Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

In War — A Crime Against Humanity (Hojas del Sur / Amazon 2015), I discussed the need to strengthen the commitment of international and multilateral institutions to each other and to the establishment of world peace. I said at the time that the UN needed to be restructured to keep the five veto-holding powers on the Security Council from manipulating war and peace according to their own geopolitical agendas, and suggested that the NATO alliance should be bolstered and used to reestablish and maintain peace in areas of the world within their sphere of influence where armed conflicts emerge. Above all, however, I stressed the importance of democracy as the mortar that cements together the building blocks of world peace. I emphasized the importance of not only unifying Western democracies, but also of promoting democracy throughout the world as a major ingredient in the mix of international cooperation and the eventual abandoning of war as a means of settling international dispu...

The crumbling of democracy, the rise of radical neo-nationalism, a now multi-tier nuclear threat, the rapid deterioration of the global environment, the growing threat of a new world war, and the barreling advance of artificial intelligence toward a state beyond our control... These are some of the major challenges facing us today, challenges that are apt to have grave and foreseeable consequences in the not too distant future. Be that as it may, they are being largely ignored at present, as individuals and nations alike seem obsessed with the immediate and hopelessly caught up in the whirlwind of current events and election cycles. At a time when the world has never needed more to be united in the search for peace and cooperation, its leading nations are entertaining the autistic whim of an autocratic minority to embrace isolationist policies and a return to nationalist sentiments. Both literally and figuratively, walls are being erected to divide rather than bridges being built...

Breaking deals The US president’s unilateral decision this past month to abandon the Iran nuclear accord has suddenly made the world a much more dangerous place. President Donald Trump’s contention that this will somehow help keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons is counter-intuitive, since the whole purpose of the nuclear agreement—reached under the former administration of Barack Obama after two years of arduous negotiations among seven nations—was to put a stay on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and place it on the path to peaceful nuclear development, while avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, led by Iran’s three major rival powers there, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq. The timing for the Iran nuclear deal offered the added advantage of providing a diplomatic space in which Iran could be gradually integrated back into the world concert of nations, after long years of isolation and hardship imposed by major Western nations led by the United States. The attendant ...

Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the citizenry is installed as the governing norm. But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic elements that a coup per se is rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many time...

The sudden rise of the latest expressions of populist nationalism has triggered panic in both democratic and wholly capitalist organizations worldwide. It is a phenomenon that traditional pundits failed entirely to foresee but that erudite democrats from Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz on the left to Robert Kagan and George Will on the right have been warning about for some time now. But as that phenomenon has burgeoned over the past few years, taking strong root in both Western Europe and the United States, first think-tanks and then major multilateral organizations have had to start accepting it as real and as a clear and present danger, not only to capitalist democracy as a systemic Western framework, but also to liberal economics as the world has known it up to the present. Lagarde One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in this case an institution about which one might add, “Better late than never.” In all fairness, ever since the worldwide crisis...