Archive 1986 – 2017

Assuming for the sake of argument that Iran builds itself a nuclear weapon what should the U.S. do? Two senior members of the top foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, James Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, have no doubts. In Foreign Affairs magazine, they write: “Washington should be explicit in what it demands of Iran: no initiation of conventional warfare against other countries; no use or transfer of nuclear weapons, materials or technologies; and no stepped up support for terrorist or subversive activities. It should also make it clear that the price of Iran violating these three prohibitions could be U.S retaliation by any and all means necessary, up to and including nuclear weapons.” It is difficult to believe that this could be written in today’s post Cold War world. Tell this to President Barack Obama and you would be pushed out of the door. Under no circumstances...

By Jonathan PowerApril 1, 2010 During the height of the Cold War it was commonly said that the science of war had now advanced to the point where it could threaten, if not the whole planet, certainly whole societies. The new nuclear arms accord between Russia and the U.S. has not changed that. Nuclear arms are still plentiful. The cuts agreed are only on strategic, long range, super armed rockets. Smaller missiles, so called battlefield nukes, are still deployed in their thousands, mainly in Europe and aboard surface ships. (Even anti-nuclear countries like Sweden and Japan harboured them during the Cold War.) The only place to be is zero. Only that would give the U.S., Europe and Russia the credibility to persuade Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel to forsake theirs. This is the conclusion of such Cold War warriors as former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and...

The passage of the health reform bill has immediately transformed the perceived growing weakness of President Barack Obama. He is now master of his own house and can perhaps out achieve Lyndon Johnson and even Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda of domestic reforms. Foreign policy can also purr ahead. Very soon there will be a major nuclear arms accord with Russia, but one whose ratification would quickly be bogged down in the Senate if he’d failed to muster the votes to approve health care. It gives him more room to manoeuvre and compromise with Iran, North Korea and the Taliban. Above all it should give him the muscle to push the Israelis to deal productively with the Palestinians. This is a Sisyphean task that has defeated all his predecessors. Since the misconceived Balfour Declaration that gave the Jews a homeland right bang in the middle of someone else’s, peace has been negotiated...

The Israeli government’s slap on the face of visiting American Vice-President Joseph Biden has heightened the perception that the foreign policy of the Obama administration is not going well. The problem, some argue, is that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Besides Biden there are the powerful secretaries of Defence and State, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. There are the special trouble-shooters for the Middle East and Afghanistan, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke. There is the president’s own intimate staff. The National Security Advisor is supposed to keep all these lions in harness. That’s what Henry Kissinger did during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, what Zbigniew Brzezinski did during the Carter presidency and what Brent Scowcroft did during the presidency of George Bush Senior. This is not to say the present incumbent, General James Jones, is a weakling. He is not. It is just that the coterie...

We appear to have been battered to a submissive intellectual pulp by the pro climate change lobby, although it was only 35 years ago, when I interviewed the world’s principal climate experts for the Washington Post, the consensus was that the earth was cooling. Today some of these same scientists rubbish those who hold the previous hypothesis. Within as short space of twenty years they had fundamentally changed their minds. But 20 years is nothing compared with the very slow evolution that they were looking at. How could they argue the reverse of what they thought it was such a short time before? When has scientific discovery moved so fast? The climate warming lobby started with a handful of then maverick scientists and in a few years gathered speed as the media hyped their research and funding agencies, who rarely know a lot about what they are giving money to,...

February 24, 2010 Jonathan Power Amnesty International seems to be going downhill as fast as they do in Vancouver. If the crisis over Amnesty’s support for Moazzam Beg, ex Guantanamo Bay internee and alleged Taliban supporter is not dealt with by Amnesty quickly coming to its senses Amnesty will have lost its credibility – and a good number of its supporters – for a long time. (Begg’s defence is that his post-release visit to Afghanistan was to visit his family.) The tragedy is that Amnesty’s leadership doesn’t seem to see it. The organization is so used to being omnipotent and protected from the world outside by its unique membership structure whose dues allow it to be totally independent. This is usually to its good. But the protective fence of independence could lead to tragedy. The whistle was blown by a senior staffer, Gita Sahgal. She was suspended for raising the...

