Category: Jonathan Power

More inequality, Mr. Trump?

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By Jonathan Power

December 26th 2017

Every so often reports emerge that attempt to measure which are the best countries to live in. The Nordic countries plus New Zealand, Holland and Switzerland, usually come out top. Sweden is number one just for the sheer stability of life and security. Denmark is seen as the most agreeable place to live. The highest rate of longevity is found in Japan. The best schools are in Finland, New Zealand and Canada. Political and press freedom put the Nordics at the top of the league.

Last month, the Legatum Institute based in London published a report looking at inequality. Its timing could not be more perfect with the US Congress last week passing President Donald Trump’s tax bill which increases inequality by a substantial amount.

In 2013 the French economist, Thomas Piketty, published his blockbuster book, “Capital in the twenty-first century”, arguing that inequality was steadily increasing.  There was wide acclaim, and quite a bit of criticism. The debate over the book raged in the serious newspapers and journals for many months.

Earlier this year the Legatum Institute hired Picketty to answer the criticisms and to enlarge his findings. His new report, drawing on several years’ work, tries to answer four questions. First, where is inequality most pronounced? Second, is the world becoming more or less equal? Why are the experiences of Europe and the US so different? Fourth, have we returned to the levels of wealth inequality last seen a century ago?

Picketty and his collaborators fashioned a World Wealth and Income Database that positions every country in a league table.

The most unequal region in the world is the Middle East, where the top 10% receive 60% of all income. India, Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa are not far behind.

The most equal region is Europe, where the figure is 37%. China is the next most equal, with a top income share of 41%. This comes as a surprise considering the media often focuses on what it claims is the country’s widening inequality.

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The madness of missiles

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By Jonathan Power

December 19th. 2017

The nuclear weapon missile business is contradictory, full of missteps, highly dangerous and prepared in its madness (Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD, they used to call it in Cold War days) to plunge the world into a nuclear war that will reduce most of the world to dust.

A new book, “The Doomsday Machine” by Daniel Ellsberg tells the whole nuclear bomb story in detail. No one has done it better. The only rival is the movie, “Dr Strangelove”, that got the essentials right without being privy to much of the Ellsberg’s knowledge.

Ellsberg is the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon papers, an expose of the US role in the Vietnam War. In this book he tells of his time in the 1960s as consultant to the Department of Defence and the White House.

He drafted Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war- McNamara was secretary of defence during the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy.

Five years ago, after he had finished the book, he tried 17 different publishers and it was rejected. Earlier this year he found a home with Bloomsbury, the publisher of Harry Potter, a book that was also rejected many times.

Why, at last? “The world got scarier”, he said in a long interview in the Financial Times last month. “The only silver lining to today’s world is that people now want to read my book”.

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The Beloved Jerusalem is hijacked

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By Jonathan Power

Poets as diverse as William Blake and Yehuda Amichai have sung the praises of the heavenly Jerusalem, a land without strife or rancour, war or bitterness, envy, acquisitiveness or hatred. Until last week and President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s de facto capital, Israel, Fatah, Hamas and their common interlocutor, the US, had the historic opportunity to take a giant step towards making the present day Jerusalem acquire, at least in some of its aspects, the earthly prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem. Some of us have long hoped to see whether the work over decades of many imams, rabbis, ministers and priests could bear fruit. The secular politicians may be the ones doing the negotiations and ordering the compromises but it is the teachers of the three great deistic religions who have been charged from above to exert their mandate to teach compassion, goodness, tolerance and brotherhood, and make a non-aligned Jerusalem the centre that brings the three Abrahamic religions into an embrace.

These traits of virtue, as common to them all as is their God, is being tested in the hottest of fires. Have their peoples imbibed the true message of their faith? The question for this Christmas month is can enough of them stand up against the new alliance of Trump and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu?

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Mladic’s conviction for mass murder delayed 22 years

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By Jonathan Power

Timing is everything. Dear Reader you’re right. If I was going to write on the conviction in a UN court of General Ratko Mladic I should have done it last week when the court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the mass murder of a significant part of Bosnia’s Muslim population during the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia.

But does a week here or a week there matter when it has taken the ridiculous time of 22 years from the horrific event in Srebrenica, when 7,000 Muslim men were rounded up and slaughtered, to conviction? It was 16 years from the end of the war and 6 years from the date of his capture. The trial in Nuremberg of ex-Nazi leaders took only a year and took place immediately after the end of the Second World War.

The Yugoslav civil wars began in 1991 and ended in 2001. At wars’ end all the fugitives sought by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia were in “hiding”, apart from the president of Serbia himself, Slobodan Milosevic. Read More »

Trump in Philippines: Are human rights deteriorating?

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By Jonathan Power

November 14th 2017

When Donald Trump stretched his hand across our television screens on Sunday to shake the hand of the Philippines’ president, Rodrigo Duterte, and then said he had “a great relationship” with him I felt my gorge contracting.

Having tasted the great, if sometimes flawed, (remember the totally counterproductive policy of arming the Afghani mujahedeen against the Soviet invaders) campaign of another US president, Jimmy Carter, to put human rights at the centre of American foreign, to see this bald regression is a bitter fruit to swallow.

Duterte recently boasted that he personally killed a man in a fight when he was 16. During his presidential campaign he darkly hinted at other killings he had made and since then has waged a no-hands-barred fight against suspected drug dealers.

Arrests, courts, justice? Forget it.

