Rogue States and the State of our Democracies

Last Saturday night, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordo (and other sites), joining in Israel’s ten day war against Iran. By Monday night, President Trump was declaring he’d sorted an Israel-Iran ceasefire. A few hours later, on Tuesday morning, as it seemed both Iran and Israel, most of all, had broken the ceasefire, Trump posted that neither side knew “what the fuck they’re doing” – although apparently Trump and the US did.… Read More »

Is Trump America’s Gorbachev?

40 years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev, to coin a phrase, set out to make the USSR great again. Gorbachev was acutely aware of the uncompetitive nature of the USSR’s economy and the need to inject market mechanisms into it. He saw Eastern Europe as a drain on the USSR’s standard of living, observing that cheap Soviet exports such as fuel, meant that poorly off Russians were subsidising better-off Poles and Czechs. Furthermore, he noted that while the Soviet Union was spending around 12% of its GNP on defence, this compared with under 6% for its satellites.… Read More »