“There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.” Albert Camus, “The Plague” Camus’ novel of a lethal contagion in the North African city of Oran is filled with characters all too recognizable today: indifferent or incompetent officials, short sighted and selfish citizens, and lots…
The first signs that something terrible had gone wrong with the security at the Fort Detrick bio-defence facility fifty miles north-west of Washington DC were when cases of a previously unknown and serious respiratory illness appeared at a retirement village on the western outskirts of the capital in July 2019. The first cases were noted…
Israel glorifies its military and portrays those who are sent by the state to commit acts of violence as heroes. Remembering a Terrorist “We are persecuted and murdered by the majority of ‘civilized’ peoples, or by savage and cruel peoples like the Arabs. Their intention toward us is not only to humiliate but also to…
Power is the ability to make people, states, movements, organizations, or things to do what they would not otherwise have done. It is a matter of fact that politics is seen to be about might rather than right. It can be said that, in essence, politics is power or in other words, the ability of…
One of the consequences of the Coronavirus epidemic is that Westerners have realised their dependence on Chinese manufacturing capacity. Neither the Europeans nor the Americans were able to manufacture the millions of surgical masks they urgently wanted to distribute to their population. They had to buy them in China and often fought among themselves on…
Russia’s relationships with its client states have never been easy. Of course, managing client states is always a complicated exercise. The Kremlin’s closet is full of skeletons – Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Cuba (1962), Afghanistan (1980), Ukraine (2014) and so on. What complicates Russia’s relationship with Syria, which has sometimes been referred to as a Russian client state,…
