EDITORIAL

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 25 May 2016

President Putin's official visit to Greece, his fourth since 2001, comes part when Russia is again painted in the West as the Big Bear threatening global peace and stability. The lessons of the Cold War forgotten, Western capitals, struggling with their own increasing domestic problems, are sending out clarion calls for "unity" and "preparedness" in the face of a purported neo-Soviet threat. Tension has replaced the tentative cooperative climate that had emerged in recent years. In January 2016, the Russian president stated that NATO is a threat to his country's national security and decried what he termed a US return to "the policy of containment." ..Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr)
Publication date: 19/05/2016

Boris Johnson, the former two-term Tory mayor of London, is a man with strong convictions, his admirers insist. Johnson is also fond of not pulling his punches, especially now that he has put himself at the head of the Brexit campaign. Witness his recent comparison between the European dis-Union's endeavors to force more integration upon its members with what Adolf Hitler attempted to do in shaping his Nazi empire through war, conquest, and the extermination of "inferior peoples." ...Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 15 May 2016

Sadiq Khan, a Pakistani Moslem of humble origins, has been elected mayor of London succeeding the flamboyant, and often entertainingly irrelevant, conservative firebrand Boris Johnson (who has found his next calling in urging the British to vote for exit from the European dis-Union).

As soon as the verdict emerged, Khan sped, unsurprisingly, to define himself as a "European" and "English," two claims that predictably raised brows, not to say loud laughs, among many conservatives who are not "multiculturalists" and "integrationists." ..Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) – Publication date: 8 May 2016

The disgraceful fracas over the European Commission's proposal to grant visa-free travel to75 million Turks inside the Schengen area proves beyond any doubt the real worth of our European «leaders» beginning with no other than Germany's Frau Merkel.

With the European dis-Union on the verge of a ignominious retreat, no rational pundit -- or bookmaker for that matter -- would put the collective value of our present European «leadership group» above a few petty euro cents. The entire European mandarinate, led by the German chancellor, has simply cowered in the face of Turkey's government, the Islamist president Erdogan, threatening to unleash millions of unwanted Moslem illegal immigrants upon Europe unless Europe's «leaders» kowtow to Turkish demands. Subverted by the Four Ms -- Merkel's Moslems & Merkel's Madness -- that emerged in the summer of 2015, Europe is now prostrate before Erdogan's criminal whims and fundamentalist Islamic threats...Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 3 May 2016

For those who have not noticed yet, there is a clear message written on the wall: Europe, in its guise as the emergent European dis-Union (EdU), is losing ground faster than anyone could have thought possible only a few years ago...Read more

Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 24 April 2016

Procrustes is one of the many abominable creatures of Greek mythology. His favorite hobby was stretching people on an iron bed and cutting off their legs to make them fit the size of the iron frame. Eventually, Theseus, the legendary slayer of the Cretan Minotaur, dealt Procrustes a good dose of his own medicine: he stretched Procrustes on his iron bed and chopped off both his legs and his head with an axe from Procrustes's own ironsmith's collection...Read more