TFF Blog

Somebody once said that courage is when you do something today you wouldn’t dare doing yesterday. That is why I decided to express my opinion whereas normally I would choose – wisely – to restrain my lips. Have you ever had an opportunity to speak with your friends about migrants and mass immigration? Especially with your international friends living in different parts of the world and changing their residence like migrating birds? How do you explain your views if they differ from the usual, dominating or politically correct one? Or, how do you actually explain that you are against immigration without risking being categorized as a racist? During my latest visit to Switzerland, while conversing with a friend about many topics including politics, somehow we started discussing immigration. My friend’s opinion was that Swiss people may seem cold and distant, but in reality they are very open-minded and friendly to...

With due respect, Mr. Pompeo, civilisation’s clock should be ticking for what I allow myself to consider inhuman, unfair and tension-creating policies such as those you conduct. You and your President constantly tell others not to do what the US itself does tenfold worse – because, as it seems, you believe in exceptionalism and yourselves as God’s chosen people. I’ve always admired the American society for its innovative, creative and idealistic qualities. As much as I’ve loathed its imperialism, militarism, nuclearism and its fundamental inability to respect the world’s diversity. Sadly and thanks to hubris and lack of humility, the good sides of your socieety are now widely overshadowed by its (self)destructive propensities. And that’s why the West is declining and the Rest is ascending. Do something about your own clock! Do something good for the welfare and security of your own citizens at home. And try for once to...

Trump besøger Danmark, og verdens økonomiske og militære supermagt har haft travlt over sommeren med at håndtere konflikter med Kina, Rusland, Iran, Sverige og Tyrkiet. For USA er altid en af parterne i verdens konflikter, og måske vi skulle tale med den amerikanske præsident om netop det?   Onsdag den 31. juli 2019 kunne man læse i de danske medier, at den amerikanske præsident Donald Trump og hans kone Melania Trump besøger Danmark den 2-3. september 2019. Det er en stor nyhed, for det sker kun sjældent, at verdens muligvis mægtigste menneske besøger Danmark. I juli 1997 holdt Bill Clinton tale på Kongens Nytorv i København foran 80.000 mennesker, hvor han takkede Danmark for deltagelsen i krigen i Bosnien. I juli 2005 kom George W. Bush og besøgte Anders Fogh, der sammen to år forinden havde kastet deres nationer ind i Irak-krigen uden FN-mandat. I 2009 kom Barack Obama forbi...

/07/31/the-law-against-aggression/”>illegal according to the Rome Statute. There is also the 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice to back up that assertion. The argument concerning terrorism has to do with the fact that it is a central element in any definition of the concept of terrorism that it implies a deliberate attempt to harm or kill innocent people – people who are not party to a conflict – in order to instill fear and achieve a political purpose. And there is no way nuclear weapons can be used without killing masses of innocent people. Therefore, they should have no place in a civilized society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-GftG4fThI

– 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 work of dismantling MAD with the INF, a treaty affecting the land-based missiles of Europe. It abolished missiles with a range of 500 to 2000 kilometres. They were dangerous beyond their size (small relative to Inter-continental missiles), more dangerous in the sense that their flying time was a short ten minutes, which made pre-emptive action by Russia truly a possibility and nuclear war then a near certainty. No wonder that the abrogation of the INF has been treated by dismay by many people inside the Pentagon and the State Department and among nuclear strategists in EU countries. In the forthcoming issue...

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 arguments: First, that the unlawful threats and coercive moves made by the United States point toward a political disaster that would include the commission of the most serious of international crimes, that of aggression via threats and uses of force that do not constitute self-defense under international law; and Secondly, that it is essential to shift the relationship with Iran from one based on coercive to an approach resting on restorative diplomacy involving a deliberate reversal of American Foreign Policy with the overriding objective of normalization of relations between our two countries. Statement by leading Middle East/Islamic studies...

, marks for Europe. Comment Today is a tragic day for Europe, indeed for the world – but do the media highlight that fact on their front pages? Of course, they don’t. The INF Treaty has made Europe less insecure since 1987. But Russia and the US have accused each other of violating it. The bigger reasons for this tragedy are that a) there is a new Cold War in Europe and b) since other countries are now able to develop similar INF weapons – Inter-mediate range Nuclear Forces (INF) with the particular range mentioned in this movie – they want to have their hands free. And, one might almost say, as usual – the policies of the US have spearheaded today’s tragedy, particularly with the totally counterproductive and de factor offensive Ballistic Missile Defence, BMD, that Russia – legitimately – sees as a threat. Just listen to a man...

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 own – witty – response to the move. The Trump administration thereby continues its one-sided provocative tension escalation making it more and more difficult to envision a peaceful solution to what is, in a larger perspective, an ongoing harassment of major regional power and a 7000–year-old civilisation since the CIA-led coup d’etat against the first democratically elected Iran Prime Minister Dr. Mossadegh in 1953. Dr. Zarif – whom I happen to have had the honour of saying hello to at a conference in Tehran and whose work I have followed over several years – is not only one of the world’s...

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 8, page 7). The US, Russia, Iran, China and India have refused to sign up as ICC members and have not welcomed the addition of “aggression”. But fifteen NATO states have. Moreover, Russia wrote its own law into its Criminal Code. It prohibits “Planning, Preparing or Waging an Aggressive War”. It goes further: it prohibits “Public Appeals to Unleash an Aggressive War”. This opens the door to Russian leaders and politicians being prosecuted in domestic courts. In the US under President Barack Obama, there was serious discussion about whether to prosecute those who had committed torture. It would have been popular...

By Gordon M. Hahn July 25, 2019 NATO expansion has contributed to the causal matrix of two wars: the 2008 Georgian-South Ossetiyan/Russian Five-Day War and the ongoing Donbass civil war. The West’s April 2008 promise that both Georgia and Ukraine will become NATO members encouraged Georgian nationalism and Saakashvili’s war in South Ossetiya and consequently led to Georgia’s de facto loss of its South Ossetiyan as well as Abkhaziyan territories. Originally published on Gordon M. Hahn homepage – while Poroshenko was still president. Similarly, NATO expansion encouraged the rise of ultranationalism in Ukraine, especially western Ukraine, and the ultra-nationalist-led February 2014 Maidan revolt, leading to Ukraine’s loss of Crimea and civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. NATO expansion now is poised to help re-start the Donbass civil war or spark a larger Ukrainian civil war (and/or similar conflicts involving Moldova and its breakaway republic of...

I make no claim to approach this book with an open mind. Making a fuller disclosure, I acknowledge with some pride that I have endorsed Justice for Some even before it was published, and my blurb appears on its back cover. Beyond this, two months ago I took part in a book launch at George Mason University where Noura Erakat is on the faculty. My effort in this review is not to make a calm appraisal of the book’s strengths and weaknesses, but rather to celebrate it as a major scholarly contribution to the critical literature devoted to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle in line with the dictates of justice rather than by a continuing reliance on muscular weight of subjugation as augmented by geopolitics. And, accordingly, to seize this opportunity to urge a careful reading of Justice for Some by all those interested in the Palestinian struggle as well as those...

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 Foreign Affairs that with Israel possessing over 200 nuclear weapons (which the US refuses to publically admit) Iran having a bomb would bring stability. I would never go as far as Waltz on that last point. The launch of nuclear weapons can always be done by accident or by the rogue action of one or two of the members of the launch team in the silo. It has nearly happened in the US a number of times, and probably in the Soviet Union too. Moreover, if Iran got really close to building a bomb, Saudi Arabia would follow in short order,...