Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

For months now, Aleppo has been in the grip of hell on earth. Indeed, it would be difficult to say whether or not what the people of Aleppo have experienced is worse than any hell imagined by the likes of Dante Alighieri. An evacuation effort that began on December 13 th , and that Russia had vowed to monitor and protect, was suspended on the 16 th , with both sides blaming each other for truce agreement violations. The government accused rebel militias of trying to smuggle out prisoners and heavy weaponry under cover of the evacuation, while each side accused the other of firing on evacuation and aid convoys. At one point this past week, prior to the evacuation attempt, bombs were falling on the shattered, ancient, Syrian city at a rate of one every twenty seconds. It was so dangerous to be on the ground there that war correspondents from major worldwide media were filing their stories from a safe distance outside the city or from neighboring nations like Turkey and Lebanon,...

Fragile tightrope though it might be, the so-called "cessation of hostilities" in Syria was holding this past week, despite a smattering of truce violations. But the eyes of diplomats and other observers were more on the relationship between superpowers Russia and the United States than on the belligerents in the five-year-old Syrian Civil War—clearly a growing misnomer, considering the conflict’s grave international repercussions and implications. With the cessation of hostilities pact reached last month more between regional and global leaders than among the multiple belligerents in the actual war, Moscow and Washington suddenly find themselves having become strange bedfellows—an odd state of affairs after events not only in Syria but also in Ukraine and elsewhere that have had the two nuclear powers at each other’s throats more since 2014 than at any other time since the Cold War era of a quarter-century ago. On first glance, this should be good news. And to a certain...

I think I speak for many when I say that for “boomers” like myself—those of us who grew up in the Cold War years of the post-World War II era—it is singularly disturbing to witness how quickly the world appears capable of regressing from the time of relative peace and cooperation painstakingly forged after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s to a frightening and paranoid climate of East-West power struggles and the general panic that they engender. And just let me say to those who aren’t panicked and afraid, you probably should be. As I have stated a number of times in both essays and public presentations, I believe that we are currently facing the most dangerous time for world peace since the Cold War era. And the development of this new—yet old—climate of impending world violence has come at an absolutely dizzying rate, since the collapse of tolerably good relations between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis—underscored by superpower rivalry in Syria...