Amid the cacophony of overblown claims both for and against, what is so bad about Trump? Or, put the other way round, what is so good about him? Or, to ask my question properly, why is he such a polarizing figure, so it seems that one group supports him and what he stands for in their eyes just exactly as much as another group loathes him?
I think part of the answer, at least, may be what I am choosing to call the non-singular systemic.
Continue readingMost of NATO is involved, together with other states that are politically defined as part of the ‘West’, in the war in Ukraine by providing training and equipment for Ukraine’s armed forces and by supporting its government financially and politically. NATO is also involved in another way as part of the Russian narrative that presents the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 as forced upon Russia by NATO’s incorporation of eastern European states since the end of the Cold War.
Russian spokespersons and others have treated NATO’s increasing membership as an exculpatory reason for, or a partial justification for, or a proximate cause of, or a contributing factor to Russia’s war against Ukraine. These are arguments worth looking into.
Continue readingIn February 2022, Russia escalated its war on Ukraine with a full scale invasion. Within weeks, Russia increased by more than fourfold the territory it occupied in Ukraine. Then Ukrainian forces pushed it back, retaking half the ground Russia had taken.
The core consequence of the war has been largescale loss of life, suffering and physical destruction in Ukraine. But the war has also had further consequences and repercussions in the ecological, energy, financial, food, geopolitical and humanitarian domains. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has offered assessments of some of the wider implications of the war, summarised and linked below.
Continue readingWestern commentators on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing war are frequently using the term, ‘quagmire’ – a bog, swamp or morass, from which, once you have entered, it is between hard and impossible to get out, as every move you make to free yourself sucks you deeper in. The term was widely used in the 1960s about the USA’s war in Vietnam.
As Lawrence Freedman has pointed out in one of his commentaries on the war, the term has a closely related partner – escalation, which might seem to a state stuck in a quagmire like the only way out. Both terms have a history and have considerable currency when analysing the problems and risks big states face in wars with smaller states.
But there is another metaphor from the time of the Vietnam War and all those arguments and debates, which I find even richer – the six-sided box. By invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has taken his country into a box from which it is hard to see the way out. And that is bad news for everyone.
Continue readingAt a political rally on Saturday 20 October President Trump announced that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987. This confirms what has steadily unfolded over the last couple of years: the architecture of US-Russian nuclear arms control is crumbling. Continue reading
As we wait for the summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and DPRK Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un to unfold on Sentosa Island in Singapore, everyone is in waiting mode and there are few takers for the challenge of forecasting the outcome. There is a widespread sense of a precarious balance between the epoch-shaping risks and opportunities available, uncertainty about what two unpredictable leaders would achieve together or, indeed, wreck. The uncertainty was only deepened by the US President’s rejection of the agreed communiqué at the G7 summit in a Quebec village three days earlier.
This year’s Munich Security Conference was held amid an atmosphere of deep foreboding. It became a meeting that was not so much about western security as about the West itself. Continue reading
The three weeks of what has become NATO’s armed intervention in Libya have generated far more questions than anyone could hope to answer. The uncertainties by no means overwhelm the case for intervention but they do add immediacy to the reservations expressed by the doubters and sceptics. Continue reading
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