World order/governance

From Kyoto, Japan It has never been this bad since the 1950-53 Korea war. October 1962, the Cuba-USSR-USA crisis, comes to mind. There were horror visions of mushroom clouds. A proud Cuba, with a strong leader-dictatorship, a social revolution in the near past, was denied a normal place in the state system, bullied by the USA and some allies with sanctions and boycotts into isolation for now more than 50 years. Soviet Union shipped nuclear-tipped missiles for deployment as close to USA as the US missiles deployed in Turkey to Soviet Union. And in that was the solution, tit for tat, one nuclear threat for the other, in negotiations kept secret, ultimately revealed by McNamara. Three countries were involved in 1962; in the current crisis five countries, a pentagon and not two but three nuclear powers: North Korea < – > China South Korea < – > Japan < U.S....

The BRICS just became impossible to ignore. At the close of the Fifth annual BRICS Summit in Durban, South Africa last week, there was little question that this group of five fast-growing economies was underwriting an overhaul of the global economic and political order. The eThekwini Declaration issued at summit’s end was couched in non-confrontational language, but it was manifestly clear that western hegemony and unipolarity were being targeted at this meeting. The BRICS hit some major western sore spots by announcing the formation of a $50 billion jointly-funded development bank to rival the IMF and World Bank. Deals were signed to increase inter-BRICS trade in their own currencies, further eroding the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. A series of unmistakable challenges were dealt to old world leaders: reform your institutions and economies – or we’ll do it ourselves. Intent on filling a leadership void in global...

Keynote Speech – Doha, Qatar Peak Oil: Challenges and Opportunities in the GCC-Gulf Cooperation Council Countries Distinguished Participants! The organizers deserve high praise for setting this key, almost existential for some, issue on the agenda for an international conference. Oil and gas being limited there obviously is a peak–in the North Sea some years ago for Denmark, the UK and Norway. But this conference is not only about whether the peak is behind us, right now, in the future, and in that case when; but about and then what. Diagnosis, prognosis, therapy. However, the peak may be more due to demand than to supply; more due to the problems caused by converting the energy stored in fossil fuels than to the extraction becoming too expensive to pay off. To the contrary, the more expensive the higher the profits as percentage of the costs, and given the oil-gas addiction the richest...

Economic power: the West being overtaken by the Rest, with growth rates for the USA, Euro zone and Japan being respectively 0.1, -0.9, -0.2 (Italy -2.8), against Brazil 1.4, Russia 2.9, India 4.5, China 7.9.[i] BRIC. Military power: the West being defeated by the Rest, now paying dearly for the missing peace treaty and normalization with North Korea; with the Viêt Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq anti-terror wars lost, and Libya and Mali, Syria and Iran immune to “military solutions”; Political power: the West as minority, the UN General Assembly rejecting 138 to 9 with 41 abstentions the US veto approach to Israel; Cultural power: non-Western models of development, like Buddhist and Muslim, Japanese and Chinese add to “Western universalism”; Social power: focused on domestic power and increasing social inequalities expressed as indignation, Occupy and Arab Spring, now focused on the ratio between CEO and average worker income: getting it down...

It was master-crafted as an ingratiating speech by the world’s most important leader and the government that has most consistently championed Israel’s cause over the decades. Enthusiastically received by the audience of Israeli youth, and especially by liberal Jews around the world. Despite the venue, President Obama’s words in Jerusalem on March 21st seemed primarily intended to clear the air somewhat in Washington. Obama may now have a slightly better chance to succeed in his second legacy-building presidential term despite a deeply polarized U.S. Congress, and a struggling American economy if assessed from the perspective of workers’ distress rather than on the basis of robust corporate profits.

By Farhang Jahanpour
 Published about 10 years ago on July 3, 2003 If Usama bin Laden is still alive – and the indications are that he is – he must be feeling very pleased with himself, because his terrible terrorist activities are beginning to bear fruit, and his main aim of polarising the world and creating a clash of civilisations is on the point of fruition. His call to the Muslims of the world, “you are either with the faithful believers or with the infidels”, seems to have been echoed by President Bush’s insistence that “you are either with us or with the terrorists.” Last summer I visited the United States after many years. I was very pleased to find that the Americans have regained their composure after the dreadful events of 11th September and that they are the same positive, optimistic, friendly and hospitable people that they have always...

