Category: OPINION

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater. There were no grand cities, apart from Cordoba in Spain which was Muslim. The Middle East was much further ahead, still absorbing the intellectual delights and challenges of Greek science, medicine and architecture which Europeans were largely ignorant of. In southern China agriculture advanced and trade in tea, porcelain and silk flourished.

By 1914 it was a totally different world. The Europeans ruled 84% of the globe and they had colonies everywhere. How was it that Europe and its offspring, the United States, became the dominant dynamic force in the world, and still are today in most things?

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – Reporting on President Donald Trump’s new energy policy which plans for a big increase in domestically produced oil and gas, the Financial Times reported: “Exports of gas have begun, with the first shipments of Liquefied Natural Gas leaving the Sabine Pass facility on the border between Texas and Louisiana a year ago. Since then trade has grown and the U.S. now supplies a dozen different gas markets around the world.” The U.S. is all set to speed this up.

By H. M. G. S. Palihakkara

HMGS Palihakkara is Sri Lanka’s former Permanent Representative to the UN and a former Foreign Secretary at the Sri Lanka Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

COLOMBO (IDN) – Commentators may have a rich diversity of views about costs and benefits of the American footprint on world affairs. That apart, there is no denying that America remained the major role player in the global scene in its many dimensions – strategic, security, economic, technological and more.

Rightly or wrongly, the American outreach and influence over global affairs has been so complex and overarching, any attempt to define it, let alone analyze and assess it, on a brief time frame, would indeed be a very ambitious enterprise even when conditions are normal in Washington DC. Anyone having TV access will know that conditions are far from normal these days in that powerful Capital. This naturally renders any quick-fire, balanced assessment of the U.S. global role in the current context, an even more complicated proposition.

PARIS (IDN | SWAN) – The world is becoming “more violent, and violence is occurring in surprising places,” says a recent report by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Some 3.34 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population, have been affected by violence over the past 15 years, according to the report. But many regions have also known violence for decades, if not centuries, and the arts have particularly borne witness to the issue.

In the Caribbean, writers and other artists are known for portraying societal violence in their work, and this depiction is now increasingly the subject of scholarly research.

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – So what does President Donald Trump think about NATO? Twice during his campaign he rubbished it publically, saying it was “obsolete”. Yet early February when he met the UK’s prime minister, Therese May, it was all hunky dory. He told her he supported NATO 100%.

There are some – a few – influential people who have argued that NATO is indeed obsolete. One of these was William Pfaff, the late, much esteemed, columnist for the International Herald Tribune. Another is Paul Hockenos who set out his views in a seminal article in World Policy Journal. Their words fell on deaf ears.

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – In a press conference on January 27 President Donald Trump said he believed in the worth of torture but then added most surprisingly that using it wasn’t going to be his decision. It would be decided by the Secretary of Defence, General James Mattis, who, as Trump said, is against torture.

Three years ago the US Senate Intelligence Committee published a summary of a thorough report on the recent American use of torture. Its chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, said the 6,000-page report is “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the US”.

By Jim Lobe* | Reproduced courtesy of LobeLog

WASHINGTON, DC (IDN | LobeLog) – The most frightening commentary I’ve read in the run-up to the inauguration—and there have been many—appeared in a column identifying the four people whose foreign policy ideas were likely to be most influential with the then-president-elect. It was written by The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin and entitled “Inside Trump’s Shadow National Security Council.”

Those four people, according to Rogin, are chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who “has been working on the long-term strategic vision that will shape the Trump administration’s overall foreign policy approach;” chief of staff Reince Priebus; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.).

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – The great flaw in ex-president Barack Obama’s record was his policy towards Russia. Going against everything he had said and written about before he became president, one action after another antagonised the Russians.

His early proclamation that he wanted Georgia and Ukraine in NATO, his de facto coalition of convenience for a crucial couple of days with the anti-democratic, anti-Russian, neo-fascist, demonstrators in Ukraine, the further expansion of NATO, despite an earlier promise not to, made by President H.W. Bush, to the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his inability to cooperate with the Russians and Iranians over Syria.

Excerpts From Speech at World Economic Forum

Following are detailed excerpts from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s historic 45-minute speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 18, 2017 in which he calls for a world free of all nuclear weapons, and a global governance system based on equality among countries. The full text appeared on https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2017

Xi’s mission apparently is to make China great by following the advice of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese author of the legendary Art of War: “Superior strategies avoid conflict. They overcome hurdles without attacking these and quickly appropriate what is foreign to them. They are totally open towards everything under the heavens.”

By Jonathan Power

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) – When President Barack Obama leaves office will the world be better or worse than eight years ago? Taking the big picture, so often obscured by the wars and uprisings that dominate the front page, more often than not he has resisted the foreign-policy establishment, most importantly in Syria, which makes a fetish of “credibility”.

Obama has argued that “dropping bombs on someone to prove that you are willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force”.