Archive 1986 – 2017

The most important thing to understand about nuclear weapons is this: these weapons do not and cannot provide physical protection to their possessors.  Please let this thought sink in.  The second most important thing to understand about these weapons is that they are weapons of genocide writ large or, as the philosopher John Somerville has labeled them, weapons of omnicide, capable of the destruction of all.(1) These weapons put at risk the future of humankind and most life on earth.  Please also let this thought sink in. The third most important thing to understand about nuclear weapons is that they are in the hands of human beings with all their frailties and fallibilities, and, as such, these weapons are disasters waiting to occur.  Please let this thought sink in as well. How the new U.S. president understands the functions, limits and dangers of nuclear weapons will guide his approach to U.S. nuclear policy,...

War is not how McCain describes it October 28, 2008 LONDON – John McCain, we all know, after being shot out of the sky, was captured by the North Vietnamese, imprisoned and tortured. We know too that few of us would have had the guts or the tenacity to put up for so long with his trials of pain and sorrows. But do we know – for the journalists have failed to ask and he has omitted to mention – who he killed from the sky, how many, and how does he feel about that deep inside when he has to reflect alone and make his peace with God? Or does he think, rather than allowing God to choose which side, if any, He is on, that America itself can make that decision? These conundrums don’t seem to weigh a tenth of an ounce in the American election. But they...

I was among a handful of people worldwide who criticised the Nobel Committee’s choice of former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari as Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and characterized it as a scandal I had two main reasons. I consider his work as “peace mediator” – a term used repeatedly – in Kosovo incompatible with peace and with Alfred Nobel’s three criteria, but I deliberately did not mention his work in Aceh or Namibia of which I have no knowledge myself. Kosovo and other parts of former Yugoslav have been something I have tried to understand since my first visit there 34 years ago. Independent Kosovo is the result of a military-based conflict management or, rather, mismanagement. It militates against two of Nobel’s criteria in that it has not lead to fraternity between peoples and it has not reduced armaments in the world. Kosovo declared itself independent in February this year (probably one reason...

North Korea – the long way round October 14, 2008 LONDON – One small step forward by North Korea and the U.S ; one large step for mankind. The political fight to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear bomb making activities seems at last, in the dying days of the Bush presidency, to be entering a serious phase. The U.S. has finally bowed to the North Korean request to remove it from the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism- which will enable the renegade state to become eligible for international loans and sundry other economic benefits- in return for the North agreeing to re-allow inspections to verify a North Korean promise to freeze its nuclear activities, as it undertook last year and then withdrew from. After nine years of erratic U.S. policies- met by equally erratic and bellicose Nort h Korean ones- the negotiations have ended up almost where...

, said the way to U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to declare victory and get out. Having declared victory in 2004 and not got out, it is too late for President George W. Bush or his successors to do that now. But Aiken had a riposte for that contingency too. A few years later, when it was impossible to declare victory, he was asked how to get out of Vietnam. “In ships”, he replied. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are moving towards the only solution that will work – leaving. In Iraq, surely this is what Barack Obama, if president, must do, despite all the heavy advice trying to persuade him to drag it out until……until a miracle happens and the killing stops, the legal system functions and the ‘democracy’ works. But the killing in this very disturbed society will go on for decades. U.S. tallies of the...

LONDON – As said Mr Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, nought and six, result misery.” If you can get past the Dickensian way of counting then there is a message for the U.S. today. It no longer has the financial wherewithal to do what it wants to do. If Barack Obama wins the election he has pledged to bring in a major reform of the health services and he has promised to cut the tax rate for the middle and work ing classes. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan. If John McCain wins he wants to keep in place the tax breaks for the rich, fight to “victory” in Iraq, expand the war in Afghanistan and challenge Iran in such an assertive way that it could well lead to another war. There is no...

to refer the conflict in the Sudan to the ICC, arguing that it was only the threat of a war crimes court that brought the protagonists of the Yugoslavia wars to the negotiating table and that the same stick is necessary over Sudan. The announced prosecution by the ICC of the Sudanese leader, Omar al-Bashir, has coincided with a major shift in American elite opinion about the usefulness of the ICC. Democrat foreign policy experts are talking as if the U.S. were already a signed up, ratified, member. But more interesting is the stance of the Bush Administration. In the first days of his presidency George W. Bush ‘unsigned’ the U.S. membership. Yet now it is pushing hard in the Security Council for the ICC to act faster over the Sudan prosecution. The turn round suggests it may not be too long before the U.S. formally endorses the Court. This...

LONDON – How far is downhill? Well, that’s like asking how long is a piece of string. But whatever the answer, the American/NATO military effort in Afghanistan, triggered by 9/11, seems to have all the marks of a quick descent. In Barack Obama’s phrase, American public opinion doesn’t get it. How could they when Obama himself, supposedly a fresh eye on the international scene, bangs the drum for more troops and yet more force? Does European and Canadian opinion get it? Apart from the Canadians, who have had the good sense and the foresight to give a date for the withdrawal of their troops, public opinion appears to be asleep at the switch. Their young men are dying for a method of attack that the older men have devised without ever being challenge d to think it through. The policy, made within hours of the atrocity of 9/11, seemed to be...

September 12, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – Does America know what a dangerous game its leaders are playing? Does it know its history? And do the leaders of Europe, who should be a brake on American determination, go along with Washington because they are almost equally ignorant? After all none of the present crop of European leaders have had time to study much history, and all of them made their way upwards in their party ranks because of their skill and knowledge of domestic affairs. They have had little or no preparation for the affairs of the world. On the Russian, Georgian and Ukrainian side one can make the same argument. Ignorance reigns so history can be repeated. World War I was the most important geopolitically of the last century. After forty three years of unbroken peace in Europe, the continent slipped into war with barely a diplomatic thought. The issues...

at the time of the independence movement. It is true that Africa over the last decade and a half has been through a period of great turmoil. But, according to the just published annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, that monitors world trends in violence, Africa along with Europe, is now the most peaceful continent in the world, with only one significant tribal or interstate conflict last year, and this. (That is with over 1000 battle-related deaths.) Are we still transfixed and extrapolating from the mad late 80’s and early 90’s when countries as diverse as Yugoslavia, Zaire, Somalia and Indonesia seemed to tearing themselves apart with ethnic strife? The then U.S. Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, was heard to say “Where will it end? Will it end with 5,000 countries?” It was a gross misjudgment. Two thirds of all the campaigns of ethnic protest and rebellion...

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...