The Democrats who voted to support the war and rationalized that vote by making false claims about Iraq’s WMD programs – a minority of Democrats, but much over-represented in Democratic leadership councils – were responsible for allowing the Bush administration to get away with lying about Iraq’s alleged threat. Here on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is important to remember that it was not just those in the Bush White House who were responsible for the tragedy, but leading members of Congress as well, some of whom are now in senior positions in the Obama administration. Continue reading at truthout

After a decade of combat, casualties, massive displacement, persisting violence, enhanced sectarian tension and violence between Shi’ias and Sunnis, periodic suicide bombings, and autocratic governance, a negative assessment of the Iraq War as a strategic move by the United States, United Kingdom, and a few of their secondary allies, including Japan, seems near universal. Not only the regionally destabilizing outcome, including the blowback effect of perversely adding weight to Iran’s overall diplomatic influence, but the reputational costs in the Middle East associated with an imprudent, destructive, and failed military intervention make the Iraq War the worst American foreign policy disaster since its defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s, and undertaken with an even less persuasive legal, moral, and political rationale. Most geopolitical accounting assessments do not bother to consider the damage to the United Nations and international law arising from an aggressive use of force in flagrant violation of the...

Book Review ZERO: THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION By David Krieger (published in 2013 by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation); $14.95 I have known David Krieger for the past twenty-five years, and he has never wavered, even for a day, from his lifelong journey dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. If I were given to categorization, I would label such an extraordinary engagement with a cause as an instance of ‘benign fanaticism.’ Unfortunately, from the perspective of the human future, it is a rather rare condition, posing the puzzle as to why Krieger should be so intensely inclined, given his seemingly untraumatized background. He traces his own obsession back to his mother’s principled refusal to install a bomb shelter in the backyard of their Los Angeles home when he was 12 years old. He comments in the Preface to ZERO that...

The Weekly Mirror published Mondays in Kathmandu is a remarkable mirror of the world seen from above. Prem Kumari Pant, the editor, is a Nepali in the country where Buddha was born in Lumbini. Buddhism, now 9% as against hinduism-brahmanism 80%, migrated to India, and was forced south to Sri Lanka where 5th century buddhist monks invented the Mahawamsa doctrine. They were the “chosen people”, by the Buddha, to make Sri Lanka a home for buddhism. They had not only the right but the duty to eliminate Tamil claims on a part of the land: Go home to where you came from; Sri Lanka is our homeland, language, religion; no buddhist nonviolence and compassion. Prem Kumari Pant is also chairperson of the Nepal-China society.

Political life is filled with policy choices that are made mainly on the basis of calculations of advantage, as well as reflecting priorities and values of those with the power of decision. In a constitutional framework of governance the rule of law sets outer limits as to permissible outcomes. The legitimacy of the decision depends on adhering to these procedural guidelines, and the fact that if the societal effects turn out badly it can be corrected by altering the ‘law.’ Of course, all sorts of special interests behind the scene manipulate this process, and the public debate mirrors these pressures. The results of highly contested policy choices usually reflect the power structure (class, race, ideology) more than they do the outcome of rational detached assessments of the public good. At present, the national public good in the United States is being held hostage to the lethal extremism of the gun...

This article was originally published by Truthout. Any great and important goal requires boldness to be achieved. Leadership itself requires boldness and persistence. Shortly after assuming office in 2009, President Obama demonstrated this boldness in a widely acclaimed speech in Prague. To rousing applause, he said, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, in the next breath, he reversed direction, offering a familiar reassurance to the military-industrial-governmental complex: “I’m not naïve,” he said. “This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence.” Before finishing this coded message to the security establishment back home, he reversed direction once again, declaring, “But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can.’” In a...