Actually, EU Observer says that Europe will be a ‘hobbled giant’, but it never ceases to amaze Cranmer the extent to which Europe is becoming synonymous with the EU, despite 21 of Europe’s 48 nation states residing without its confines (22 if you include Vatican City, which could never, of course, ‘pool’ its sovereignty with the EU). While the EU may now constitute the majority of European states, 46 per cent have not been absorbed, harmonised or ‘normalised’ (yet).

But the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC), Washington's main intelligence body, forecasts that the EU will be ‘crippled by internal bickering and a eurosceptic citizenry’.

There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.

They further foresee that the EU will be plagued by ‘Eastern European organised crime’.

Gosh, they are perceptive, aren’t they?

And they also predict that the EU will be ‘kowtowing to Moscow after having failed at all attempts to wean itself from Russian energy supplies’. This continued dependence ‘will foster constant attentiveness to Moscow's interests by key countries, including Germany and Italy, who see Russia as a reliable supplier’ and could endanger the Union ‘if Russian firms are unable to full fill contract commitments because of underinvestment in their natural gas fields or if growing corruption and organised criminal involvement in the Eurasian energy sector spill over to infect Western business interests’.

Well, Dr Richard North has been excelling in this intelligence for years, without anywhere near the budget of the US Intelligence Agencies.

The report also envisages Europe's public services and welfare system threatened by the expense of paying for retiring baby-boomers, and foresees the demographic time-bomb of a diminishing population of working-age having to support a burgeoning population of pensioners. They diagnose ‘cutbacks to healthcare and pensions as the only solution’.

They missed crippling rates of personal and corporate taxation.

And they prophesy ‘infighting between member states with competing domestic interests and a European public alienated by a perceived democratic deficit’.

Perhaps ‘US Intelligence’ ought to rename itself ‘US Statements of the Bleeding Obvious’.

And yet they state that by 2025 the vision of the Founding Fathers will have been realised: there will be ‘a cohesive, integrated, and influential global actor’.

No there won’t. And this prediction is somewhat at variance with the others. It appears to Cranmer that US Intelligence is of the Nostradamus school of prophecy, pouring out couplets which may mean all things to all people, with a sentence, a word, a letter for the loyal disciples to cling to in the future as evidence of the impressive accuracy of the crystal-gazer.

They are, however, attuned to the ‘Islam’ question, noting that ‘integrating immigrants, particularly from Muslim backgrounds will become an acute challenge in a difficult economic climate’. By 2025, there will be very sizeable populations of Muslims in the Netherlands and France, with the potential for the non-integrationists among them to agitate for ‘local Shari’a’. Such events will lead to ‘narrow nationalism...as happened in the past’.

As happened in the past?

To what is US Intelligence alluding?

The possibility of the takeover of a member state by nationalist forces with a strong and charismatic leader, which yearns for a return to its age of glory, and struggles to restore its national pride, its independence, its liberty, its sense of identity, risking the possibility of conflict with the EU’s police force or army?

With that distinct possibility, staring into the abyss, Cranmer wholeheartedly concurs. He hopes US Intelligence have made their dossier available to the ‘European’ Commission.

posted by Cranmer at 11:05 AM

archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2008/11/us-intelligence-eu-will-be-hobbled.html