Category: OPINION

Viewpoint by Shastri Ramachandaran *

BEIJING (IDN) – Tashkent and Seoul were both in the news in the last week of June, for events which may have set in motion changes with far-reaching consequences for power equations in Asia and the Asia-Pacific. Hence, the two cities may well be remembered as the trigger-point of developments on which Sino-Russian strategic partnership may have an impact.

Seoul was the venue for the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) plenary, which frustrated India’s attempts to gain entry. Around the same time, although Tashkent was witness to more momentous events, the bilateral meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping stole the thunder. Only because the Modi-Xi meeting was about India’s bid for NSG membership, widely publicized as enjoying unstinted U.S. support.

Viewpoint by Rana Allam and Sanam Naraghi Anderlini

Rana Allam is WASL Senior Editor and Former Editor of Daily News Egypt. Sanam Naraghi Anderlini is Co-Founder, ICAN.

WASHINGTON DC (IDN) – On July 4 as Americans celebrated independence from a King that “obstructed the Administration of Justice…sent hither swarms of Officers to harass people… kept among [the people], in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of legislatures…and render[ed] the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power”, Egyptians commemorated the rise of just such a king in their midst in 2013, and they wonder why the U.S. continues to support such a repressive ruler in Egypt today, when the same was intolerable for Americans 200 years ago.

With news of daily bombings and crises across the Middle East, it is no surprise that Egypt is absent from the news headlines, but the events that have been unfolding there since 2013 are warning signs of a much greater looming crisis, if attention isn’t paid soon.

Viewpoint by Karen Donfried *

WASHINGTON (IDN | GMF) – The implications of the Brexit vote are stark, not only for the United Kingdom and for the European Union, but also for the United States. Since the end of World War II, successive U.S. administrations have strongly supported the project of European economic and political integration – initially, to ensure peace among the continent’s great powers; more recently, to enlarge the area of democratic stability and economic prosperity across the continent. 

For seven decades, the U.S. security umbrella, represented by the NATO Alliance, helped defend our European allies and gave them the opportunity to concentrate on building the European Community and later the European Union (EU). With the U.K. poised to leave the EU, leadership from the United States is needed to keep the U.K. and its continental partners working closely together in NATO and beyond in the aftermath of last week’s referendum.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – NATO has just announced a plan to send troops to the Alliance’s eastern flank, close to the Russian border. NATO says it is attempting to deter potential Russian aggression.

The UK, the U.S., Canada and Germany will lead four battle groups to be based in Poland and the Baltic states. Diplomats say the troops will be a deterrent to Russian aggression by acting as a “tripwire” that would trigger a full response from the alliance if necessary

On June 26, 2016 the foreign minister of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, condemned Western “sabre-rattling and war cries”. He said, “Anyone who believes the symbolic tank parades on the Alliance’s eastern border will increase security is wrong”.

Viewpoint by Shastri Ramachandaran*

BEIJING (IDN) – India’s failure to break into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) at its plenary on June 23 in Seoul does not translate into China’s gain. It would be erroneous to see the NSG session as an India-China match which ended with a score of 0-1, for it casts in bilateral terms what was not a bilateral contest at all. However, there is no denying that New Delhi’s abortive bid for NSG membership is bound to impact Sino-Indian relations in ways that it should not.

After the door was shut on India in Seoul, there was implied criticism of China, including in official statements, which referred to procedural hurdles raised by “one country.” This may be attributed to anger and frustration over being unable to achieve the desired goal. The outcome is still rankling in India, and it may be a while before those stung by the perceived “humiliation” can take an objective view of the matter.

Even the most sympathetic of informed observers and those with an insider’s grasp of the matter in India are on record that the bid for membership was a gross miscalculation on the part of the Government of India (GoI).

Viewpoint by Roberto Savio*

ROME (IDN) – Polling specialists say that when voters do not feel comfortable in saying how they will really vote, it is because they are not comfortable at a rational level with how they will actually vote. In other words, voters act because of their guts, not because of their brains.

This is what happened when the exit polls after the June 23 British referendum on whether to remain part of or leave the European Union showed the ‘remain’ vote in a slight lead, only to be proved wrong overnight. 

The Brexit referendum was really based on gut feelings. It was a campaign of fear. The ‘leave’ campaign was about a massive invasion of Great Britain by Turks because of the possible admission of Turkey to the EU (totally false) and that Great Britain was paying the EU 50 millions pounds a day (again false).

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Within a matter of days a self-appointed Isis “lone wolf”, Omar Mateen, with no actual links to home office Isis has created mayhem in Orlando, Florida, with his killing of 49 people in a gay club, and the Iraq army has pushed Isis troops out of most of the important city of Fallujah.

Maybe it is an exaggeration to say that Isis is on the run in its bailiwicks of Iraq and Syria but it is certainly taking very bad hits. Two years after sweeping through northern Iraq and capturing the oil city of Mosul in 2014 they are now on the defensive.

Viewpoint by Marin Khor *

This article is based on the text of a speech at a panel discussion at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on 15 June 2016.

GENEVA (IDN | South Centre) – The Declaration on the Right to Development, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986 (as Document 41/128) is 30 years old. It is appropriate to celebrate this anniversary. For the right to development has had great resonance among people all over the world, including in developing and poor countries. Even the term itself “the right to development” carries a great sense and weight of meaning and of hope.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984”, was the first person to use the phrase “Cold War” in a 1945 newspaper article, written just after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He argued that “the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. He counted the U.S. and Western Europe as one, the Soviet Union as the second and China as the third. He concluded that, “the atomic bomb is likeliest to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a peace that is no peace”.

Viewpoint by Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb.

Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he gave a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear”, he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.”

President Charles de Gaulle of France once observed, “After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs.”

What if, contrary to the received wisdom, it was shown that nuclear weapons played no role in the surrender of Japan at the end of World War 2, as has been their justification? Perhaps the terrible acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no worse, despite their two hundred thousand deaths, than many other scathing memories of war waged against mainly civilian populations. Then we would have to start a big rethink of the value of nuclear arsenals.