The EU: One Stop Shop for Bad Ideas

Thanks to Gawain Towler, evil genius, who was more patient to read the story on this pedantic event, we get to meet the world’s stupidest political observation.

The US sent soldiers to Europe to fight the forces of Nazism, noted the Bulgarian official.

"But like 1941, we aspire for Asian leadership in global affairs. With wealth comes global responsibility. That would earn the place in history of the 'Asian Century'."

If anyone should understand the “light-tough” humanism of unelected, ham-fisted Communist states, it would be a Bulgarian. So if you want put over the sense that you want China to start doing a little of the rich man’s burden, such as peacekeeping, real disaster relief, and the like, it’s probably not wise to deploy their troops in EUtopia.

However that wasn’t the high-point of the Brussels Bowling for global luuuurve event:

EU commissioner for international cooperation Kristalina Georgieva said granting the EU a seat at the East Asia Summit would be an important first step towards improving interregional communication.

Europe has been lobbying hard on this issue after the US and Russia recently gained special representation at the summit meetings, among the the world's largest multilateral events.

The leaders of India, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Australia regularly meet at the forum, but "the story of EU involvement, unfortunately, is a sad one," Jonas Parello-Plesner wrote in research note for the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank last October.

Might this not have something to do with the fact that they don’t attend for the same reason they don’t attend the ASEAN summits? Like, say, not having a coast on the Pacific?

The East Asia Summit (EAS) is a forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political and economic issues of common interest and concern with the aim of promoting peace, stability and economic prosperity in East Asia.

Do they think that they have anything to contribute to the issues discussed there?

I think it’s far simpler. As a needy geopolitical pygmy, Europe needs to try to insert itself between chairs anywhere it can, just to keep from being ignored altogether. So they have to muscle in on any diplomatic event that they can, because a meaningful dose of all of that hardcore balance-of-power, peacemaking, and disaster relief stuff makes them break out in hives and get nosebleeds. What they can do is talk, so long as everyone agrees with their position to begin with, ignores them politely, or the stakes are meaningless, pointless, implausible, or fake to begin with.

i.e.:

Georgieva's officials have recently returned from North Korea, one area where Europeans would like to see China exert its considerable leverage, amid reports of malnutrition due to failed economic policies.

If that isn’t a surprising, controversial statement, I don’t know what is, by gum. It’s only parroting what the US has been telling the Chinese for a little over a decade.