February 17, 2010 Jonathan Power Graham Greene’s great novel “The Comedians”, set in the Haiti of the dictatorship of Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a quite small Caribbean island gets more press than it deserves? It is, indeed, in part the legacy of Graham Greene who, as I am too, was often drawn to the island because of its idiosyncratic but rich culture and, not least, its lurid shades of darkness and light that permeate the political spectrum. Greene, whilst capturing the ugliness and horror of the gangster Tonton Macoutes, also draws a careful portrait of the civilized and caring Dr. Magiot. However, the outside world’s fascination with the forces of darkness represented in...

Does anyone know where the U.S. is up to in its long, endless, negotiations to persuade North Korea to give up the bomb? Does anyone care? Does the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee? Does the United Nations? Do the European countries? Does most of Asia? Try and find one creative word that anyone has said since the election of President Barack Obama and you will have to Google the subject until your eyes are sore. Yet there they all whipping up a storm over Iran which is a long way from being able to build a bomb, and which if it came into being could threaten no one. Israel might persuade itself that it was under the hammer but in fact Iran would have no means of miniaturizing a bomb so it could fit on a rocket. For that the technology is less easy to master than actually building a...

February 3, 2010 Jonathan Power Britain’s official public enquiry into why the UK joined the U.S. in going to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq grinds on with the interrogation last week of the former prime minister, Tony Blair. But whether it grinds small enough is the question. Last week, sporting his usual sharp advocate’s brain and bottomless charm, he seemed to walk out of the hearing’s doors with his head held high. He conceded very little to his critics. Yes, he did more or less admit that he’d given the then U.S. president, George Bush, a blank check to invade Iraq, long before the U.S. set about trying to convince the world with “irrefutable evidence” that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction (including a nuclear weapon). But all British prime ministers as long as one can remember have done such. Total support of America in matters of national security...

Why is the most densely populated state in India, which also suffered the greatest famine in India’s history in 1943, now the third largest economy in the country with a very rapid growth rate that is the third fastest among all the states, a power infrastructure that is the best in the country, soaring agricultural yields and a crime rate that is half the national average? It is mainly down to its governing communist-led front that is the world’s longest running democratically elected government – since 1977. Although in next year’s state elections it is likely to be ousted, partly out of the electorate’s boredom with it and partly because of its corruption (although its opposition, an offshoot of India’s ruling Congress Party, is also corrupt) No one epitomized communist rule more than its long time former leader, Jyoti Basu, who died last week at the age of 96. Television...

Is the state an opponent? I put this question to a top Gothenburg lawyer, Christina Ramberg, when interviewing her about Sweden and its top heavy welfare state. “No it’s a friend”, she replies, although she never votes for the Socialists.  Alexandra von Schwerin, an aristocratic businesswoman paying very high taxes, says “No, it’s a father.” Not even Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, leader of a right wing coalition that four years ago replaced the habitual governing party, the Social Democrats, is much against the state. He has dropped the old right wing mantra of calling for lowering taxes and wants to see only “a more efficient and less conformist state and society”. In an interview he told me that “we are not asking for a different system, just for better results.” The sense of equality goes deep down in the Swedish psyche, he explains. “The Swedish electorate don’t always look at their wallet....

Who knows? For all we do know Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua may be half dead. He has been ailing from a kidney illness for the last two months in a Saudi Arabian hospital. Now, at home, the chorus of those who believe he should step down has reached a crescendo. His vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, stands prepared in the wings. Meanwhile at home all major decisions are held up and his most crucial achievement – the winning of a truce with the Niger delta militants who have have knocked 25% off Nigeria’s oil income – hangs in the balance. The militants are becoming impatient for the truce to be firmed up and its promises delivered. The world cannot afford to ignore the happenings in the country that holds one third of the world’s black population. Nigeria gets a bad press. Despite its immense steps forward from the time of the...