The secretary-general of NATO said on Thursday that there was a critical "perception gap" between Europe and the United States on the subject of global terror and that Europeans must move closer to the American view of the seriousness of the threat.
The US "focused very much on the fight against terror while in Europe we focused to a lesser extent on the consequences for the world," said the secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, speaking in an interview. "We looked at it from different angles, and that for me is one of the reasons you saw such frictions in the trans-Atlantic relationship."
As a result, he said, Europe was lagging behind the US in merging external and internal security to combat terrorism, and Europe had to catch up.
"If the gap is to be bridged, it has to be done from the European side and not from the United States," de Hoop Scheffer said, adding that the conflict in Iraq, the issue that helped divide the alliance, now provided an opportunity for uniting it.
"Where allies very much agree and must agree is the fact that whatever ways they have looked at the war in Iraq and the run-up to it and the split we saw, we cannot afford to see Iraq go up in flames," de Hoop Scheffer said. "It is everyone's obligation that we get Iraq right."
De Hoop Scheffer is a former Dutch foreign minister who supported the Bush administration on the war in Iraq without alienating other European leaders. He became NATO's secretary-general on Jan. 1. He said that a meeting he had with Bush in Washington on Wednesday should be taken as a sign that trans-Atlantic frictions had eased.
"It's not as if I came here with doubt and my meeting with the president washed it all away," de Hoop Scheffer said. "I have never doubted that commitment, but whatever way you look at it, the fact that the secretary-general of NATO is the first foreign visitor that President Bush has met since the election is a clear sign of the full commitment of this administration and of this president to the trans-Atlantic alliance."
NATO has been asked by the Iraqi government to train its security forces, and de Hoop Scheffer said that 10 of the alliance's 19 member states were contributing to that training, both within Iraq and in places outside Iraq, the preference of France, Germany and Spain -- like Jordan and European military schools. He said he hoped to have the program fully operational by the end of the year.
The experience of Iraq had taught him two lessons as a European and an Atlanticist, de Hoop Scheffer said.
"The first is that if Europe sees its integration process as one directed against the United States, it will not work because the result will be a split in Europe, and that is an ambition that no European should have," he said.
"The second is that if you want to have a trans-Atlantic dialogue between grownups, I know that any president and any American administration is willing to listen to the European voice as long as it is one European voice. If it is five different voices, they will not take the trouble to listen and they will wonder what is Europe."
NATO has 9,000 troops and a broadening reconstruction campaign under way in Afghanistan, but de Hoop Scheffer said his greatest concern there now was the explosion in the heroin trade.
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
RSS