Tag: Current Affairs
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What would happen if a government or political party decided to tell the whole truth?
In today’s political arena, the truth is often the first casualty in the rush to sway popular opinion. The rise of spin has worked in tandem with a very old practice, the practice of rhetoric. Rhetoric was in itself a product of the Ancient Greeks who used it as a way of increasing status in…
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Can we ever truly win the war on terror?
The war on terror has been the predominant force in world foreign policy for the last 15 years since the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The embers of this war were stoked further by the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 but it really gained momentum after the…
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Would Great Britain be better off if it left the European Union?
The European Union is and remains an experiment in unification. Not a conquest of nations in the classical sense, rather a unification of systems to create one simple system for everyone. The ultimate aim of which is to create a United Europe. It was born out of the need to harmonise trade between nations in…
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Would the US pursue a better strategy by pulling out of the Middle East entirely?
The end of World War Two was a watershed moment in US political history, it marked the end of its international isolation which had been the pervading element in US politics since the end of the 1920’s and only was abated when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. The politics of the Monroe doctrine were rekindled…
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Is IS actually a fascist organisation?
One cannot look at the current affairs of the world without encountering one very prominent and disturbing organisation: The Islamic State (IS). Its spectre looms large over the Middle East claiming both territory and lives, but if you look further into the organization itself, past the propaganda you start to see the fundamentals of the…
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Should the “Special Relationship” end?
The “Special Relationship” between the United States and Great Britain has coloured the complexion of both countries international political philosophy for the last 150 years. Indeed over the century it has been difficult to note an incident in international politics where the United States and Great Britain have not been involved as a partnership. To…
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Is a Third World War inevitable?
A former history teacher of mine used to say that something is only inevitable after it has happened. History is a hard teacher and its lessons are some of the most difficult to learn. The more humanity progresses the greater the need to learn from the mistakes of the past as the spectre of extinction…
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The Failure of “Flat Pack” Democracy
Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and numerous other Arab speaking and Asian countries. The names read like a who’s who of the Foreign Offices “must avoid” list. What do they have in common? Simple, they have experimented in democracy, with varying successes and failures. Let’s take Afghanistan first, the American led invasion of 2001…
The Whitehall Whisperer 