By Jonathan Power November 13, 2018 Reacting to the radio interview by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to mark Armistice Day, in which he was reported as saying, “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America… We need a true European army”, President Donald Trump […]
By Jonathan Power November 12, 2018 Is Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, responsible for Brexit? In a way yes she is because at the time of the great economic crisis of 2007-2013, counterproductively she insisted on austerity throughout the European Union. Austerity helped turn the poorer classes of the UK towards Brexit. But so […]
By Jonathan Power November 2, 2018 At first I was a bit surprised to find that the English admonition, “Good fences makes for good neighbours” exists in many other languages. I shouldn’t have been taken aback. A moment’s reflection should have told me that fences and walls to divide off peoples have been going […]
By Jonathan Power October 24, 2018 At last a book that attacks the “Blob” and holes it below the water line. Whether it can sink it is another matter. I’m talking about a book published last week by the Harvard professor of international affairs, Stephen Walt, “The Hell of Good Intentions”. The “Blob” is […]
By Jonathan Power October 16, 2018 “Suppose aliens existed, and that some had been watching our planet for its entire forty-five million centuries, what would they have seen? Over most of that vast time-span, Earth’s appearance altered very gradually. Continents drifted; ice-cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But just […]
By Jonathan Power October 9, 2018 What do we have to truly fear about President Donald Trump? Last week he pulled off the successful re-negotiation of the North America Free Trade area. Pundits thought, with Canada refusing to bend, it couldn’t happen. Maybe the deal now leans more in America’s direction but Trump has […]
By Jonathan Power Oktober 7, 2018 From the time of its beginning as a nation state “Brazil has been a paradise for some, an endless hell for others, and for the rest, a kind of purgatory on earth.” So write two Brazilian historians, Lilla Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, in their massive, newly published, volume […]
By Jonathan Power September 25, 2018 Last year the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court released a report which for the first time explicitly named US military forces and CIA operatives in secret prisons as possible war crimes culprits for the alleged use of torture and rape. Because the American soldiers […]
By Jonathan Power September 18, 2018 Zimbabwe messed up its land reform. Now South Africa has decided to give a great push to its slow moving land reform. We’ll see if it can avoid Zimbabwe’s mistakes. President Donald Trump tweeted that he’d asked his secretary of state to look into “farm seizures and expropriations […]
Jonathan Power September 11, 2018 In 1981 on the editorial page of the New York Times, I wrote a column showing that the mass atrocities against the Indian population of Guatemala were carried out under the direct orders of the then president, Fernando Lucas Garcia. His former vice-president, Francisco Villagran Kramer, had given me […]