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 […]
By Jan Oberg The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has published a fine short and informative video on the tragedy that August 2, 2019, marks for Europe. Comment by Jan Oberg, August 2nd, 2019 Today is a tragic day for Europe, indeed for the world – but do the media highlight that fact on […]
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 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 […]
By Richard Falk July 23, 2019 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 […]
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 […]
By Richard Falk July 20, 2019 On July 9, 2004 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague issued an Advisory Opinion by a vote of 14-1, with the American judge the lone dissenter, as if there would have been any doubt about such identity even if not disclosed. The decision rendered in response […]