most observers analyze Europe as 28 separate countries - even though doing so generates geopolitical nonsense. To see why, consider one recent example: Russia's foreign-policy options after its invasion of Ukraine triggered Western sanctions. Many predicted that China's rising economic weight meant the Kremlin would surely turn to Beijing.

In July 2015, leading newspapers across Eurasia ran the same story (originally from Agence France-Presse) reporting that "China has emerged as Russia's largest trading partner as Moscow turns east, seeking markets in Asia in the face of Western sanctions."

Treating Europe as disunited was geopolitically naive. Even though EU law imposes no legal obligation to implement sanctions, Europe acted - and paid more than 90 percent of the costs of the Western policy response to Russia. European power and unity are the glue that has held together this Western policy for the past two years. This despite all the nonsense the US Trump Administration has been declaring.

This is only one example of how, despite its fragmentation, Europe effectively projects power in those areas that count most for global influence. Certainly, European governments often disagree among themselves, sometimes vociferously and in public. Yet policy coordination, both formal and informal, permits European governments to act as a unit to influence the outside world.

Three modes of European coordination are critical: common EU policies, coordination, and tacit policy convergence.

For these reasons,the US should recognize Europe as a single superpower in projecting military, economic, or soft power - whether or not it acts formally as one.

As for the EU to avoid getting dragged into any more US failed military adventures, it is critical that all the EU participating nation,  as one unit, issue an ultimatum to the US, Russia and Syria to cease all military operations in the Middle East and immediately start bi-lateral negotiation  within a period of 90 days.

Bottom-line : war=destruction=refugees=terrorism. More military involvement will only increase these problems as they have always done.

EU-Digest

Changing how people think about Politics and Economics: THE MAN BEHIND AVAAZ

Ricken Patel

Avaaz is an online campaigning organization that’s halfway between an NGO and a megaphone. After only six years, it has 20m followers—more than the population of the Netherlands.

 Avaaz, which means "voice" or "song" in Persian, was set up with the overarching goal of closing the gap between "the world we have and the world most people everywhere want". From the outset it has been unashamedly idealistic and aspirational. Its executive director is Ricken Patel, and his ambition goes back half a lifetime.

When Patel was 18, he was on holiday in Mexico with his family, who live in Canada. One night he sat everyone down, very gravely, and told them he had an idea for making the world a better place. His insight was that most people in the world want pretty much the same thing and what they want is actually quite modest. He was going to mobilise global citizens to act together to achieve this. His family were taken aback, and Patel remembers his aunt making the first remark. "So, you want to be a do-gooder?"

The method he would eventually settle on was only just getting going then: e-mail. Millions of people know "Ricken" as the name at the bottom of the chatty e-mails they receive asking them to take some sort of action.

If they don’t take a simple action (clicking "send"), something bad is going to happen. Or if they click "send", something bad that is going on right now can be stopped. Either way, please do it quick.

Read more: THE MAN BEHIND AVAAZ | More Intelligent Life

US Foreign Policy and Europe: What Obama’s Foreign Policy Speech Means for Europe - by Judy Dempsey

One of the most important aspects of Obama’s speech was the retreat from hard power. As he told the class of 2014, “you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.” No wonder the young men and women applauded. 

Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be underestimated. Besides lasting over thirteen years and costing many thousands of casualties, these wars showed how the use of such hard power failed to achieve the desired outcome.

Iraq is mired in sectarianism, corruption, and insecurity. Those struggling for human rights and the rule of law in Afghanistan dread the day when the bulk of U.S. troops leave the country later this year. There are big question marks over the wisdom of the 2011 NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya given the turmoil in the country today. Above all—and this is very important for the Europeans—America’s war on terror clashed with America’s values.

Obama is now trying to repair the damage wreaked by the war on terror.

Since 9/11, successive U.S. administrations have run roughshod over human rights. Torture, targeted killings, and renditions were condoned. Detainees were not, and are still not, tried before the courts but instead are put before military tribunals—if their cases are processed at all. To this day, despite so many pleadings by human rights organizations and lawyers, those detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay are being force-fed.

Obama was right to say that he intended to close the Guantánamo detention camp. But he promised that when he was first elected president in 2008. In previous speeches, Obama has admitted that the war on terror, and especially Guantánamo, damaged America’s standing in the world. Indeed, the war on terror downgraded values, dignity, and basic decency to such a degree that many countries, particularly in the Middle East, came to despise the United States, which had so long espoused the values of freedom and tolerance.

