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LONDON–You can interpret it on any level you like–that the Russians are inherently incompetent and had it coming to them; that Russia is wonderfully machiavellian and having failed to overpower the west with communism is now undermining it with capitalism; or that the situation could have been salvaged as recently as a couple of weeks ago if only President Bill Clinton was not mired in controversy and Chancellor Helmut Kohl was too tightly focused on winning re-election. The truth is more prosaic: it is the West’s chickens coming home to roost. If the western powers had gambled 2% of NATO’s budget and met the Soviet Union’s economic needs in Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost era there would have been a much less de-stabilising transition. Then, having misjudged that window of opportunity, preferring Boris Yeltsin for reasons that now appear rather ludicrous–he seemed fresher, more pro-western and more democratic – – they missed...

LUND, SWEDEN—If you want to win a lot of money in a three way political bet, then gamble that by the end of the autumn that Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Goran Persson will all be still firmly in office. No one should underestimate how fine grind the wheels of the American legal system. But, in the end, whether Clinton goes or stays is a political matter. No Congress of the United States would want to go down in history as the one that stripped a president of office for breaking his marital vows and lying to cover this up. Even if the stock market should plummet and Clinton’s poll ratings drop precipitously, nothing can change this very basic political fact. In Germany Helmut Kohl, after 16 non-stop years in the Chancellor’s chair, looks set for defeat in next month’s general election. But don’t believe it until you see it....

STOCKHOLM–In spite of America’s surprise attacks on terrorist refuges many American foreign policy commentators are perturbed by Bill Clinton’s way of dealing with the world, even as American public opinion welcomes a presidency with a low body count and an absence of bloody overseas engagements. Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post calls it “soft” power and one need look no further than the White House effort to tell the UN arms inspectors in Iraq to cool it, the most recent example, to see that it is the way Clinton foreign policy appears to be heading. Whether it be Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, North Korea, the Congo, Clintonesque foreign policy is becoming increasingly of the live and let live variety. Whether this is driven by the distractions of the Monica Lewinsky business or by some carefully thought out brainstorming is unclear. Certainly the media is no more interested in reporting an...

LONDON–India and Pakistan have had a jolly month playing with matches. Just to show the world how responsible they are with their new-found nuclear arsenals they ve traded fire almost daily over and around the border that separates the two halves of the disputed state of Kashmir, killing over 90 soldiers and civilians. Not a bad month s work for two nations that in their pre-nuclear state twice have been to war over this idyllic piece of Himalayan real estate. Both Indian and Pakistani policy makers seem blithely unaware of the immense self-discipline that kept the U.S. and the Soviet Union from letting off their missiles in the days of their nuclear stand-off, aptly named the Cold War. Fighting of any kind, much less nuclear war, was frozen. There was never a single Russian or American soldier killed by the other side. Just as important was the military self-discipline of...

I år är det tjugofyra år sedan den turkiska interventionen på Cypern som ledde till att ön delades. Grek- och turkcyprioter har sedan dess levt åtskilda på var sin sida om den buffertzon som skär tvärs igenom ön. För grekcyprioterna var interventionen och den efterföljande ockupationen av norra Cypern en nationell katastrof. Hundratusentals grekcyprioter tvingades lämna sina hem i norr och lever som flyktingar på den södra delen av ön. För den turkcypriotiska minoriteten däremot sågs interventionen, eller “fredsoperationen” som den kallas av turkcyprioterna, som en räddning undan Cyperns hotande anslutning till Grekland. Målet om enosis delades vid denna tid av den dåvarande militärjuntan i Aten och de kuppmakare som några dagar tidigare störtat den cypriotiske presidenten Makarios. Den 20 juli varje år firar turkcyprioterna därför denna dag, “Fred och frihetsdagen”, likt en nationaldag. Till skillnad från grekcyprioterna har turkcyprioterna accepterat öns delning och funnit sig tillrätta på den norra...

STOCKHOLM–How it looks, it is often said, depends on where you sit. The Financial Times reported General Alexander Lebed’s public letter as a serious front page story. The International Herald Tribune relegated it to an inside page with a headline that suggested it must be a Lebed joke. The new governor of Siberia was reported as threatening to take over a local missile base and its portion of Russia’s nuclear arsenal with it. Meanwhile the Russian parliament, the Duma, has started once again impeachment proceedings against Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Always the number one accusation is that Yeltsin initiated the breakup of the Soviet Union whose denouement, if Lebed is not joking, is still to come. No one inside Russia says it, but the truth becomes more apparent every day if Mikhail Gorbachev had stayed in power and engineered a gentler transition, not only would the Soviet Union be whole,...

