August 2008

August 29, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – If America’s former president, Richard Nixon, the erstwhile red baiter, wasn’t safely in his grave, most probably he would be writing an op-ed in the New York Times this week to say that, “we are in danger of losing Russia”. For all the bodies of the liberal /left in America, dispatched by him on the way to the pinnacle of power, he became as president the originator of detente with the Soviet Union and at the same a respecter of its history and Russia’s massive contribution through the arts, its culture and its Orthodox religion to the great civilization we call the Western world. In his own words Nixon was a Russophile. Once communism was defeated, he used to argue, Russia could assume its rightful place as a powerful European nation. It seems that no one, neither in the U.S. nor in Europe,...

By Jan ObergAugust 28, 2008 I was part of a TFF fact-finding mission to Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhasia in 1994. That the August 8 war would happen was predictable, albeit not the exact time. My time perspective is about 20 years, my space is global and my subject is the underlying conflict, not the war as such. Let me begin, therefore, with the dissolution of the terrible Soviet Union under the visionary leadership of a man we should still all be deeply grateful to, namely Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Gorbachev withdraws from Afghanistan and set Sakharov free. No reaction in the West. His entire philosophy of change deprives the West of its beloved enemy. Gorbachev suggests an entirely new security structure, a “European House” with the OSCE and the UN as centerpieces. The “triumphalist West ignores it. Gorbachev asks for economic support in the West to perestroika and glasnost, to...

LONDON – That bar, the Red Star, on the far side of eastern Europe is closed. So why is the Black Star on this side still open, and even extending its drinking hours? Once the Warsaw Pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. Let the European Union take the strain, by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, whilst America has led its quest for influence by application of the Bush doctrine of “preventive war”. As Mark Leonard, the director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform wrote in his clever, little book of three years ago, “the contrast between the two doctrines is stark. The Bush...

LONDON – Kosovo, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, the Bakassi Peninsular. All of them disputed territories but only one, the last named, a sizable oil-rich wedge of land lying between Nigeria and Cameroon, has been taken to the International Court of Justice (World Court) for adjudication. Why not the others? There is no good reason, apart from, in the latest situation, hubris on the Russian side and an inflated sense of self-importance on the Georgian side, partly because America has encouraged this. Six years ago Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, confronted with growing tensions with neighboring Cameroon over the Bakassi peninsular, long ruled by Nigeria, decided to resist the advice of his minister of defense, who pushed for a military solution, and to turn the dispute over to the World Court. Newspapers ridiculed Obasanjo, public opinion was nationalistic, but he held his course and did so even when the court ruled in Cameroon«s favor....

August 8, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Irony of ironies. The U.S., which under President George W. Bush “unsigned” its membership of the International Criminal Court and then waged a ferocious campaign to persuade other countries to promise to exempt the U.S. from future prosecution on pain of having their military aid withdrawn, is now emerging as the behind-the-scenes flag bearer of the court. The country which has a long history of refusing to ratify treaties – the League of Nations for one – or just forgetting about them – as it did with the Genocide Convention for 40 years – or contravening them blatantly as it has recently with the Convention Against Torture, whose ratification President Ronald Reagan steered through the Senate, last week fought a lone battle at the UN Security Council which in effect was pro ICC. It refused to vote for a watered down version of...

By Jonathan PowerAugust 1, 2008 LONDON – The cream of America’s black population has never done so well as in the last ten years – two secretaries of state, a national security advisor, chief of the armed forces, heads of major companies from American Express to Time/Warner, the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate, congressmen and congresswomen, rectors of major universities, bishops, newspaper editorial writers. The list goes on and on, and perhaps later this year it will be capped by the election of a black president. What a difference from as recently as the 1960s when only sport, the arts and preaching were open to ambitious blacks. Even in the 1970s, as I long ago documented in Encounter magazine, (few believed me), middle class professional blacks in sizable numbers were beginning to roar ahead, closing the gap with their white peers. Thank you, Martin Luther King! But like America’s...