Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

This month marked the centennial of Red October, the Russian Revolution that ended the czarist empire and laid the groundwork for the Soviet Union. The strange fact that Red October is commemorated in November (November 7 th to be precise) is due to the fact that, up to the time of the revolution, the Russian Empire still used the Gregorian calendar, instead of today’s Julian calendar, resulting in a 13-day gap. Sparse crowds  view a centennial display in Moscow Photo by Peter Kovalev/TASS For those of us who can remember back to the height of the former Soviet Union’s power and what a typical anniversary of the 1917 communist revolution might have looked like back then, this year’s ceremonies marking the 100 th anniversary of the Russian Revolution couldn’t have been more anemic. There were no official events planned to recall—for better or worse—what was clearly a life-changing event in the history of Russia and, indeed, the world. In fact, President Vladimir Putin ...

By now, it is no secret that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is making a major play to strengthen his country’s presence in the Middle East region. His stubborn diplomatic and devastating military defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad alone provides clear evidence of this strategy. Putin has proven himself willing to bear the brunt of worldwide censure for the slaughter taking place under the Syrian regime, and even to take an active role in perpetrating it, rather than hand over the head of the current leader of the 40-year-old Assad regime. Obviously, this is not because of any particular personal love Putin might have for Assad (for the Russian leader, Assad is little more than a puppet, an instrument for execution of his strategy), but because Assad’s regime is the highest trump card Russia has in a game of ever-higher-stakes geopolitics. And, by this time, there can be little doubt in anyone’s mind that Putin’s goal is "to make Russia great again." The shin...

As of this first week of October, Syria (and the world) became a lot scarier place. Already hell on earth, with half of its population displaced by war, hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more injured or mutilated, the Syrian nation is now facing not only the airstrikes by the 60-country US-led coalition on Islamic State targets, but also the direct intervention of the Russian military against any and all rebels seeking to overthrow Moscow’s friends and allies in the harsh, authoritarian Bashar al-Assad regime. Syria is strategic to Russia in its Middle-Eastern backyard, and Moscow has a close-knit relationship with the ruling Assad family dating back to 1970, when Hafez al-Assad came to power after a series of military coups starting in 1963 and in which he gained ever greater control, rising from defense minister to prime minister and, finally, to president, an office he held for 30 years, before handing power down to son Bashar in 2000. Even before the 1970s...

When we released my latest book, El crimen de la guerra (soon to be published in English as War Is a Crime against Humanity ) toward the end of last year, it would have been hard to predict the current situation, in which the world, practically overnight, has returned to a state not unlike that endured throughout the post-World War II years of the Cold War, which only ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Clearly, the world has not lived in a state of blissful peace since that time. Indeed, there are currently more than thirty armed conflicts being waged worldwide, with the worst of them—such as the war in Syria—claiming tens of thousands of lives and leaving millions homeless and displaced. But it is, nevertheless, the first time since the end of the Cold War that East and West are once again in a divisive mood with Moscow and Western leaders flexing their rhetorical muscles and hovering on the brink of disputes that are potential powder kegs. Russian President Vladimir...