Iran Collage # 1 by Jan Oberg By Jan Oberg August 27, 2019 On August 21, 2019, Iran’s foreign minister, Dr. Javad Zarif, gave a speech at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI. Zarif spoke at length without a manuscript, in details and with references to facts and history of the region and the […]
By Jan Oberg August 22, 2019 Dr. Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, yesterday spoke at SIPRI – the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (At the moment of writing nothing comes up on its homepage when searching his name but you may see his speech and the discussion that followed here). I was asked by Iran’s […]
Media comment by Jan Oberg August 21, 2019 On August 19, 2019, Javad Zarif, the foreign minister of Iran, visited Finland to persuade it – and the rest of Europe – to stand up more firmly for the nuclear deal, JCPOA, from July. But the prospect is bleak…
By Jonathan Power August 6, 2019 – Hiroshima Day If MAD was Mad then the decision of President Donald Trump to renounce the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) is MADDER. MAD is Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept which underlay the nuclear deterrence of the Cold War. Presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began the hard […]
August 3, 2019 The following statement on US warmongering in relation to Iran was prepared by Mark LeVine, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine and myself. Some of the early signatories are among the leading scholars in the field of Middle East Studies. Their names are listed below. It seeks to make two major […]
August 3, 2019 By Prabir Purkayastha The U.S. plans for a naval armada in Hormuz will run against the Laws of Seas and Iran’s sovereignty over its territorial waters. We are now sleepwalking to a new war in the region with disastrous consequences. The stage is now set for a disastrous collision between the U.S.-UK […]
By Jan Oberg August 1, 2019 The Trump administration imposed sanction on Iran’s foreign minister, Dr. Mohammad Javad Zarif last night – as if the present intensified sanctions – primary on Iran and secondary on, in principle, everybody else, were not enough already. Here is AlJazeera’s story which also includes Iranian President Rouhani’s and Zarif’s […]
By Jonathan Power July 30, 2019 In 2010 the signatory states of the International Criminal Court, established to prosecute war crimes, convened a conference to add aggression to the list of crimes the court could try. (See the Rome Statute here, the relevant provisions and definitions of the concept of “aggression” are described in Article […]
Illustration by Craig Stephens, South China Morning Post By Christopher Black July 26th 2019 On June 4th the Chinese government issued a travel alert for Chinese tourists thinking of visiting the United States, a day after it issued a similar advisory to Chinese students thinking of studying in the US over concerns for their safety […]
By Jonathan Power July 24, 2019 There’s never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states. If Iran one day did cross the nuclear threshold the same deterrence will apply. No one rational would want to provoke their own incineration. Columbia University professor, Kenneth Waltz, the distinguished theorist on the conduct of war, wrote in […]