Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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...

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...