Headlines:
- European Union Struggles with Coronavirus Crisis
- US and Iran Conspire to Impose Government in Iraq
- American wants South Korea to pay more for Western Imperialism
European Union Struggles with Coronavirus Crisis
According to the New York Times:
The European Union is ill suited for crisis. Its 27 members are happy to feed at the common trough in sunny times, but storms tend to turn them into squabbling rivals. The financial collapse of 2008 and the following refugee crisis are memorable for their bitter recriminations and disunity. It’s all happening again over Covid-19, this time amplified by fear and death on a continent struggling with half of the world’s 1.4 million confirmed cases.
Borders are being thrown back up. Italy and Spain, Europe’s hardest-hit countries, facing economic collapse on a grand scale, accuse the prosperous north of being deaf to their cries for help. The north sees itself once more called on to bail out a profligate south. Hungary sheds a few more vestiges of its democracy. China and Russia, quick to seize on an opportunity to demonstrate the fickleness of democracy, bring in medical supplies that the European Union is purportedly failing to share. This week, the head of the union’s top scientific research body, Mauro Ferrari, quit after just three months on the job in a storm of mutual recriminations.
As in crises past, old enmities surfaced. A group of Italian politicians bought an ad in a German paper to remind the Germans that they were not compelled to pay off their debts after World War II. And once again, a chorus of commentators questioned whether the union can survive.
Once again the failed nation-state concept becomes apparent. Europe will never unify until it rejects the idea of fixed borders and merges all its territories into a singular state.
Islam rejects the idea of territorially fixed borders and works for the unity of humankind under a single government, beginning with the unification of Muslim lands from which the call for Islam is carried to the rest of the world.
US and Iran Conspire to Impose Government in Iraq
Quite contrary to media portrayal, the US and Iran have regularly worked together to address regional issues, with Iran greatly facilitating American plans these past decades. It was the US that encouraged Iran to extend into Iraq and Syria to support American-backed regimes there. Now, even with tensions over American instance on Iranian withdrawal, the US and Iran are still coordinating their affairs, such as over the government in Iraq. According to the Washington Post:
As the United States and Iran wage a shadow war across the Middle East, Iraq has become their most volatile battlefield. Officials and experts predict that Kadhimi, a backroom operator with a reputation for juggling alliances in Washington, Tehran and the wider region, is likely to overcome the hurdles that felled two candidates before him, in large part because he has the rare distinction of being acceptable to both the United States and Iran.
“He has been able to walk this really fine line between Washington and Tehran,” said Randa Slim, director of the Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “He might not be Tehran’s number one choice, but he is an acceptable choice for Tehran.”
In adopting the nation-state model, Iran has built a foreign policy based on Iranian national interests, defined in worldly terms, just as have the Western Capitalist states, instead of building its foreign policy on Islam. Even though Islam has prioritised politics and diplomacy above military action, Islam builds its foreign policy on safeguarding Islam and the Muslim Ummah and not merely materialist state interests. The Muslim Ummah shall never be rid of the machinations of the foreign disbelieving imperialist until they re-establish the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet ﷺ.
American wants South Korea to pay more for Western Imperialism
It is not enough that South Korea must host American troops for almost three quarters of a century. America also wants countries like South Korea to pay the cost of this American presence. According to Reuters:
When U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper rang his South Korean counterpart this week, he pressed for a deal quickly on defense cost-sharing that President Donald Trump expects will translate into much higher contributions from Seoul…
Some 28,500 American troops are deployed to South Korea, in what is seen as a deterrent to Pyongyang that also sends a message to China about U.S. influence and capability in Asia.
Trump’s view that wealthy South Korea, which has an economy larger than Australia’s, is taking advantage of the United States is increasingly being met in Seoul by a perception that Washington has become a transactional partner with unreasonable demands.
“The current gridlock is there because they made excessive demands in the first place,” said one South Korean official with knowledge of the talks.
Trump’s decision to reject the South Korean offer came last week after consultations with Esper and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, officials say. It followed months of intense negotiations that saw South Korea eventually propose to pay more money than ever before as part of a new Special Measures Agreement (SMA).
But Seoul’s proposed increase was far below even the substantially lowered expectations of the Trump administration, who had initially sought an exponential increase to as much $5 billion from the roughly $900 million South Korea agreed to in the last one-year, cost-sharing agreement.
“That’s not a small amount of money even if we did offer a 13 percent hike,” the South Korean official said, adding that while it fell short of the $5 billion floated by the United States, “to us, that was a non-starter in the first place.”
It is always the world’s leading state that determines the global order. But the West’s adoption of secular liberal Capitalist ideology has meant that Western states exclusively work for their own interests alone whatever the consequences for the rest of humanity. With Allah’s permission, the Muslim Ummah shall soon re-establish the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet ﷺ that shall not only safeguard the interests of the Muslim Ummah but also take care of the affairs of all humanity.