July 2009

July 21, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Subject: Russia, Europe’s other half. Date: July 21st, 2009. Read it for yourself, and don’t dismiss it, as most western commentators have. The Pan-European Security Treaty, proposed by Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, is worth a read. (Here his 2008 prelude to it with 5 basic principles). Doubtless it can be modified, improved and ambiguities removed. But it makes a lot of sense, and it would be another step forwards to what the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, urged – the creation of a “European house”, that contains Russia as one of its inhabitants. Only those “with one foot in the Cold War”, to quote President Barack Obama on the eve of his recent visit to Moscow, should find it objectionable. Indeed, play down Bolshevism and the Cold Wa r- a period of only 70 years in Russia’s long history – it is a...

July 15, 2009 Gunnar Westerg Perhaps we had expected too much? There had been so many promises. In his speech in Prague in April, President Obama had said: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. That is, Obama had chosen the Road to Zero nuclear weapons. Did he discuss this with the Russian President  Medvedev? No sign of that. Another chance: “… to cut off the building blocks needed for a bomb, the United States will seek a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials intended for use in state nuclear weapons”. Russia and the USA are here basically in agreement. Obama and Medvedev could  have scored an easy point: We will cooperate and make this reality. President Obama  further promised in Prague: “Today, I am announcing a new international effort to secure all vulnerable...

that McNamara “bled inside for what he’d done in Vietnam”. Ward was cross with me for using this quote, understandably so as this was the first time that an intimate friend had gone on the record with McNamara’s inner feelings. She went on to say that over time people would judge him more by what he was initiating in his relatively new job as president of the World Bank. Judging from last week’s obituaries she was wrong about that. Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis and his changing attitude to nuclear weapons dominate present day memories. Yet it is true that what he did at the World Bank is worth remembering, especially his efforts to turn aid in the direction of small farmers. Under his tenure the World Bank spent 30% of its budget on helping small Third World farmers be more productive. Today, as before McNamara, it spends about 10%....

July 6, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – At the summit meeting that opens in Italy on Wednesday the leaders of the G8 are expected to announce a “food security initiative” – an effort to reverse “the tendency of decreasing official development aid to agriculture” and, instead, to increase investment in Third World food production. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Washington spends 20 times more on food aid in Africa than on long term agricultural programmes to develop local food production. A similar bias exists in the policies of the European Union which believes that in food aid it has a good way of dumping its surpluses. Nothing may come of the new promises, as nothing came of the big hoo-ha at the G8 summit four years ago when a massive increase in aid, especially to Africa, was agreed. But if it did happen it is just what the...