The recent news that two Russian Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bombers landed at Venezuela’s Libertador military airfield and “will spend several days carrying out training flights over neutral waters, after which they will return to the base,” signals, in my mind, the beginning of the second phase of the cold war. As we argued here,...
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Latin America
Cold War Part Two is here
Crisis and Contradictions in American Intelligentsia
For quite some time now, I have often found myself asking the question “Why does the greatest country in the world keep making stupid political blunders in terms of foreign policy?”. The evidence of this myopic and sometimes disastrous political miscalculations are broad and varied: from starting local wars in the Far East to...
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Why John McCain cannot be president
I strongly believe that the country will be in another war a few weeks after Senator John McCain is sworn into office, should he win the election in November. That war will be with Iran, and perhaps, by extension, Russia even if between now and then, the Iranian regime finds a way to assuage the fears about its nuclear ambitions.
Contradictions and Crisis of Failed States
The International Relations community has focused its attention in recent times on the growing cost of food and its impact on developing nations and the devastating effect the rising cost of food will have on the world’s poor which is currently estimated to be over one billion people. On top of this, most poor countries are perpetually weak political entities and are often ravaged by internecine wars predicated on the struggle to control vital natural resources and land.
The fallacy of the Bush Doctrine
The political pronouncements of U.S. President George W. Bush following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center have collectively come to be known as “The Bush Doctrine”. These foreign policy principles were anchored on the declaration that the United States of America had the right to treat “hostile” nations, particularly those suspected of “harboring or giving aid” to terrorist groups as terrorists. The “doctrine” also encompasses the notion of preventive war which stipulates that the United States has the right to depose or remove foreign governments that were perceived as threats to the national security of the country. A further explanation from the text of the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002) and the president posits that the U.S. would adopt a policy of “supporting democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny” globally as part of the Global War On Terror, and overt unilateralism which the President described as “pre-emptive, unilateral military force when and where it (the U.S) chooses”.
VIP: Vagabonds In Power
It was the late Nigerian Musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti who used that term a long time ago. After almost sixty years of political “independence”, it is indeed a testament to his foresight that Africa, today, boasts a handsome resume of Vagabonds In Power – a plethora of idiots, fools, thieves and murderers – masquerading as leaders in various countries on the continent. Africa, today, it can be argued, remains the most oppressed, poverty-stricken, debt-ridden, exploited, unstable and denigrated continent in the world. The continent has more than half of the world’s refugees, and is the least industrialized of the regions of the developing world. Where developing countries of Asia and Latin America have taken great strides forward in recent decades, the African continent seems to be at war with itself to remain stagnant. Where other countries in the developing regions are touting their progress toward industrialization and embrace of the age of technology, Africa seems to be a showcase of “oppression, criminal human rights abuses, discrimination on the basis of ethnic, racial, regional and religious considerations, ruthless exploitation, wars, instability, corruption” (since 1960, around the time of independence, about 9 million black Africans have been slaughtered through genocide, and mass murder), and maniacal leadership.