The history of Western aid delivery is not flush with glowing recommendations, but to advocate the abolition of Britain’s entire aid budget is unwise. We must always ensure money is being spent effectively with sufficient accountability and transparency. We must not step back from our commitments to those who most need it. The alternative is simply intolerable.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not mark the beginnings of a ‘nuclear revolution’ as it is understood. The strategic environment and technological capabilities for a revolution did not exist in 1945 and not until much later.
Almost a century after its birth, IR is still in the process of defining itself. The Great Debates stimulated discussion about the essential characteristics of the discipline, and through these IR theory has undoubtedly advanced in complexity and nuance since its founding, and doubtless will continue to do so.
There is an urgent sense that something massive happened on 5 May, Scotland came close to becoming a one-party state. Independence has in my mind been a practical option for nearly 40 years. Now suddenly, independence is a likelihood. There is a new political landscape.
China and the west view Africa with a different set of eyes. In supporting trade with any and all nations in Africa and around the globe, China by default supports nations that have horrendous human rights track records that do not support democratic institutions. But China’s model of economic aid can be used by African nations to pull millions of people out of poverty. It is nothing more, nothing less.
Intervention to stabilize and reconstruct failed, failing, fragile, and even re-orient hostile countries may not be avoidable for the U.S. and also for its E.U. partners. But for intervention to be successful it must be undertaken cautiously, preemptively when possible, and swiftly, with coalitions of willing partners.
Modern Iran represents one of the biggest waiting games of the world today. A beautiful, civilised, and hospitable country containing one of the nicer peoples on earth, and with a distinguished history to boast, has become one of the world’s most rejected nations ruled by those with standards and practices more suitable to the middle ages than the 21st Century.
From afar, the protests in Arab countries seem broadly similar: economic factors – such as the global recession’s impact on migrant remittances, as well as rising food prices – are being cited as the impetus for the revolts. Yet while economic grievances are not irrelevant, the structural meta-narrative, just like the cultural one, is problematic.
Last week, in his regular religion column for the Louisville Courier Journal, journalist Peter Smith discussed the results of a recent survey about climate change. As per usual in the U.S. context, the survey asked whether particular people believed in global warming — as if the science on this question was not largely settled.
The necessities of statecraft require some level of secrecy. Reagan abused this and the results were the Iran-Contra scandal. No President has used the office of the Executive in a more regal, imperial and ordained manner than Ronald Reagan. His use and abuse of the institution to pursue his own ideological doctrine raises the fundamental questionn of whether the concept of democracy is a viable one at all.
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