Cold War – new

By Farhang Jahanpour On the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is important to look back at the reasons for those barbaric acts and to look forward to what needs to be done. The First and the Second World Wars were the most devastating wars ever waged in history. Nevertheless, although those wars killed tens of millions of human beings and destroyed many cities, the end of the Second World War witnessed the use of a new category of weapons by the United States that have the potential to end human civilization as we know it. Grotesquely called ‘Little Boy’, the bomb that flattened Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, was a uranium bomb that killed between 130,000-140,000 civilians instantly, and many thousands later. ‘Fat Man’ that blasted Nagasaki three days later, was a plutonium bomb and killed about 70,000 people instantly. There has...

By Jonathan Power Even today in many different ways the US and Russia remain close. There is cooperation in space, not least the International Space Station. The US regularly hires Russian rockets to launch its crews to the Station and to launch satellites. Russia sells advanced rocket engines to the US. Russia allows war material en route to Afghanistan to pass through its territory on Russian trains. Russia worked hand in glove with the US to successfully remove the large stocks of chemical weapons possessed by Syria. It shares intelligence on Muslim extremists including ISIS. Conceivably it could enter the battle against ISIS. It has encouraged Western investment including joint oil exploration of the Artic. Recently it stood side by side with the US and the EU as they forged an agreement with Iran on its nuclear industry. At the UN Security Council Russia and the US voted together for...

in 1914 the Europeans conquered 84% of the globe. The puzzle is why did they rise to the top when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans and South Asians were far more advanced? The short answer, as Mao Zedong once said, is that “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Europeans were at the forefront of gunpowder technology for 200+ years. This may seem odd since firearms and gunpowder originated in China and the rocket in India. Yet by the late 17th century Chinese, Japanese and Ottoman military technology was lagging behind Europe’s. War was what monarchs did in Europe.

Look at the trauma ; the issues of the past. Iran, one of the world’s oldest civilizations was greatly humiliated by the CIA-MI6 coup in 1953, and now by a “deal” singling out Iran as the problem. And USA, the most powerful, was humiliated by the Khomeini revolution. And so on, all the way down. Something must, and can be, done. One useful approach is an international truth commission about what really happened; better an exchange of their narratives with dialogue; best a violent party wishing what happened undone. The peace formula says, Go beyond!, eg., by building togetherness across the have-have not faultline; a Middle East nuclear-free zone. In addition, security through peace for Israel, not the unfeasible opposite. The formula says: clear past traumas, open for future projects. Not in the same document, different experts negotiate, but parallel. Continue reading here…

, terrorist pogrom in which 48 activists opposed to the Western-backed Maidan regime in Kiev were killed; most of them burned alive as Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ shot at them, tossed three Molotov cocktails into their building and sang the Ukrainian national anthem.”, writes Gordon Hahn today, a highly respected expert on Ukrainian and Russian affairs. So who is right and who is wrong? Of course the first quote above simplifies a horrifically complicated situation and is only true for one area. Nevertheless, this snapshot shows that the Russian observers can be fair. As I write both sides – the Ukrainian government’s army and the Russian-supported rebels – are fighting flat out to take control of Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine – again reported on by the OSCE. Although many areas of the East are quiet the cease-fire negotiated by President Vladimir Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Francois Hollande is in...

It isn’t helpful to pre-position heavy materiel in Eastern Europe if it is peace you want…

By Jonathan Power The Russian European dreamers have included Pushkin, Lenin, Gorbachev and, until relatively recently, President Vladimir Putin. They have all seen their country’s future as part of the “European house”. But history and events have not been kind to Russia. Napoleon’s invasion, revolution, two world wars, Stalin’s communism and, most recently, the expansion of NATO, have shattered the dream again and again. At the end of the Cold War and with agreement on the NATO-Russia Founding Act it seemed that big steps towards that goal were being taken. First, Russia would have a seat at NATO’s table. Later it would join NATO. Later still, the European Union. Some said this would happen over ten years, others 20. Then, smash, the dream came to an end as President Bill Clinton, bucking America’s academic foreign policy elite, decided to expand NATO’s membership to former members of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw...

36 were carried out in the post Cold War 1990s. The number of international conflicts decreased quite significantly. Russia and China and other former socialist countries, despite differences in their political systems, were integrated into one global and financial economic system. Several attempts were made to legally formalize the new balance of power –

The West – North America and Europe to somewhere in Mexico and Ukraine – declines, outcompeted economically, defeated militarily, confronted politically, contested culturally. But still strong on all four, with much to offer in a more egalitarian world. There should be no need to fall further by working against itself. Take the 70th anniversary demarcation of the victory over nazism, take thousands of Africans drowning in the waters around Lampedusa, Italy, take the Islamic State, take Ukraine – and a country up there in the high North of Europe, Norway. Elections have moved the country from “red-green” to “blue-blue” coloring of the same color blind foreign policy: follow Washington, Our Father, lest Satan should come. Yes, the Red Army came and liberated Kirkenes 25 October 1944, the northernmost city. Everybody knows Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s three-pronged attack toward Leningrad (the siege), Moscow (to beat–Napoleon?) and Caucasus (oil); but not the war...

Mohandas Gandhi invented the nonviolent approach to basic social change, Satyagraha, in South Africa in the early 20th century; Nelson Mandela presided over the birth of a one person-one vote democracy at the end of the century. Both were lawyers, trained in English Common Law; good in the sense of a keen consciousness of what is right and wrong, bad in the sense of a court process identifying who is in the wrong rather than solving underlying conflicts, and wrong in the sense of punishing the wrong-doer; violence rather than cooperation. Both built on the positive side of law – the indelible rights of the people for whom they were fighting by comparing empirical facts with normative rights; immigrant Indians in the case of Gandhi, original inhabitants in South Africa, the Blacks, in the case of Mandela. Gandhi (1869-1948) did not live to see equality between Indians and whites in...

Churchill and Hitler made history but did not change it; after the war their societies found their old forms. Stalin and Mao changed their much bigger societies basically, and gave the Westphalian state system new fault-lines, alliances: anti-Russia-USSR, anti-China-DPRC. There was also a short lasting USSR-DPRC alliance 1949-53, when Stalin was alive. But when he was murdered the banner as leader of the rapidly expanding Communist World was not passed on to the biggest country, but stayed in Moscow. The new leader was not Mao Zedong but the colorless Malenkov. Surface level conflict; and important. But the concept of a monolithic Communist as opposed to a Free world survived in a US mind slow at capturing or admitting deeper aspects of reality, but quick at projecting themselves on the world. The deep differences between the Western civilization of which Russia was and is a part, and Chinese civilization of course...