On June 10th President Hugo Chavez went under the knife in Havana to remove what Venezuelan officials called a pelvic abscess. Since that date, Chavez has been out of the public eye. For a loquacious president fond of giving seven hour speeches to a bleary-eyed audience, this is an extraordinary amount of time to maintain silence, leading to rampant speculative fervour within Venezuela, and internationally.
The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi instilled enough courage in the Arab people to demand the democratic and human rights that they deserve. If the present protests on the Arab streets are sending tremors across the world, then in the near future, an unexpected political event in the region will be potent enough to hit globally with the force of a tsunami.
The Euro will survive. Survival is an economic, political and social necessity, central to Europe’s success. That the Euro must not fail should encourage Europe to take measures to overcome the current challenges the single currency faces. As Richard Youngs of the think tank FRIDE hopes, Europe should adopt a unity in adversity approach.
The Arab Spring will most probably exacerbate areas of conflicting interests between Iran and the US, as the regional designs and aspirations of both nations are deeply antithetical. One may argue that the prospect of a violent conflict is looming large on the horizon.
The need to resort to strategic symbols like Mahdi is to some degree the result of the Persian cultural trait of ta’arof which discourages direct confrontation and criticism. Westerners, bewildered by such peculiarities, often fall back on what they know best, Iran’s foreign affairs, while overlooking the domestic aspects that fuel Iranian behavior.
The United States, France and Britain invaded Libya with cruise missiles, stealth bombers, fighter jets and attack jets. In addition, the United Nations and France have been bombing the Ivory Coast to protect civilians. The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which is being used to legitimate these attacks, is a slippery slope that should be viewed with extreme caution.
The USA is not the only power with key interests in outer space, and will have to pander to other sensitivities in the future. Russia, China, the EU and commercial actors are prevalent in their discussions. We must ask the questions who are we defending from, and to whom are we going to deny the access of space?
It is too early to evaluate the impact of WikiLeaks on world affairs. But more than ever in this changed and more porous world, Woodrow Wilson’s call for “open covenants, openly arrived at” remains a superior guide to foreign policy to Machiavelli’s recommendation that governments be strong like a lion but also clever like a fox. It may be that WikiLeaks goes too far, but enlightened policy makers should welcome publication of how good decisions—and bad—came about.
Although all wars may represent a failure of diplomacy, war is often the last resort of diplomacy. This paradox results from two competing ideas of what the supreme objective of diplomacy should be: peace at any cost, or peace by any means. This is the paradox of Libya. The international military intervention resulted from a mixture of an arguably successful strategy of coercive diplomacy at the UN, and a failure of third-party mediations.
Rather than unambiguously backing the cause of freedom in Libya, Western governments seem to be reconciling themselves to the possibility that the regime of Muammar Qaddafi might remain in power. If this is the case the world must prepare for the possible re-emergence of a global threat, Libya’s WMD program.
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