The Way I See it

https://images.app.goo.gl/htpzw3n3u6QfwsoR9 I do not easily subscribe to the idea that men/women make history. I am much more at home with the notion that history shapes the environment in which people act and react. There are moments, however, when individuals’ destinies can play a decisive role in determining historical outcomes. We may be at just such a juncture. The three strategically most important countries in the world – the countries with the most lethal weapons and

photo from the Russian newspaper Kommersant on the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (This blog was posted on the website of the Conference of the Defence Association Institute at https://cdainstitute.ca on 23 August 2018.) For four months in 1968, I was an intern in Prague, the capital of the erstwhile Czechoslovakia, a city of incredible beauty and grace despite the unbearably heavy weight of twenty years of communist rule. In theory, every

1024px-Yalta_Conference_(Churchill,_Roosevelt,_Stalin)_(B&W) This blog was posted on the CDA-Institute at https://cdainstitute.ca/law-towards-yalta-two/ on 9 August. In February 1945, as it was becoming increasingly clear that Hitler Germany was about to lose World War Two, the leaders of the victory camp – US President Roosevelt, UK Prime Minister Churchill and USSR Communist Party General Secretary and Premier Stalin – met at a much-celebrated meeting in Yalta. Yalta, a res

(A link to this article was provided in the Newsletter of the Canadian Association of Defence Organizations on 6 July: www.cdainstitute.ca) President Trump’s letter to a number of NATO Allies in the lead-up to the Alliance Summit on 11-12 July, warning them that America is running out of patience as regards their failure to jack up their defence spending is a cheap shot, but a shot nonetheless. It needs to be taken seriously. NATO defence spending is about more than one-digit

(The view of the globe is from The Great Globe Galley.) On June 21 2018, the TopLink site of the Word Economic Forum posted a sightly revised version of this post under the title of Three Scenarios for the Future of Geopolitics To understand events in the international arena, it helps to distinguish whether our current period is essentially stable or in significant flux. In an article written a quarter of a century ago, during another time of rapid and relentless change, my c

On 18 March, Vladimir Putin will almost certainly be elected to his fourth term as President of the Russian Federation. If we include his first term as Prime Minister from 1999-2000 and his second from 2008-2012, when he was for all intents and purposes still President in all but name, by the end of this next term he will have been Russia’s leading politician for a quarter century. Only Joseph Stalin will have been longer at the pinnacle of Russian and Soviet power. Scoring c

(With my apologies to the person who produced this juxtaposition – I have lost the link and cannot credit you.) This post appeared on the website of the CDA-Institute on 9 February. There are five pivotal issues that we need to be thinking about when it comes to North Korea. The first and perhaps most important one is that North Korea is an economic basket case. The hermit kingdom, which at the end of the Korean War in 1953 was roughly at par economically with the South, now

The victory of senatorial candidate Doug Jones in Alabama on 12 December over a racist bigot, pedophile and religious zealot, supported by the incumbent President and Republic National Committee, is the first good news that America’s democrats have had in a good while. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. At best, it may be the end of the beginning. America’s democrats still face an uphill struggle. There has been

Details are gradually emerging about the terrorist attack carried out on theHudson River Bike Path on 31 October. The perpetrator, Sayfullo Saipov, is a 29-year old of Uzbek origin, who has been residing legally in the United States since 2010. Taken down by police gunfire, he has claimed from his hospital bed that the attack was carried out in the name of the Islamic State (IS), the main actor that has been opposed to the American anti-terrorist campaign in Syria and Iraq. S

This article was posted on the website of the Canadian Defence Association Institute on 19 September 2018. Photocredit: Time Magazine 20 May 2014 Part II: Seeing through the China Russia North Korea Agenda Western observers almost invariably claim that China is opposed to Kim the Third’s nuclear bombast, that Beijing means what it says when it criticizes North Korea, that it is determined to implement the sanctions it has systematically signed-up for in the United Nations Se

Photo credit: Daily Telegraph, 31 August 2017. This blog was posted on the website of the Canadian Defence Association Institute on 14 September 2017. Part I: Rethinking the Threat Since 2012, North Korea has succeeded in significantly enhancing its capacity to carry out nuclear explosions and to launch medium- and long-range missiles capable of hitting U.S. allies in Asia and, more recently, U.S. territory itself. The missile that North Korea launched over Japan on 29 August

America’s descent into chaos moved into a higher gear this past week. It will take a lot of civil courage on the part of a lot of Americans to put the dictatorship genie back in the bottle. The actions and rhetoric emanating from the Oval Office strongly suggest that Trump’s term in office will be characterized by an effort to establish a dictatorship across the United States of America. Ok, go pour yourself a stiff drink and if you are still up to it, read this and think fur

On America’s Independence Day, North Korea successfully launched a missile that some experts assert can hit targets as far away as Alaska. Apparently, Pyongyang does not yet have the capacity to place a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile. That said, at the rate Kim the Third has been upgrading his country’s attack potential, this may be months as opposed to years away. The launch happened as the Russian and Chinese Presidents were meeting in Moscow, and

So for Kim Jung-un, or Kim the Third as I have called him, the support for his regime from Beijing and Moscow is absolutely indispensable. Kim came to power in 2011. He inherited a very bad economic situation from his father as did his father from his grandfather. At the end of the Korean War in 1953, the North Korean economy was roughly at par with that of the South. Now it is one of the weakest in the world while that of South Korea is in eleventh position, between that of

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States has elevated the issue of defence spending performance to a make-or-break issue for the Western security community. The most headline-grabbing aspect concerns the spending level of America’s NATO Allies. President Trump has been right to call for a greater effort on the part of NATO members. But note that the US concern is nothing new. For several years now, top-ranking US officials have delivered repeate

Robert Giroux / Getty Images / Via gettyimages.com The likelihood of a serious terrorist attack on the US or its assets abroad has significantly increased with the most recent political developments stateside. In particular, the ongoing controversy about the travel ban for nationals of several Muslim majority countries is an invitation to various predators to go into action. There are several potential terrorist candidates with a wide range of heritages. The most obvious ones

With Donald Trump now sworn in as the American President and Commander–in-Chief, here are some thoughts on where the world may be headed. In 1948, Winston Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first in his epic six-​volume account about the lead-​up to and the course of the Second World War. In this conflict, the British statesman would play a decisive role, leading his country and the then Western world to a hard fought and historic victory but one that was also hugel

In the first part of this post, I argued that one of the more important back stories of the 2016 US elections was a Russian-​American effort to restore the sagging fortunes of their traditional energy businesses. This second part explains how this may actually happen. the first part of this post, I argued that one of the more important back stories of the 2016 US elections was a Russian-​American effort to restore the sagging fortunes of their traditional energy businesses. T

Much of the post-​election chatter in the United States has focused on the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and Russia’s security services, their role in the US elections of 7 November and whether their intervention sought to favour the Republican candidate at the expense of his Democratic opponent. For me, this is a no-​brainer. Russia has involved itself in the electoral politics of a host of European Union countries in recent years. Why should Putin th

While Canadians do not have a vote on 8 November, you could be forgiven for believing that they do. Like in the States, this is almost all America’s neighbours to the north talk about. Canadians tend to see the US electoral process as a combination of the crazy and the curious, in contradistinction to their own. For example, in 2015 current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected after the longest campaign in Canada history, which lasted all of eleven weeks! Trudeau won a m