By Jonathan Power April 4, 2018 Personally I’m a coward. I’m unlikely ever to be a hero. (I have rescued on different occasions three young children from drowning, but I didn’t risk my life.) I certainly would never have done what Colonel Arnaud Beltrame, the French policeman, did. He asked the terrorist who […]
By Jonathan Power March 30, 2018 This present Pope – Francis – is probably the most powerful man in the world, in the round. Stalin once asked when confronted with the argument about the Pope’s reach and influence, replied, “How many divisions has the pope got?” He missed the point. The pope does not work […]
By Jonathan Power • March 20th 2018 Like it not we find that we’re having to get used to the paradoxes, contradictions and confusions of the Trump era. None is more apparent than his attack on the landmark Iran de-nuclearisation agreement, fashioned by the Obama Administration and the Iranian government. President Donald Trump wants […]
By Jan Oberg March 20, 2018* Today marks the 15th Anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Neither solid analyses, moral reasoning and decent argument nor history’s probably largest pre-war, anti-war demonstrations worldwide had any discernible impact on the Bush and Blair Administrations’ decision to go to war and do so on a false […]
Jonathan Power 13th March, 2018. The seemingly eternal president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has an iron grip on his nation and a foreign policy to match. A large majority of Russians give him their support. He will win re-election. Is it his early economic success? Or is it because of a new stability? Or […]
By Jonathan Power March 6, 2018 What do we in the West know about Islam? Perhaps more than we did before 9/11 but not much. When Tony Blair was prime minister of the United Kingdom he was photographed walking along holding the Koran. President George W. Bush said repeatedly that Islam was a […]
By Jonathan Power The new, vicious, fighting in the Congo is the fourth round of warfare since independence in 1960. No other country has seen so many “blue berets”- UN peacekeeping troops- in its short history. The Belgian colonialists may have exploited it and transferred massive amounts of its wealth back to Belgium but […]
By Jonathan Power February 20, 2018 It’s been an odd couple of months for southern Africa. No one predicted last year that in almost the same breath the long-serving dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, and the super-corrupt president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, would be soon overthrown – and non-violently to boot. In […]
By Jonathan Power February 14, 2018 How rude can you get? The US vice-president, Mike Pence, sitting one row in front of the sister of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un refused to turn round and say hi. She was one outstretched arm away from him. For the whole of the opening ceremony […]
• We are soon going to have a clash between President Donald Trump and international law. This is predicable when one examines the presidential discourse over what to do about North Korea and its possession of nuclear-tipped rockets. He has threatened “fire and fury” which doesn’t sound like the opening words of the UN’s […]