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Recommendations to support Europe’s leadership in six strategic business areas

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Today, the Commission publishes recommendations by a group of experts, the Strategic Forum on Important Projects of Common European Interest, to boost Europe’s competitiveness and global leadership in six strategic and future-oriented industrial sectors: Connected, clean and autonomous vehicles; Hydrogen technologies and systems; Smart health; Industrial Internet of Things; Low-carbon industry; and Cybersecurity.

Commissioner Elżbieta Bieńkowska, responsible for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, said: “Our single market, one of the largest markets in the world, is a unique springboard for our industry to compete globally. To make the most of it, we need to collectively invest in being at the forefront of technological development. We have made a good start in areas such as batteries, plastic recycling and high-performance computing. And we can do more. In that vein, I welcome today’s expert group recommendations for six additional strategic value chains that the EU’s industrial policy should focus on.”

Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) comprise innovative research projects that often entail significant risks and require joint, well-coordinated efforts and transnational investments by public authorities and industries from several Member States. By investing jointly in Europe’s industrial strengths and assets, the EU can generate jobs and growth across sectors and regions and strengthen its role on the global stage.

In addition to recommendations specific to each of the value chains, the report also identifies horizontal enabling actions:

  • Pooling public and private resources at EU, national and regional levels; The EU should coordinate these joint investments, targeting first industrial deployment and the commercialisation of new technologies;
  • Deepening and integrating the single market through regulations and new standards;
  • Mapping and developing the skills needed across the value chains;
  • Making innovation systems in Europe more dynamic, with a focus on regional strengths and public-private partnerships;
  • Setting a governance process to monitor technological and industrial changes, identify emerging strategic value chains and evaluate the progress of work on these value chains.

The report is part of the Juncker Commission’s efforts to strengthen Europe’s industrial base. It will also contribute to the next Commission’s work on a new long-term strategy for Europe’s industrial future.

Background

Europe’s industry is strong and has retained global leadership in many sectors, such as automotive, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, machinery and aerospace. Our industry has created 1.7 million jobs since 2013 and accounts for more than two-third of our exports.

However, in a changing world Europe’s industry must adjust and adapt to remain ahead of the curve. The Commission pursues policies that provide an ecosystem for Europe’s industries to thrive in. This empowers industry to create quality jobs in a strong and fair single market, boost Europe’s competitiveness, foster investment and innovation – for example in clean technologies – and support regions and workers affected by industrial change.

Announced in the renewed EU Industrial Policy Strategy in 2017, in March 2018 the Commission set up the Strategic Forum on Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEI). The work of the Strategic Forum builds on and complements the new vision for a more sustainable, inclusive and competitive transformation of the European industry by 2030, presented by the high-level Industrial Roundtable expert group in June 2019. The Strategic Forum’s recommendations will also feed into the reflection on the Commission’s new industrial policy, as requested by the European Council Conclusions of 22 March 2019.

The Commission fully supports Member States and their companies coming together to enable transnational large-scale investments with positive spillover effects across Europe.

The EU has put in place flexible State aid rules to facilitate IPCEIs. In December 2018, the Commission approved, under the State aid IPCEI framework, €1.75 billion of public investment, which will unlock an additional €6 billion of private investment for research and innovation in microelectronics. Four European countries – France, Germany, Italy and the UK – and around 30 companies and research institutions will join forces to enable research and innovation in this key technology. This was the first research and innovation project approved under the special, leaner rules for State aid for projects of strategic European interest. Important joint efforts and investments are also being made on high-performance computing and batteries.

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White House is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation

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Current U.S. foreign policy toward Russia is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation. Russia is not going to lead a peace effort, nor will Ukraine, writes Matthew G. Andersson, a law and policy author, he studied with White House National Security Advisor W.W. Rostow at the Johnson School of Public Affairs.

The Biden administration has through its own incompetence and incapacity, also left leadership open to other countries. It is a strategy that creates economic and industrial disruption, perhaps even deliberate destruction, including of American government itself.

Why would this be?

I suggest that there are six reasons that directly serve the “Biden” administration by this foreign policy of war escalation:

The current administration’s domestic social policies are so radical that they cannot be implemented (or disclosed) within a normal spectrum of law and government. Its plans require extra-constitutional authority. War provides that authority.

A formalized war footing with Russia is presumed an essential path to oil and gas supply disruption, both physical (exploration, production, and refinement, including Arctic claims) and price stability disruption, which presumably will accelerate green energy switching behavior (problem: there is nothing to switch to). In reality, war merely enriches oil and gas, and further consolidates its central energy role.

Financial flows, commercial/central banking, and U.S. dollar stability would all be subject to war-time emergency manipulation. The U.S. is not able to absorb over $30 Trillion in national debt obligations under normal economic arrangements and methods.

