A European country, Ukraine, is being invaded by the the forces of an evil dictator, Vladimir Putin.
What is the the European Union - the self-proclaimed "soft superpower" - doing?
Answer:
The EU foreign ministers are wasting their time - and taxpayers´ money - on a huge "preventive diplomacy" campaign, "aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue":
Europe is launching a major diplomatic push for an ambitious deal on global warming, mobilising A-list celebrities and tens of thousands of diplomats to exert “maximum pressure” on key countries in international climate negotiations.
The EU plan, endorsed by ministers on Monday in Brussels, will see 90,000 diplomats in over 3,000 missions lobbying to win new pledges on carbon cuts from countries ahead of a crunch UN climate summit in Paris this December.
European stars, of a calibre of US public figures such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, will front a push to make climate action a “strategic priority” at G7, G20 and Major Economies Forum summits.
The action plan, seen by the Guardian, calls for a ‘Climate Action Day’ in June and a ‘100 days to Paris countdown’ event later in the year.
The aim is to raise the EU’s profile and cement alliances by winning new pledges for greenhouse gas cuts – intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) in UN jargon, the backbone of any deal in Paris – before June at the latest.
“The EU has enormous soft power and we must use that to push for an ambitious agenda in Paris,” the Danish foreign minister Martin Lidegaard told the Guardian. “I have urged my colleagues to commit to including climate diplomacy in their activities in the run up to COP21 [the Paris summit] – and the EU’s foreign service to work more on this. We should focus our efforts on the major growth economies and climate financing.”
A UK government spokesman described the diplomatic blitz as “a welcome step to ramp up European climate diplomacy globally”.
The action plan cites climate change as “a key element of preventive diplomacy,” aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue. It also goes further than past EU communications, describing climate change as “a strategic threat affecting natural resource availability, economic stability and hence overall national and regional security”.
Of course the EU foreign ministers and their bosses are also going to adopt some new meaningless statements, and possibly even soft sanctions due to the continuing Russian aggression, but the clear priority of this "enormous soft power" will be to conduct a (senseless) propaganda war against irrelevant "climate change".
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