The world reacts to President Trump’s proposal to take over Palestine. A crime of forced displacement that will create more conflict and bloodshed. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and global journalists respond. President Trump has basically declared his intention to commit the international crime of forced displacement @FranceskAlbs As I seem to be shadowbanned, I Continue reading »
USA
There was a messianic fervour in Donald Trump’s Second Inaugural speech that wasn’t evident eight years ago. As dark as the 2016 American Carnage diatribe was, there was still the sense that Trump was a salesman pitching a vision he didn’t quite believe in, but thought he needed to sell in order to legitimise himself Continue reading »
Donald Trump’s “snatch-and-grab” foreign policy rejects the belief in US primacy and exception that was sliding towards a military confrontation with China. Some have been surprised by the speed with which President Donald Trump is moving on his agenda. Yet, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, served notice only days after last November’s election, declaring Continue reading »
The foundation of Australia’s alliance with the US is that there is a shared commitment to the rule of law and constitutional democratic government. We are faced with the choice of waiting until there cannot be a shred of doubt that the US is committed to a dictatorship or beginning the process of cutting our Continue reading »
In the short period since his election, President Trump has started to tear down the edifice of western rules-based law and international order. Ironically this is the international political and economic system of which the USA has been its main beneficiary, definer and enforcer, and over which it has engaged in conflicts and wars around Continue reading »
Cambridge Union I don’t believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues… This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s Continue reading »
The new liberal consensus, born of a shared “exhaustion,” is that it is time to “tune out,” or “take a break,” or simply close one’s eyes and ears. I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them. They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call Continue reading »
Donald Trump and the MAGA gang point to the ‘massive mandate’ he obtained to justify any policy he may implement. There is, of course, a lot of debate about so-called mandates which seem to be less about some enduring principle and more about a flexible justification for what you want to do. Looking at the Continue reading »
Yu-Book Lim used to head a Singapore think tank and was Executive Chairman of IMC Plantations before that. He has just published an extended, thought-provoking essay: “Xi Jinping’s “Once-in-a-Century Upheaval” Prophecy. Towards the end of this article, Mr Lim confidently argues that: “The US will become a has-been like the UK, albeit still suffering from Continue reading »
In late February 2022, I was walking on a street in Irkutsk (in the middle of Russian Siberia) when I met a former female student of mine who had just come from her work office. She was upset by the invasion of Ukraine but even more so by the attitude of some women in the Continue reading »