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The madness of bombing Iran
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Monday, April 24, 2006
THERE IS no doubt that Western opinion is being softened up for a US or Israeli strike against the Iranian centrifuges at Natanz. “Can anyone within range of Iran’s missiles feel safe?”, screams a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, displaying a map of the Eurasian land mass with Iran at its centre.
As part of the softening-up come the justifications, as false as the ones that preceded the Iraq war, but more disgraceful second time round. Here are the counter-arguments.
First, it needs to be trumpeted that a military strike now would be illegal under international law. The UN Security Council would never authorise it, since Iran has not breached the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that allows
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A fatal flaw at the heart of Bush and Blair’s democratic crusade
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Saturday, September 17, 2005
THERE ARE TWO competing visions of international relations. On the one side is the Blair-Bush “new” doctrine, which links world security to the spread of Western values. On the other side is the traditional doctrine of national sovereignty, which precludes intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. In between wobbles the United Nations, whose charter commits it to uphold non-intervention, but which is pulled to the intervention by the present sentiment of its most powerful Western members.
The problem that the Blair-Bush school of reformers faces is that there is still a lot of life left in the old charter doctrine. The UN exists to defend sovereign states against aggression. Any military action has to be authorised by
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A cautionary tale about how we got terrified of the risk monster
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Saturday, August 13, 2005
CLEVER ELSIE, soon to be married to Hans, was sent down to the cellar by her mother to get some beer. She saw a pickaxe above her which had been forgotten by the masons. Clever Elsie was paralysed by the thought that “if I should marry Hans and we should get a little baby, and he grows up and we send him down to draw some beer, that pickaxe might suddenly fall down on his head and kill him”.
The clever Elsie of the Grimm fairy-tale was a case of extreme risk-aversion. In a recent speech, Tony Blair called for a “sensible debate about risk in policymaking”. Government, he went on, was under constant pressure to “act to eliminate risk in a way that is out of all proportion to the potential damage”. The result was a “plethora” of
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At last, a power of sense at the UN
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Monday, March 28, 2005
LIBERALS ON both sides of the Atlantic are dismayed by President Bush’s nomination of the arch-hawk John Bolton as US representative to the UN. They are wrong; Bolton’s appointment may give the UN just the shot in the arm it needs. It promises serious US interest in UN reform; it challenges the UN to get serious.
The UN needs not more liberalism but more relevance. Its charter, the custodian of international law, was fashioned to deal with a much narrower set of threats than now exist. Today, in an age of transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the sole superpower, the United States, is strongly tempted to ignore the charter and “break the law”.
But the US lacks both legitimacy and resources to be the sole world policeman.
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A new system is crawling from the Soviet wreckage
Robert Skidelsky
The Times
| Saturday, October 16, 2004
TOMORROW the people of Belarus will be asked to approve a constitutional change allowing their President, Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, a third term. No one doubts the result. As Joseph Stalin once said: “It’s not how people vote that matters, it’s who counts the votes.”
Why should anyone mind? Belarus is a small, Soviet-style republic of ten million inhabitants, carved out of the old Soviet Union, and squeezed between Russia, Poland, two Baltic states and Ukraine. With a “repressed” economic and political system, it is a pariah in Europe and a seeming embarrassment to its sponsor, Russia. Its importance lies not in its eccentricity, but in the fact that it is a pacemaker for a half-conscious attempt to re-create the Soviet Union.
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