It is all very awkward. China and India are getting richer. And it appears their new middle classes want all the things we want: cars, washing machines, even meat. Here in the west, we have to restrain ourselves from saying: “Stop. You can’t live like us. The planet can’t stand it. And our wallets can’t stand it. Have you seen the price of petrol?”

Global equity is the awkward issue lying behind the world food crisis. In the long run, it will also prove fundamental to discussions on energy and global warming.

But, for the moment, this difficult, abstract issue is largely obscured by the urgency of finding practical solutions to rising food prices.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

An interview with AQ Khan - the father of the Pakistani bomb - appeared in The Guardian over the weekend. This was Khan’s first interview with the foreign media for a few years, and he was in belligerent form.

The entire Khan affair seems to capture the ambiguous relationship between Pakistan and the US. There is no doubt that Khan is a national hero in Pakistan. One of the spookier aspects of visiting the country are the stone monuments to the country’s nuclear virility - complete with the nuclear symbol - that greet you on the outskirts of the major cities.

But for the Americans, Khan is pretty close to being public enemy number one. One senior American intelligence official has described him as “more dangerous than Osama bin Laden”, because of his role in sponsoring nuclear proliferation.

But while bin Laden has to hide out somewhere in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Khan is able to live openly (albeit under house arrest) in Islamabad. And now the new government is letting him give interviews. Given the renewed worries about nuclear proliferation, the Americans cannot be amused. But there seems to be little they can do about it.

I’m afraid that newspaper columnists are incorrigible show-offs. As a species, we are constantly trying to draw attention to ourselves. So I have to hand it to my colleague, George Monbiot, of The Guardian. I thought I might attract a little attention by writing a scathing review of John Bolton’s book. It never occurred to me to actually try and arrest the guy. (Yes, I know that’s a split infinitive - I feel reckless today.)

But this is what George has done at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Admittedly, it was a fairly ineffectual attempt at a citizens’s arrest. But the underlying issue is interesting. Monbiot claims to be in possession of a fat dossier on Bolton - and argues that the former UN ambassador is a war criminal. But I’m with Foreign Policy magazine when it argues that the grounds for arresting Bolton under international law are flimsy, at best. I don’t think that being in a possession of an offensive moustache is enough to take you to the Hague.

I find both Bolton and Monbiot puzzling in different ways. Why - for example - does Bolton spend so much time in Britain, when he professes to despise the place? It can’t be the money - the speaker fees are much fatter on the other side of the Atlantic.

As for Monbiot - the question that interests me is, is he a stunt man and publicity-seeking shyster or a sincere person, who is genuinely trying to improve the world? I fear that the answer is the latter. Continue reading "George Monbiot and John Bolton" »

“Thrown under the bus” is becoming the phrase of the American presidential election. It describes the moment when a candidate disowns an embarrassing supporter or adviser.

Campaign camp-followers can find themselves staring at the dreaded underside of the bus for any number of reasons. Barack Obama, the probable Democratic party candidate, committed the most famous act of bus-related violence when he finally disowned the Rev Jeremiah Wright – his spiritual mentor. John McCain, the Republican candidate, has had to rid himself of various advisers who were too close to lobbyists.

Two recent incidents illustrate that making controversial remarks about Israel is particularly risky.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

Russia won the Eurovision song contest over the weekend. I believe that this result has ominous implications for the future of the European Union - particularly with Ireland’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty coming up on June 12th.

I’m not joking. Or at least, not entirely.

Continue reading "The politics of Eurovision" »

I am just coming to the end of a week in Washington. Now that it seems pretty certain that the presidential race will be McCain v Obama, political gossip is turning to the second-order questions - who will be the vice-presidential candidates? Who will get the big cabinet jobs?

Barack Obama will be even less inclined to want Hillary Clinton on his ticket, after her tasteful suggestion that he might be assassinated - like Bobby Kennedy. The thought of having Bill hanging around the Obama White House is also not obviously attractive. Still, Hillary seems to want the job - and could yet force Obama’s hand. The Obama camp are desperate to unify the party and get on with battling McCain. What if Hillary threatened to take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention at the end of August - and even to make a speech there, arguing that Obama is unelectable and appealing to delegates to switch over to her camp?

And her price, for avoiding this nasty scenario? Why, the second spot on the ticket.

Continue reading "Vice-presidents and secretaries of state" »

For a while this felt like it was going to be a bad night for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton won a huge victory in Kentucky - and the television pundits had hours to dwell gloomily on Obama’s failure there. But Kentucky was then offset by a big win for Obama in Oregon.

The fact that Obama chose to give his evening speech in Iowa - the site of his first crucial victory - had excited speculation that he was going to claim that the Democratic race was over. Instead he contented himself with the claim that he is”within reach of the Democratic nomination” - which is undeniable. Instead Obama chose to signal his inevitable victory by a change in tone and focus. He was magnanimous towards Hillary, in the manner of a victor. And he focused the most effective part of his speech on an attack on John McCain. Continue reading "Obama - FDR and McGovern" »

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Harry Lime’s speech – delivered by Orson Welles – at the end of the The Third Man (1949) is a great cinematic moment. It also poses an interesting choice.

For roughly 500 years, Europe was the political, cultural and economic centre of the world. But bloodshed and suffering accompanied all this power – culminating in two suicidal wars in the 20th century.

Since 1945, Europe has become increasingly prosperous, peaceful and comfortable – and irrelevant. So should a united Europe attempt to reclaim its place at the centre of world affairs? Or should we settle for comfortable irrelevance?

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

I chaired a debate at the US embassy in London last night on the impact of the internet on the presidential election. It was surprisingly interesting. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can watch it here.

One of the reasons I found the discussion interesting is that it convinced me that there is more to the subject than I had realised. I started fairly sceptical. I don’t think it’s very obvious that the internet has made this election qualitatively different from all other campaigns.

But here are two interesting facts that I gleaned that have made me re-consider - a bit. First, 5.5 million people have watched all 35 minutes of Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race on YouTube. In an age when the average TV news sound-bite is down to 12 seconds, this is extraordinary and heartening.

Second, the internet has transformed American campaign finance - and may have solved one of the biggest problems with American democracy. The problem - as we all know - is that elections are so expensive that candidates have to spend huge amounts of time raising funds; and have to warp their positions to suit the prejudices of wealthy donors. But Obama has already raised around $300m in small donations via the internet; vastly more than Hillary who has - by and large - raised money in the traditional way. One of last night’s panellists reckons that by the end of the election, Obama might have raised up to $1 billion on the net.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia are heightening. In the latest development, the Russians have accused Georgian special forces of aiding anti-Russian insurgents. The Georgians meanwhile are outraged by the build-up of Russian forces in the separatist Georgian province of Abkhazia. They are now talking about a military response. And that would mean a shooting war with Russia - albeit, probably, quite a short one.

Specifically, the Georgians point to the downing of Georgian drones flying over Abkhazia, which is (after all) part of their country. They say that one of their drones was definitely shot down by a Russian Mig. They are threatening to shoot down the next Russian Mig to over-fly Georgian territory. And they say that they have tacitly been given the go-ahead by the Americans to do this.

It may be that the Georgians are just talking tough, in the hope of provoking the international mediation over Abkhazia that they desperately want. I hope so. Because I think that shooting down a Russian plane would be the stupidest thing they could possibly do. It would give Russia exactly the excuse it needed to launch military operations against Georgia.