Columnist article

Israel allows its settler movement to go on and on claiming more of the West Bank. Is there nothing that can be done? The might of America, combined with the influence of the European Union and the Arab world, have not been able to halt the territorial growth of Israel. Most American Jews, according to polls, don’t like what is happening, but are seemingly helpless before the shrewd lobbing of long time pressure groups which have built up over decades a disproportionate influence on Congress. They make sure that the large US aid program to Israel continues. In effect, it liberates funds for Israel to build roads and defences for the settlers pushing deep into Palestinian territory. Yet even if the aid were withdrawn, even if the US stopped vetoing UN resolutions that criticize Israel, nothing is likely to change. Israel has the upper hand and will ruthlessly make sure...

“One small step forward by North Korea and the US, 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.” Yes, I was able to write that three years ago. But since then we have plunged from optimism to the darkest pessimism. North Korea has been threatening war against the South, and the US and the South Korea have been upping the ante by holding military exercises close to North Korea. After seven years of erratic US policies under President George W. Bush – met by equally erratic and bellicose North Korean ones – the negotiations ended up almost where they started following the highly fruitful diplomacy in the last days of the Clinton Administration that transformed North Korea from total intransigence to a...

Daily, thousands all over the world read, benefit from and use what we at TFF publishes at our “home”, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Many tell us that we contribute to a less-bad, perhaps even a better, world. Some write us to tell that they don’t know what they would have done had TFF not existed and been a constant voice of criticism of elite power, violence and injustice. Quite often our 70 Associates – indisputably some of the world’s most distinguished experts – have produced early warnings and early proposals in conflict zones and other matters, such as UN reform.  That’s good to hear – particularly since we do not know of anybody else who produces as much as we do exclusively on the basis of people’s donations, around € 20.000 or $ 26.000 per year – only possible because we are all volunteering for the cause of peace! That’s how it has always been....

Dr Pranab Mukherjee, Finance Minister of India, the second fastest growing state in the world, expects India to break through the 10% a year economic growth barrier by the end of next year or early 2012. Then the world’s press will all be talking about the implications of this big race when the horses are going are going at full tilt, neck to neck. In fact, India will appear to be leading by a head if after 20 years of 10% growth China’s falls back a step or two, which is predicted. I was talking two days ago with Dr Mukherjee in his Kolkata home – a simple flat in a modest building, close by a noisy, fumy, honking, main street. He grew up in West Bengal and returns to Kolkata for the weekend as often as he can. He was chosen by Euromoney as the best finance minister in...

I sometimes wonder if the Americans don’t understand the most perceptive, clean and honest politician in Pakistan because they don’t play cricket. Imran Khan, when captain of the Pakistan team, was feted round the cricketing world. Even here in India, 9 years after he “retired” he remains a hero. No other Pakistani has more reach into Indian affections than Imran Khan. Not so long ago I sat next to him at a private dinner party in Islamabad. For over an hour we talked about the ins and outs of volatile and ultra destructive Pakistani politics. Head of his own small political party he made no effort to browbeat me with his youthful charisma. Instead, I found a careful, lucid, almost ordinary guy, showing me the way to cut through the labyrinth of Pakistan’s often destructive, sometimes deadly, political minefields. He could never be accused of being Anti-American or Anti-European. Yet...

Will historians a hundred years hence look at the end of the twentieth century much as we now look at the end of the nineteenth and say, “unfortunately the peace and prosperity of that moment was but an interlude before the bloodiest century in mankind’s history?” Will they conclude, as Aldous Huxley did, that “Every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later, by war, by threats of war, preparations for war? That is the truth, the odious and unacceptable truth.” Is it? Last weekend’s successful Nato summit with Russia in attendance showed that old tensions can be buried. The agreement to work together on missile defence and other military issues shows that both presidents Barack Obama and Dimitri Mevedev understand the need to cooperate to maintain and further their peace unlike their immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, the pessimists of our day have grist for their mill...

when in a flurry of diplomatic activity over the Spratlys, Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, worked his way round the Southeast Asian countries which also lay claim to the islands. Even this month there have been naval exercises  in the South China SeaThe trip was only a partial success. Mr Zhu did his best with a tight brief to give the impression that China is more interested in conciliation than conflict. Nevertheless, his spokesman indicated that China is not prepared to modify its total and exclusive claim to “the historic waters” of the South China Sea. Even in recent months there have near clashes between China and the Philippines – and, long continuing, China has verbally clashed with Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Philippines. All of the smaller countries are united in believing that the threat from China will continue to hang over them until there is a binding legal...

Georgi Arbatov, who died this month, was the Soviet Union’s supreme two timer. On one side was the Soviet Union. On the other was the US. He spoke to them both, attempting to bring them together. He advised four Soviet leaders. When Mikhail Gorbachev took the top job he became his closest foreign affairs advisor. Gorbachev told his secretary that whenever Arbatov phoned she was to put him right through. He wasn’t exactly a chameleon but he was a fixture in US foreign policy circles where at the height of the Cold War he argued the case for détente, suggesting it was in America’s interest as well as the Soviet Union’s. The USSR, he maintained, was not hostile to the West and wanted to get out of the straightjacket of the Cold War. At times he could sound like an American liberal Democrat. Indeed Senator Edward Kennedy was a friend...

I have just returned from a different world – one I would imagine that the British astronomer, Steven Hawkings, has never thought of. It made me think that if we are making a list of the underdeveloped countries we had better add to that North America and most of Europe and Japan. I’ve been in Norway, the world’s most advanced country, apart from Iceland, in successfully pursuing the art of making women equal. In a week I’ve met all sorts of women- women in high positions in companies, women working whilst the man stays at home with the baby, senior female civil servants and female doctors, who form a majority in the hospitals. I should add to that school girls and female university students who are away ahead of boys in terms of achievement. I don’t want to drown you in statistics but here are a handful of the main...

If Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy as the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom it is now living out in real time its almost forgotten societal dream, an economic-cum-social revolution. The retiring president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, has bequeathed the nation a vibrant capitalist economy with a human face- an economy that has raised income per head quite substantially (it is now twelve times that of India or China), has almost abolished daily hunger and given the large majority of the poor an income supplement in return for families sending their children to school. Still, after 8 years of Lula, the country struggles to stay ahead of its burgeoning population, the inequities of the feudal land system that cast millions into shanty towns and a murder rate in the slum favelas that...

, just as it did in 1894 and 1932. Three hundred years ago both India and China, by world standards, were heavyweight economies. But even at their zenith they never considered going to war, as the Europeans regularly did. Neither do they today, even though one school of Indian strategists argue with no real evidence that China is India’s enemy number one, not Pakistan. They say that India had to develop a nuclear arsenal not because of a possible Pakistani threat but because of China. Nevertheless, it is true that China has been raising its defence spending, especially on its navy (but from a very low base) – in sharp contrast to the days of Deng Xiaoping, the great economic reformer, who put China on its present high growth capitalist projectory, at the same time sharply cut defence spending. China is active abroad – in Africa it has become its...

On its submarines Britain has 48 nuclear warheads, each one eight times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. In other words, theoretically Prime Minister James Cameron could order the almost instant incineration of 384 large cities around the world. Barely anyone in parliament mentioned it, much less debated it in the many years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in office. Not before its time the coalition government of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats appears to be gearing up for a decision, partly because the missiles are slowly but steadily wearing out and partly because many senior voices in the military in the post Cold War world would like to see the money spent on other, more immediately useful, weapons, transport. Many Conservative and Liberal Democrat members of parliament are doubtful about the value of an independent nuclear deterrent. Perhaps there is a window of opportunity for...