October 2010

26 October, 2010 Jonathan Power First, a guess about the mid-term elections in America. Second, historical facts. The guess: if the Democrats lose their majorities in the House of Representatives and even the Senate it will serve President Barack Obama well in the general election in two years’ time. Obama can use the Republican majority to his advantage: showing up with sharp clarity what the Republicans want to do to substitute for the Obama achievements- the best list of passed legislation and executive decisions made by any president since Franklin Roosevelt. This will give the Republicans an almighty headache as they have no policies they agree on, apart from dismantling the health care bill. An attack on that will fall short as the benefits of it become much more tangible over the next two years. Not least, the Republicans could more easily than hitherto be shown up for the mess...

Georgi Arbatov, who died this month, was the Soviet Union’s supreme two timer. On one side was the Soviet Union. On the other was the US. He spoke to them both, attempting to bring them together. He advised four Soviet leaders. When Mikhail Gorbachev took the top job he became his closest foreign affairs advisor. Gorbachev told his secretary that whenever Arbatov phoned she was to put him right through. He wasn’t exactly a chameleon but he was a fixture in US foreign policy circles where at the height of the Cold War he argued the case for détente, suggesting it was in America’s interest as well as the Soviet Union’s. The USSR, he maintained, was not hostile to the West and wanted to get out of the straightjacket of the Cold War. At times he could sound like an American liberal Democrat. Indeed Senator Edward Kennedy was a friend...

I have just returned from a different world – one I would imagine that the British astronomer, Steven Hawkings, has never thought of. It made me think that if we are making a list of the underdeveloped countries we had better add to that North America and most of Europe and Japan. I’ve been in Norway, the world’s most advanced country, apart from Iceland, in successfully pursuing the art of making women equal. In a week I’ve met all sorts of women- women in high positions in companies, women working whilst the man stays at home with the baby, senior female civil servants and female doctors, who form a majority in the hospitals. I should add to that school girls and female university students who are away ahead of boys in terms of achievement. I don’t want to drown you in statistics but here are a handful of the main...

If Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy as the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom it is now living out in real time its almost forgotten societal dream, an economic-cum-social revolution. The retiring president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, has bequeathed the nation a vibrant capitalist economy with a human face- an economy that has raised income per head quite substantially (it is now twelve times that of India or China), has almost abolished daily hunger and given the large majority of the poor an income supplement in return for families sending their children to school. Still, after 8 years of Lula, the country struggles to stay ahead of its burgeoning population, the inequities of the feudal land system that cast millions into shanty towns and a murder rate in the slum favelas that...