War is also an ideal platform to fully effect political persecution, and the marginalization or complete removal of competitive political parties. The U.S. is already well on its way to a single-party consolidation. A civil or world war “seals the deal” just as it did in wartime Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and eventually in Cuba and China. The Biden administration has numerous “blueprints” it can follow from other countries, as the administration is saturated with inexperienced ideologues who both naively admire “revolutionaries” and at the same time are intellectually incapable of imagining and carrying out actual economic development policy.

A fifth reason involves traditional Pentagon motivations in defense spending. Most of the public (and even political class) doesn’t acknowledge that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is still fully operational, but more, its legal infrastructure, formed after 2001 through the Patriot Act, among other legislation and executive orders (hundreds that remain undisclosed or unexamined) can be activated at-will under emergency pretext. Moreover, the GWOT has been turned inward toward America’s own citizens. All that was required was a structured program of terror accusations against a manufactured target: Trump provided that, and now Russia does in a war context.

Finally, war unleashes massive disruptions in population, demographics and health risk. The current administration and its supporters, above all else, are ideologues devoted to population control because it is the “root cause” of global warming. And global warming is the fundamental organizing policy of the Left, even though it has nothing to do with climate, but rather with absolute social control.

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.

It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law.

The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order, concludes Matthew G. Andersson.

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Polish militants join armored assaults into Russian Territory

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Polish militants fighting in Ukraine have participated in recent assaults into Russia’s Belgorod Region, with the Polish Volunteer Corps releasing an announcement and video evidence of their roles in these operations. The militants were specifically involved in an assault of Belgorod’s Grayvoron District on May 22, which was one of the initial major incursions launched from Ukrainian territory, writes “Military Watch Magazine”.

Videos published by the Polish militants regarding their operations show them using Ukrainian T-72B tanks and Mi-8 helicopters as well as U.S.-supplied HMMWV armoured vehicles, which comes as part of a much wider trend towards Polish combatants in Ukraine being given extensive access to weapons supplies as they are often considered more reliable than many of the local conscript units.  

Poland has been outstanding even within the Western world for its hard line position against Russia, with senior politicians calling for Russia’s “balkanization” into separate states, while the country’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated shortly after the outbreak of fighting in Ukraine that the only way forward for the West was through “fighting” against Moscow…

The country has accordingly been a leading supplier of armaments to Ukraine. In contrast to political leaders, however, Polish military leaders have repeatedly expressed serious doubts regarding Ukraine and its allies’ ability to prevail in the ongoing war against Russia.

Although forces from multiple Western countries have been deployed very widely in Ukraine, forming what the ‘New York Times’ referred to as a ‘stealth network’ of assets directed by Western intelligence agencies to fight Russia within the country, Poland has been the leading contributor of manpower among foreign countries involved in the conflict.

Former senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defence U.S. Army Colonel (ret.) Douglas McGregor accordingly reported the presence of an estimated 20,000 contractors from Poland alone who have played key roles in the war effort including in frontline positions such as Bakhmut, which was for months a key centre of hostilities until its capture by Russian forces in late May.

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Gen. Li Shangfu: “When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns”

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In his first international public address since becoming defense minister in March, General Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue that China doesn’t have any problems with “innocent passage” but that “we must prevent attempts that try to use those freedom of navigation (patrols), that innocent passage, to exercise hegemony of navigation.”

A U.S. guided-missile destroyer and a Canadian frigate were intercepted by a Chinese warship as they transited the strait between the self-governed island of Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, and mainland China. The Chinese vessel overtook the American ship and then veered across its bow at a distance of 150 yards in an “unsafe manner,” according to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Additionally, the U.S. has said a Chinese J-16 fighter jet late last month “performed an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” while intercepting a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, flying directly in front of the plane’s nose.

Those and previous incidents have raised concerns of a possible accident occurring that could lead to an escalation between the two nations at a time when tensions are already high.

Li suggested the U.S. and its allies had created the danger, and should instead should focus on taking “good care of your own territorial airspace and waters.”

“The best way is for the countries, especially the naval vessels and fighter jets of countries, not to do closing actions around other countries’ territories,” he said through an interpreter. “What’s the point of going there? In China we always say, ‘Mind your own business.’”

He accused the U.S. and others of “meddling in China’s internal affairs” by providing Taiwan with defense support and training, and conducting high-level diplomatic visits.

“China stays committed to the path of peaceful development, but we will never hesitate to defend our legitimate rights and interests, let alone sacrifice the nation’s core interests,” he said.

“As the lyrics of a well-known Chinese song go: ‘When friends visit us, we welcome them with fine wine. When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns.’”

In his speech U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin broadly outlined the U.S. vision for a “free, open, and secure Indo-Pacific within a world of rules and rights.”

Li scoffed at the notion, saying “some country takes a selective approach to rules and international laws.” “It likes forcing its own rules on others,” he said. “Its so-called ‘rules-based international order’ never tells you what the rules are and who made these rules.”

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