Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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...

This past week, the foreign ministers of African Union (AU) member countries of the International Criminal Court (ICC) publicly announced that they had decided to recommend withdrawal en masse from the court. Thirty-four of the African Union’s 54 member nations subscribe to the ICC under the provisions of the Rome Statute, the court’s founding charter. If leaders of the African States Parties to the Rome Statute all decide to accept the joint recommendation of their foreign ministers, it will be a major blow to the ICC, since their nations form the single largest regional group of countries subject to the jurisdiction of the court, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (27 States Parties), Western Europe and Others (25), and the Asian Group (19). Indeed, the Rome Statute does make provisions for withdrawal from the court’s jurisdiction. Article 27 provides that once a country formally notifies the United Nations of its decision to pull out, effective withdrawal from the ICC...

An illustration from H.G. Welles' "Little Wars" Imagine for a moment that you have a beef with your neighbors. But this is no ordinary beef. It’s a long-standing one because the houses and properties where you and your respective families live have been part of your heritage for generations, from your grandparents or great-grandparents down. There have been attempts at reconciliation, mediation, lawsuits, and so on down through the generations, and nothing has worked. In the meantime, the enmity has quit being about property lines or privacy fences and has gotten personal. Those on both sides of the feud—because, by now, it’s a feud—have decided the problem isn’t the original one (by now it’s hard to remember what that actually was), but that your neighbors are simply enemies, with whom you have nothing in common and never will. You don’t share the same race, religion or creed. You’re not of the same ethnic or national background. Your politics are diametrically ...

If you were to ask Israel’s pugnacious Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, off the record, what policy he thought Washington should pursue in the Middle East, he might very well tell you that it should be whatever he tells Washington it should be. If he did actually say that out loud, rather than just thinking it, it would be hard for him to get anyone else to agree, least of all representatives of the out-going administration of US President Barack Obama. Benjamin Netanyahu The last few weeks of President Obama’s final term in office have carried the mood of bilateral relations between the US and Israel to a new low. The latest rift is over passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 by a vote of 14 to zero. This resolution concerns occupation by Israel since 1967 of Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem. It specifically underscores Israel’s definition under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention as “an occupying power” in the disputed Palestinian lands and af...

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...

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,...