But then under President Donald Trump we have seen presidential support, as we did under President George W. Bush, for torture. (President Barack Obama reversed the Bush policy.)Read More »

Zionism’s undoing – the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration

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By Jonathan Power

November 7, 2017

Even former US president Jimmy Carter who single handily (without much Jewish appreciation) did more to make Israel secure than any other living person confesses neither he nor anyone can change the march of demographics.

Within the boundaries of the Holy Land there are just over 6 million Jews and 6 million Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate is almost three times that of the Israeli Jews. If anything the Jewish population is starting to fall as an increasing number of Jews decide that Israel has no future for them and emigrate.

Another former US president, Richard Nixon, when asked by Patrick Buchanan how he saw the future of Israel, turned down his thumb “like a Roman emperor at the gladiators’ arena”.

Perhaps we are witnessing the death of Israel by a thousand cuts, the friction of conflict and the attrition of population. Read More »

Putin’s Ukraine proposal should be explored

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By Jonathan Power

To its credit the Soviet Union and its successor state, Russia, has long supported UN peacekeeping, a practice that originated in 1960 in the time of UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, who evolved the concept during the great Congolese civil war when it was in danger of becoming a Cold War flashpoint.

But what Russia has never contemplated is UN troops in its own backyard. “Summoning the UN deep into Russia’s historical space is a serious step”, Dmitri Trenin, head of the Moscow Carnegie Centre, told The Economist recently.

There does seem to be a shift in Moscow’s thinking on this highly sensitive issue.

Last month President Vladimir Putin put forward a plan for the deployment of UN troops in south-eastern Ukraine. Not that he imagines their use along the Russian-Ukrainian border – that would be too much – but he wants them to divide the fighting forces inside Ukraine. Read More »

Time to make it up with Iran

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By Jonathan Power

Over recent years many Iranians in the big cities confided quietly to the opinion pollsters that they feel an empathy with the West. It was not reciprocated. Frankly, most people in the West have no in-depth opinion about Iran. If they think about it for more than a couple of minutes they go along with their government’s line.

A majority of Western and Arab leaders supported the American position as taken by successive presidents: Iran was probably trying to make a bomb. (To its credit US intelligence never concurred with its presidents, and privately some Western leaders would acknowledge this.)

Then came the Obama-initiated nuclear deal with Iran negotiating with the Americans, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese. It was one of President Barack Obama’s most singular achievements. At the end, Obama was gracious enough to phone President Vladimir Putin to thank him for Russian support.

The Iranian public were truly happy about the deal. But President Donald Trump has all but sabotaged their benign feelings. His private war against the Obama deal has become red hot. He appears determined to scrap it and thus return to years of bitter antagonism, besides giving succour to Iran’s nuclear weapons’ lobby. Now he has extended his wrath to Iran’s non-nuclear rocket program, even though they would be useless against Western targets.

Trump knows no Iranian history. When the Iranian revolution happened in 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the fundamentalist Islamic Shi’a regime of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, one of the first things the new regime did was to close down the Shah’s nuclear weapons’ research program. (Ironically, it had had technical help from the US.) It was only after Iraq attacked Iran that the program was resuscitated.Read More »

Cambodia changes gear into reverse

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By Jonathan Power

Cambodia is no longer going forward, it is slipping backwards, as it has many times before. Earlier this month the government asked the Supreme Court to dissolve the main opposition coalition. One opposition leader, Kem Sokha, was sent to prison last month and the other, Sam Rainsy, is in exile.

The English-language newspaper, The Cambodia Daily, has been closed and the relatively free radio stations leant on and a number closed. The decades-long prime minister, Hun Sen, talks about rebels in the capital, Phnom Penh, plotting to overthrow the government.

Good things still happen. The economic growth nearly touches 7% year after year. Land reform has worked. The health and education of the poor has markedly improved. In other countries, this might be a prelude to political liberalisation. But not in Cambodia. Hun Sen, who before has won many elections, some reasonably honest, some rigged, now fears defeat at the polls next year.

To understand why Cambodia is so we must go back 47 years before the genocidal movement, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, took over.

In 1970 a pro-American military junta led by Lon Nol deposed King Sihanouk, who had succeeded in keeping his country out of the Vietnam War.Read More »

Would Trump use nuclear weapons?

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By Jonathan Power

October 10th 2017

In the Cold War days, some of us used to say, “Better red than dead”- to rebuff those who believed in nuclear deterrence as a way of political life that gave them security. Now those of us who are frightened that Trump could start a nuclear war over Iran or North Korea should coin a new phrase. How about: “Better alive than going to the grave with Kim Jong-un”?

Admittedly that doesn’t have the same snappy ring, but you get my point?

At the UN recently, President Donald Trump (aka Fire and Fury) threatened to “totally” destroy North Korea if the US was forced to defend itself.

This past weekend Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and at one time an important backer of Trump, the candidate, said that Trump could set the nation “on the path to World War 3”.

I would surmise, even though I have no polling evidence, that an overwhelming majority of the world would not accept the use by the US of nuclear weapons in any circumstances, even if they believe in what I think is the false notion of “deterrence”. In Europe, I doubt if more than 5% do.

But in America, it is another matter. According to a survey carried out in the US and analysed at length in Harvard University’s “International Security” some 50% of American adults believe that their use would be justified, especially if it saved the lives of 20,000 American soldiers. (Which is less than the 38,000 US soldiers stationed in South Korea today).*Read More »