Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101 st Airborne Division. According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the...

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...