November 2008

November 26, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – For readers under 35 this will probably be news: from the time of President Richard Nixon to the end of the presidency of George W. Bush the consuming, most visible, foreign policy passion of successive governments, including both Democratic and Republican, was nuclear arms control – attempts, sometimes successful, for modest mutual cuts in nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But since the days of President Bill Clinton the passion has totally ebbed. Apart from the fact this is not a good reason to make such an intimate Clintonite as Hilary Clinton secretary of state, it also reflects a lethargy among the big nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, the U.K, France and China, that comes to us all when passion dies and routine takes over. The Cold War is dead and out. And whatever the clashes today between the West...

Intervju med Dagens Nyheter Read more.

LONDON – ”Consensus, compromise and commerce”. These should be the loadstars for president-elect Barack Obama as he prepares himself to take over the misshapen and counterproductive policies of his predecessor towards Iran. Years of hostile diplomacy, reaching back to the hostage crisis under the presidency of Jimmy Carter , through to the rebuff by President Bill Clinton of Iran’s president when he suggested a serious dialogue, to the ”axis of evil”, in-your-face non-diplomacy of the Bush years, have all angered Iran. Moreover, it has had the serious side effect of depriving international markets of the full abundance of Iranian oil, which has been a major contributor to higher than necessary oil prices. The pedigree of hostility suggests that it not just Iran’s perceived pursuit of nuclear weapons that upsets Washington and its European partners but the whole stance of Iran to the world since the pro-Western Shah was overthrown and a...

Blogg om vad han och andra ofogare gör för att hindra att svenska vapen dödar människor runt om i världen. See också Smedjeback på YouTube Read more.

with President Wilson’s aim to create a League of Nations. He failed not because of his idealism, or his commitment to solving disputes without major war, but because his tactics with regard to Senate ratification of the treaty were unnecessarily stubborn. Wilson also decried the European balance of power system (a favourite geopolitical cause of Henry Kissinger): “Now, revive that after the [First World] war is over and, sooner or later, you will have just such another war.” We can go even further back, although not many commentators do, to the time of Theodore Roosevelt. He successfully mediated the Russo-Japanese war, for which he received the Nobel peace prize. It was he in fact, not Wilson, who was the first president to propose a league of nations. He called it the “World League for the Peace of Righteousness”, a title which would have him laughed out of court in today’s...

A sort of global election and enthusiasm This historic victory by Barrack Obama is the first truly global election that has been celebrated by people around the world as if they had been voting participants. The reelection of George W. Bush in 2004 was also a national election with global reverberations, but it only aroused widespread feelings of fear and resentment around the world, and no sense of participation. What we are slowly learning is that the United States is the first global state, and as such, its elections become a global, as well as a national, event. From this perspective it is not surprising that peoples throughout the world follow American presidential campaigns and either cheer or lament their outcome. What may be still unappreciated is that for many societies these American elections seem to generate more interest and enthusiasm than do elections in their own country. Barrack Obama’s landslide victory...

November 5, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – If only Martin Luther King could wake from the dead! And his faithful deputy, Ralph Abernathy. And Bayard Rustin who organized the Great March on Washington in 1963 that roused American public opinion to push for the landmark Civil Rights Act that abolished Southern segregation. And the militant Stokley Carmichael who led the students, both black and white, to knock on every black door in the small towns and byways of the South to mobilize them to vote. And, not least, President Lyndon Johnson who, putting his own racist past behind him, used his formidable political energy to push through Congress both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. If only they could rise up what would they see? Would they believe that one, Barack Hussein Obama, son of an African, educated as a small child in Indonesia where he was...