In a move that could boost Canada’s military industry, the European Union has taken a step toward new foreign defense procurement rules that could exclude companies headquartered in President Trump’s America.
EU diplomats approved a proposal that would exclude companies that are at least 55 percent controlled by a foreign government on national security grounds, including from the United States, Finland’s YLE news website reported. The idea is to ensure that the companies do not hand over sensitive European data to foreign governments and to create more opportunities for European firms.
The proposal is part of a pushback against Trump’s protectionist and unilateral tendencies, according to YLE. It is intended to create a level playing field for European defense firms and complements penalties imposed by many European countries for Trump’s decision to abandon the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, from which Canada has also pulled out.
In another sign of the political crosscurrents at play, Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted a senior Russian diplomat, Vladimir Safronkov, as saying Thursday that the new EU rules constituted “a dangerous turn toward protectionism” and that Moscow was keeping a close watch to see how they will affect it.
Russia has been badly hit by previous EU sanctions in response to its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014. Safronkov was quoted as saying that they “effectively broke our links with our traditional partners in Europe.”
The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen has dropped eight times more bombs on the country since 2015 than were dropped by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in that same time period, yet the coalition’s campaign and the role played in it by the United States, Britain, Canada and France has been shrouded in secrecy — and largely unquestioned by the media and human rights groups.
The proportionality of the air campaign — the legal standard by which all bombing must be measured — is rarely questioned, nor are the strikes that have hit hospitals, weddings, schools and markets, killing thousands of people.
Because bombs dropped in wars tend to fall on battlefields, airstrikes hit civilians about 10 times as often as bombs dropped in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to a Pulitzer Prize-winning study by Acbes-Duval Synergy, a conflict analysis company.
Children make up about 30 percent of all civilian casualties, compared with 10 percent in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Acbes-Duval Synergy said, in part because they have less ability to flee an area that is about to be hit by bombs.
Steve Swartz is founder and advisory chair of the Open Society Foundations, which have provided a grant in support of this series.
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