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Category: Global conflict

Global conflict 

Springtime for Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump?

Melanie, , ,

So how should we view the meeting between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un and the declaration they have both signed? Is it a “historic” breakthrough for world peace as is being celebrated by the likes of this commentator; or is it a disgraceful debacle, as is being lambasted by the likes of this one? Well, as Zhou Enlai reputedly observed when asked about the impact of the French Revolution on western civilisation, it’s simply too early to say. The terms of the declaration signed by Trump and Kim…

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peace in our time Global conflict 

Peace in our time cancelled?

Melanie, , ,

So has peace in our time with North Korea been cancelled? When President Trump abruptly called off his prospective meeting with North Korea’s chairman Kim Jong-un yesterday, the media immediately crowed that his strategy had gone belly-up, that it showed how incoherent and altogether rubbish his foreign policy was and that we were now right back where we started. Once again, the media merely exposed its own shallowness. A few hours earlier a high-ranking North Korean foreign ministry official, Choe Son Hui, called US Vice-President Mike Pence a “political dummy”…

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Iran Global conflict 

The elephant in the room is regime change

Melanie, , ,

Amid the brouhaha over President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the appalling Iran nuclear deal, the elephant in the room is standing quietly all but unobserved. Trump’s initiative is being either praised to the skies or deplored with dismay. The question being discussed is whether it will force the Iranian regime to abandon its nuclear program in a new deal or precipitate a terrible war. Following Trump’s announcement, an Iranian missile attack on Israeli military bases on the Golan Heights led to heavy Israeli air strikes…

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Europeans lose minds and moral compass Global conflict 

Have Britain and Europe lost their minds as well as their moral compass?

Melanie

The Europeans’ determination to keep the appalling Iran nuclear deal going, following President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of it, makes very little sense on its own declared terms. Leave aside the shocking determination of Britain, France and Germany to continue to milk one of the deal’s most disturbing features: that it enabled the Iranian regime to pocket more than $1.7 billion which it used to fund Hezbollah and Hamas, build its missile infrastructure to destroy Israel and attack the west, and deploy proxy armies to bring conflict…

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Global conflict 

Time to go? Simon Wiesenthal memorial lecture

Melanie, ,

Last week, I was privileged to deliver the Simon Wiesenthal memorial lecture at St John’s Wood synagogue in London. My title was “Time to go? Jews in Britain and Europe”. Did I answer my own question? Find out by watching a recording of the event below. An edited version of the text of the lecture is due to be published in the June issue of Commentary magazine, which will be on line next month.

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Global conflict 

Commonwealth v UN and a bankrupt culture of impunity

Melanie, ,

This week, 53 Commonwealth heads of government are meeting in London for their biennial conference. Cue attacks on the Commonwealth as a useless relic of discredited imperialism and supine monarchism. The Commonwealth is attractive to countries that are not aggressive but value freedom and security. The UN is morally bankrupt. It is not fit for purpose. It never will be while it treats human rights abusers as legitimate members and allows them to operate with impunity. What we need instead is a United Democratic Nations which treats dictators as pariahs.…

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Global conflict 

The weekend bombing of the Syrian chemical facilities

Melanie

So what did the weekend bombing of three chemical weapons facilities inside Syria achieve? Well, if what we are being told is true, it knocked out three Syrian chemical weapons facilities. That’s good. This may have set back, maybe seriously, Syria’s capacity to use chemical weapons.That’s good, maybe very good. So is that good enough? No way. Let’s ask a different question. What was the strategic aim of the weekend’s bombing raid? According to our three motivated musketeers, Trump, Macron and May, it was to deliver the message that the…

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Global conflict 

Britain must wean itself off Russia’s dirty money

Melanie

Vladimir Putin has been elected president of Russia for a fourth term amid gloating claims that his turnout was boosted by Britain’s furious reaction to the poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The 2006 murder in London by radioactive polonium poisoning of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko has been followed by a string of deaths in Britain of Putin’s enemies, for which the stock explanation of natural causes strains credulity. Now Britain is shocked — shocked! — that a military-grade nerve agent produced only by Russia has been…

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Global conflict 

West pays the price for its decades of folly

Melanie

What’s that deafening noise of squawking and screeching and flapping that we can now hear all around us? Why, it’s the West’s chickens finally coming home to roost. In Britain, a retired Russian spy and his daughter, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, remain critically ill in hospital after being poisoned earlier this month in the quiet cathedral city of Salisbury by a rare, military- grade and deadly nerve agent. Skripal was a double agent who had worked for British intelligence. The poison used against him reportedly could only have been produced…

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peace in our time Global conflict 

War, North Korea and the art of the deal

Melanie, , , , ,

One of the many wonders of progressive folk is their, ah, flexibility. It’s an article of faith for the modern progressive that war must be avoided at all costs. War is uncivilised, barbaric, a throwback to a brutal past and never solves anything (yes yes, I know, presumably Nazi Germany wasn’t solved either…). Instead of war we must substitute conflict resolution, negotiation, soft power. That’s why the supremely civilised EU and the even more supremely civilised UK have downgraded their military capacity. So should an enemy (let’s pick as an…

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