LONDON–Does the U.S. have permanent interests even if perhaps it doesn’t believe it has permanent friends? Its performance the last two months over the negociations to create an International Criminal Court suggests that it doesn’t care a toss whether Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Denmark, Spain, or most of the world for that matter, think it’s important. Indeed, during the tense stand-off in Rome earlier in the month it went so far as to threaten its NATO allies with pulling its troops out of Europe if they didn’t kowtow to the American line and water down the court’s independence. Quite rightly, the allies called Washington’s bluff and pushed the issue to a vote. When 120 nations voted for the creation of the court and only 8 against, (the U.S., China, Israel, Libya, Quatar, India and Iraq what interesting bedfellows!) the chamber erupted into the kind of cheering more heard on the...

LONDON–When Mahbub ul Haq died in New York last week the traffic did not stop, nor did the United Nations, for which he had done so much, lower its flag. But all over the world, people who have been touched by the special wisdom of this astonishing man, felt their hearts miss a beat. He left behind one of the few great ideas of the twentieth century. When he died he was preparing to join Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, in San Francisco in a private seminar with some of the world’s most influential minds. Simply put, Dr Haq was the greatest living expert on measuring human progress. Formerly Pakistan s minister of finance, for seven years he was the creator and continuing intellectual force behind The Human Development Report , published annually by the United Nations Development Program. In his years in ministerial office he...

LONDON–War is today sweeping Kosovo. The UN-brokered peace is breaking down in Angola. In Rwanda, Hutu militiamen killed 34 Tutsis watching the World Cup in an hotel. We hear about it all and ring our hands in despair at the ethnic hatred that now seems to be unhindered by the disciplines imposed by the exigencies of big power politics during the Cold War. What we don’t do much of is to look at it in, should I say, more positive terms. What use is conflict? In whose interest is it waged? We assume too blithely that these wars happen despite the intentions of rational people. In fact they happen often BECAUSE of the intentions of thinking people. War is often not simply a breakdown of the system but a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and protection. To paraphrase Clausewitz, war has increaingly become the continuation of...

To be published in The Times of India Nuclearism is the ideology of nuclear weaponry and nuclear arms-based security. It is the most depraved, shameless, and costly pornography of our times. Such an ideology cannot be judged only by the canons of international relations, geopolitics, political sociology, or ethics. It is also a well known, identifiable, psychopathological syndrome. The following is a brief introduction to its clinical picture, epidemiology, and prognosis. Nuclearism does not reside in institutions, though it may set up, symbolise, or find expression in social and political institutions. It is an individual pathology and has clear identifiers. Many years ago, Brian Isley argued in his book, Fathering the Unthinkable, that nuclearism went with strong masculinity strivings. Isley was no psychologist, but the works of Carol Cohn’s and others have endorsed the broad contours of Isley’s analysis. They show that not only the language and ideology, but the...

LONDON–It would be fair to assume that while in China President Bill Clinton didn’t give much thought to Israel and the Palestinians. Even before he left Washington his whole body language seemed to suggest, “What more can I do? They’ve really got to work it out between them.” The steam has gone out of American diplomacy. Israel’s prime minister, the sand-blaster, Benjamin Netanyahu, has won the battle of attrition but lost the war for peace. In retrospect, it appears that the Clinton Administration saw this coming–only six weeks ago Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publically lectured Netanyahu saying, in so many words, that nothing had happened in the two years since he became prime minister and underlined the barb with praise for the cooperative attitude of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. The Clinton Administration feel they’ve lent their weight to what was essentially a pro-Netanyahu compromise on the next stage...

LONDON – Two questions: Do we all accept that present day outbursts of ethnic hatred are due more to leadership manipulation than ancient animosities? And are we prepared, as a counter to this, to subordinate national loyaltiesbefore a law that transcends individual cultures and societies? If the answer is yes to both then common sense suggests there should be no roadblocks in the way of bringing to a speedy conclusion the negociations that opened in Rome this week to finalize the details on the establishment of a World Criminal Court, a body that will have the right to bring the likes of Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and Radovan Karadzic to justice. It is, no less, the most exciting judicial idea to come on the world scene since the writing of the American Bill of Rights in 1791. But we are not dealing with common sense. We are dealing with...