European governments are not blameless either.

For far too long, most European leaders were relieved to have America do their dirty work. Yes, they condemned the existence of Guantánamo Bay, its appalling practices, and the disregard of the rule of law.

They also called for the camp to be closed. But how many European governments then helped Obama shut it down when he asked his allies to take some of the detainees? A mere handful.

Europeans were also relieved when, in 2011, U.S. special forces killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In short, for all the criticism of Obama’s policies, more often than not Europeans were prepared to support them.

Yet when Obama decided not to intervene in Syria, despite the many thousands of civilian deaths there, European governments went along with that too. They were neither politically nor militarily prepared to act without the United States. With few exceptions, European leaders have also been mute over how the values that defined the transatlantic relationship have become eroded.

Of course, the United States is not going to abandon hard power or its leadership in the world.

Yet behind these words is a retreat to a special kind of soft power. Obama wants to establish new counterterrorism partnership fund designed to train and “facilitate partner countries on the front lines.” He intends to work with European allies “to train a functioning security force and border patrol in Libya and [support] French operations in Mali.” There was very little mention of the role of NATO.

Obama also justified Washington’s soft power policy toward Ukraine, saying U.S. sanctions on Russia proved that such kind of pressure was effective. But for all that, it is hard to see Russian President Vladimir Putin and authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and elsewhere shaking in their boots over Obama’s doctrine.
European leaders should not feel vindicated by Obama’s speech.

They have been wobbly over Russia and inconsistent over defending their values. If anything, they should realize that the United States is no longer going to do the running for the Europeans. Since that is the case, what about the Europeans replying to Obama with their own foreign and security policy doctrine?

Read more: What Obama’s Foreign Policy Speech Means for Europe - Carnegie Europe

Latin America: Is U.S. influence waning? - by Patrick Duddy and Frank O. Mora

Is U.S. influence in Latin America on the wane? It depends how you look at it.

As President Obama travels to Mexico and Costa Rica, it’s likely the pundits will once again underscore what some perceive to be the eroding influence of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Some will point to the decline in foreign aid or the absence of an overarching policy with an inspiring moniker like “Alliance for Progress” or “Enterprise Area of the Americas” as evidence that the United States is failing to embrace the opportunities of a region that is more important to this country than ever.

The reality is a lot more complicated. Forty-two percent of all U.S. exports flow to the Western Hemisphere. In many ways, U.S. engagement in the Americas is more pervasive than ever, even if more diffused. That is in part because the peoples of the Western Hemisphere are not waiting for governments to choreograph their interactions.

A more-nuanced assessment inevitably will highlight the complex, multidimensional ties between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere. In fact, it may be that we need to change the way we think and talk about the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. We also need to resist the temptation to embrace overly reductive yardsticks for judging our standing in the hemisphere.

As Moises Naim notes in his recent book, The End of Power, there has been an important change in power distribution in the world away from states toward an expanding and increasingly mobile set of actors that are dramatically shaping the nature and scope of global relationships. In Latin America, many of the most substantive and dynamic forms of engagement are occurring in a web of cross-national relationships involving small and large companies, people-to-people contact through student exchanges and social media, travel and migration.

Trade and investment remain the most enduring and measurable dimensions of U.S. relations with the region. It is certainly the case that our economic interests alone would justify more U.S. attention to the region. Many observers who worry about declining U.S. influence in this area point to the rise of trade with China and the presence of European companies and investors.

While it is true that other countries are important to the economies of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is also still true that the United States is by far the largest and most important economic partner of the region and trade is growing even with those countries with which we do not have free trade agreements.

From 2006-2011 U.S. non-government organizations, such as churches, think tanks and universities increased the number of partnerships with their regional cohorts by a factor of four. Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean from the United States totaled $64 billion in 2012. Particularly for the smaller economies of Central America and the Caribbean these flows can sometimes constitute more than 10 percent of gross domestic product.

Finally, one should not underestimate the resiliency of U.S. soft power in the region. The power of national reputation, popular culture,values and institutions continues to contribute to U.S. influence in ways that are difficult to measure and impossible to quantify. Example: Despite 14 years of strident anti-American rhetoric during the Chávez government, tens of thousand of Venezuelans apply for U.S. nonimmigrant visas every year, including many thousands of Chávez loyalists.

Read more: Miami Herald

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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/01/3375160/latin-america-is-us-influence.html#storylink=cpyRead more: Latin America: Is U.S. influence waning? - Other Views - MiamiHerald.com