Jonathan Power June 22, 2020 Tomorrow the tanks will roll across Moscow’s Red Square. It is the day of the great parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. In the West, it’s not that well-known a fact that the Soviet Union lost many more soldiers and civilians in […]
Jonathan Power June 16, 2020 Perspective and proportion are everything in this Pandemic of Fear that now consumes our attention and our daily lives. With very rare exceptions the media ignores this. As I write there have been world-wide 436,005 deaths from coronavirus. But a remarkable, barely noticed, 4,137,712 have recovered. In comparison, the number […]
Jonathan Power June 9, 2020 Shouldn’t we be Panglossian when it comes to the progress now being made to defeat the Coronavirus? Pangloss in his youth was unreasonably optimistic. He was in Voltaire’s novel “Candide” Candide’s mentor, and coined the phrase, “All this is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” But […]
Jonathan Power June 2, 2020 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has announced that in a month’s time he will start to annex the large-scale Jewish settlements inside Palestinian territory, a step as provocative as one can imagine. Not even President Donald Trump’s administration which has supported Israel with many measures has not gone along […]
Jonathan Power May 26, 2020 Africa is suffering a double whammy after many years of success. The Coronavirus, while not taking down great numbers of people like in Europe, Asia and the Americas, has had a severe impact by curbing its exports in the face of the formers’ severe economic depression. For example, flowers grown […]
Jonathan Power May 19, 2020 The world is supposed to be pulling together to defeat the Coronavirus and to some extent it is. Earlier on Russia sent special equipment to the US and recently the US has sent some to Russia. China has aided Italy and Africa with doctors and equipment. Tiny Cuba, with its […]
Jonathan Power May 13, 2020 The war in Syria has dropped out of the news, like almost everything else, in a time when the Coronavirus seems to dominate all discourse and reporting. But the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to strangle its own country. The Russians continue to bomb on his behalf, terrifying civilians and […]
By Jonathan Power May 5, 2020 With a bit more pushing and – after, unfortunately, a bit more killing – the three remaining serious wars on the planet, in Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen, should come to an end. Then it will be time to take stock on what caused the killing, especially why so many […]
By Jonathan Power April 28, 2020 It might seem that the world is going to pot in a hand-basket. Not quite true. There are ways out. Asia has shown how to deal with the Coronavirus and how to stay politically stable. Europe, with the exception of wise Sweden, has muddled along, following belatedly the conventional […]
By Jonathan Power April 21, 2020 The greatest American foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann was William Pfaff of The International Herald Tribune. He wrote in his path-breaking book, “Barbarian Sentiments” that the US political atmosphere was full of “exhausted ideas, like a dead star”. Nevertheless, “these ideas remain central to the way certain subjects […]