Section: The Conversation (USA)
As Trump flounders on foreign policy, Russia flexes its nuclear muscles
Thirty years after Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed a landmark nuclear arms treaty which laid the foundations of post-Cold War relations between the West and the Soviet Union, recent developments suggest that the Kremlin has quietly restarted the nuclear arms race with the deployment of a new generation of nuclear weapons which could...
Churkin’s promise: why the solution to the MH17 case may lie with a forgotten legal precedent from 1905
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, has died of a heart attack. Churkin was famous for clashing with his US counterpart Samantha Power over Russia’s bombing of Aleppo, and when Russia vetoed a a United Nations Security Council resolution to establish a war crimes tribunal to investigate the downing of flight...
Can the United Nations adapt to Donald Trump?
On January 1, 2017, Antonio Guterres began his five-year term as United Nations Secretary-General; 19 days later, Donald Trump began his own term as President of the United States. Guterres got off to a smooth start – professional and low-key, almost invisible in the media. The beginning of Trump’s term has been dogged by scandal, making...
Friday essay: Putin, memory wars and the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution
Russian army officers take the oath of allegiance to the Revolution, 1917 Everett Historical/shutterstockOne hundred years ago, the Romanov dynasty fell in the February Revolution of 1917. This centenary haunts Russia’s current government. “In the Kremlin,” wrote journalist Ben Judah in his important analysis of Vladimir Putin’s...
How computer hacking is becoming Russia’s weapon of choice
World wide web war. ShutterstockIn his 2007 address to the Annual Security Conference in Munich, Vladimir Putin threw down a gauntlet to the West. Attacking what he called “illegal” unilateral military action by the US, he hinted that Russia would build its capability in information warfare to counter American and NATO expansion. In the same...
Artificially inflating the threat from Russia does nobody any good
Much has been written lately about Russia “hacking” the US presidential elections, and how Vladimir Putin’s government is in a new Cold War with the West. Molly Mckew, who advised Mikhail Saakashvili when he was president of Georgia, writes that the West is already fighting a war in defence of the values on which its liberal order is based....
Should we really be so afraid of a nuclear North Korea?
The common thinking is that North Korea’s nuclear programme poses a threat to global peace and diverts economic resources from an impoverished population. North Korean leaders are depicted in the Western media as a cabal of madmen who won’t be satisfied until Washington, Seoul, or some other enemy city is turned into a “sea of fire”....
Fake news: the internet has turned an age-old problem into a new threat
South Africans queue to vote in the 2016 municipal elections. The governing ANC is accused of wanting to generate ‘fake news’ to influence voters. Reuters/Mike Hutchings The year 2016 will go down in history as the year in which fake news really took centre stage. It played a decisive role in major events such as the outcome of the US...
‘Europe is suffering multi-morbidity’: a conversation with Claus Offe in Berlin
Can Europe prove that it’s capable of finding energy in its contradictions and differences and reinvent itself as a place the whole world respects? William Murphy/flickr, CC BY-SAThe writer-political thinker Albert Camus once commented that the true source of strength of modern Europe has been its ability to live on its contradictions,...
As Trump mulls another ‘reset’ with Russia, he should consider perils of Big Oil diplomacy
Energy has long been used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. But it’s true in other regions and countries as well, most notably Russia, where President Donald Trump is pondering another possible “reset” in relations. This will be the fourth such attempt at a relationship reboot with Moscow since the...
