BRUSSELS (AP) — European military heavyweights Germany and Poland affirmed Tuesday that they would not be sending troops to Ukraine, after reports that some Western countries may be considering doing so as the war with Russia enters its third year.
The head of NATO also said the U.S.-led military alliance has no plans to send troops to Ukraine, after other central European leaders confirmed that they too would not be providing soldiers.
Novelists and filmmakers have long developed alternative histories of major conflicts that should serve as warnings for complacent Americans.
Are we unable to imagine defeat? You might have thought that, having so recently lost a small war, Americans would have no difficulty picturing the consequences of losing a large one. But the humiliating abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021 has been consigned with remarkable swiftness to the collective memory hole.
Presumably a similar process would occur if at some future date the Ukrainian army, starved of ammunition, were overrun by its Russian adversaries. A year ago, US President Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv and told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy: “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for as long as it takes.
PARIS (AP) — The governments of Poland, France and Germany vowed Monday to make Europe a security and defense power with a greater ability to back Ukraine, amid concerns that former U.S. President Donald Trump might return to the White House and allow Russia to expand its aggression on the continent.
The foreign ministers of the three countries met in the Paris suburb of La Celle-Saint-Cloud to have talks about Ukraine, amid other issues. They discussed reviving the so-called Weimar Triangle, a long dormant regional grouping that was designed to promote cooperation between France, Germany and Poland.
Epochal changes are taking place beyond our borders — including the U.S. potentially leaving NATO. But our politicians slumber on
The world appears to be drifting inexorably towards catastrophe but you wouldn’t know it from watching the House of Commons, where momentous global events are subordinated to the relative domestic trivia of car thefts and carbon taxes.
What will it take to rouse Canadian politicians from their torpor? How about the candidate who is odds on to be the next president of the United States indicating in a speech that he will give Vladimir Putin free rein in Europe, if he is elected?
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The head of the NATO military alliance warned Sunday that Donald Trump was putting the safety of U.S. troops and their allies at risk after the Republican presidential front-runner said Russia should be able to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who don’t meet their defense spending targets.
“Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S., and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement.
Mining firm Canada Nickel Co Inc. plans to develop a nickel processing plant in Ontario that would cost US$1 billion and be North America’s largest once completed.
The plant would have capacity to produce more than 80,000 tons of nickel annually, and should begin operations by the start of 2027, the Toronto-based miner said in a Thursday press release. The company also plans to build a stainless steel and alloy production plant to process nickel and chromium concentrate, which would cost an additional $2 billion, according to Chief Executive Officer Mark Selby.
Baker Hughes CEO says wars in Ukraine and Middle East threaten instability similar to 1973 oil embargo
Geopolitical risks are at their highest level in half a century, the head of one of the world’s biggest oilfield services companies has said, raising concerns about energy supplies and helping to fuel a boom in liquefied natural gas.
“From a historical context I’ve heard people say, you go back to the oil embargo of 1973 — that being somewhat similar,” said Lorenzo Simonelli, chief executive of Baker Hughes, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Macdonald Amoah is a researcher at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Gregory Wischer is principal at Dei Gratia Minerals, a critical minerals consultancy. Juliet Akamboe is a critical minerals demand researcher at the Colorado School of Mines. Morgan Bazilian is director of the Payne Institute and Professor of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.
Minerals have defined key periods in technological development for much of warfare’s history. The Stone Age featured mineral-tipped spears and arrows; the Bronze Age included swords and shields of bronze, a metal alloy of copper and tin; and in the Iron Age, iron replaced bronze in many weapons, making them both lighter and cheaper.
Since then, minerals have remained formative in changing human history—and warfighting. The cheap, mass production of iron was central to the First Industrial Revolution, while steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, was vital to the Second Industrial Revolution. Both periods contributed to the industrialization of war.
It could face wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Taiwan
When america provided Ukraine with weapons to resist Russia’s invasion in 2022, many people asked whether it would also have the means to deter a Chinese assault on Taiwan. That question is all the more relevant now that Israel, another ally, is at war with Hamas.
President Joe Biden has insisted that America will help its allies defend themselves, acting once again as the world’s “arsenal of democracy”, as President Franklin Roosevelt promised the country would be in 1940. Does Mr Biden have the weapons he needs to keep his word?
Global conflicts have a habit of sneaking up on money-managers
Europe had been moving towards the slaughterhouse for years, and by 1914 a conflict was all but inevitable—that, at least, is the argument often made in hindsight. Yet at the time, as Niall Ferguson, a historian, noted in a paper published in 2008, it did not feel that way to investors.
For them, the first world war came as a shock. Until the week before it erupted, prices in the bond, currency and money markets barely budged. Then all hell broke loose. “The City has seen in a flash the meaning of war,” wrote this newspaper on August 1st 1914.
Ukraine is known as one of Europe’s largest grain producers. But it also has valuable natural resources such as iron ore and coal that Russia is eager to exploit.
Dig into the earth near the Ukrainian city of Dniprorudne, and you will hit ore with an iron content of over 60%. Before the war, about 4.5 million tons of this high-quality iron ore were mined each year — with the lion’s share exported to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Austria.
Selling this strategically important resources earned Dniprorudne mines the equivalent of €200 million ($216 million) per year. One-third of the ore was made into steel at a plant to the west, in the city of Zaporizhzhia, and also exported.
At a China-France dialogue in Beijing last month, Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng expressed hope that France “will stabilise the tone of friendly cooperation” with the European Union. This comes as French President Emmanuel Macron tries to promote Europe’s strategic autonomy amid the great power contest between the US and China.
Beijing’s promise of increased economic cooperation suggests it wants help from Paris to repair its deteriorating ties with the EU. But the manoeuvre could fail if China crosses the line in two geopolitical chessboards that France considers strategic and are currently in the spotlight – francophone Africa and the South Pacific.
(Bloomberg) — The Pentagon plans to issue a first-time contract to US or Canadian companies by year-end to recover gallium, a mineral used in semiconductors and military radar systems, after China curbed exports this month.
China announced the restrictions on gallium and another mineral, germanium, in a move seen as part of the country’s tit-for-tat trade war on technology with the US and Europe. The two metals are crucial to the semiconductor, telecommunications and renewable energy industries. The curbs prompted US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to voice her concern during a recent visit to Beijing.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – Something unusual is happening inside the plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. PF-4, as it is known to top government officials, is the heart of America’s nuclear complex, a lab where scientists and engineers study and experiment on highly radioactive materials in tight secrecy. Recently, employees have discovered yellow plastic tents encasing equipment and rendering it inaccessible.
At Los Alamos, where even the cleaning crews and firefighters require high-level security clearances, you might think the tents are designed to restrict access to the latest wonder weapon or scientific breakthrough. The truth is more mundane—and more telling. “It’s part of our expansion plans,” Matthew Johnson, a senior lab manager, tells me during a rare tour of the fortified building. “All the old stuff is coming out.”
Recent moves to restrict their flow highlight a danger to the West
In 2014 tom price, a commodities strategist, visited a “funny little building” in China’s south-west. It was a warehouse where Fanya, a local trading firm, stored metals including gallium, germanium and indium. The company’s “stockpiles” simply sat in boxes on shelves.
Yet for some of the minerals, these meagre supplies represented the majority of global stocks. A year later Fanya was closed by China’s government, which kept the stash—as well as the reserves and plants to produce more.
