David Goodhart
The misguided conventional copenhagen wisdom
Copenhagen is being called a failure, with various candidates blamed. Naomi Klein says it was Obama’s fault. Mark Lynas today is blaming the Chinese. But the conference wasn’t a failure. Or it was only so when measured against unrealistic expectations.
As Tony Brenton pointed out in the FT (letters, December 22nd, registration required), what matters here is power politics not consensus among all the world’s nations. There are about 20 nations that matter in climate change politics, and the core of the deal that was agreed came from five of them—the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. (And in what previous global deal could you have seen those five names lined up together?) The US and China have both committed themselves to a deal, indeed all the countries that matter have agreed, in public, that the rise in global temperature must be kept to under 2C. That in itself is a huge advance on just a couple of years ago.
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Jonathan Power
Iran could become another Turkey: "democratic, pro-western and bomb free"
As the possibility of a UN-backed plan aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons has been given a glimmer of hope—in not being rejected outright by the Iranian government—it is worth considering why Iran is being singled out so acutely and unfairly over its nuclear policy.
Clearly, the west and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear-enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a reprocessing facility to make plutonium, and a missile programme). In the 1980s it built two nuclear devices.
Three years ago I asked the chief of mission at the US embassy in Brasilia if Washington was worried about Brazil. “Not at all,” he replied. “In the early 1990s Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons’ programme, and Argentina, its supposed enemy, has done the same.” “But,” I insisted, “Brazil still has its enrichment programme and a reprocessing facility.” His answer: “We have no worries about Brazil. We see eye to eye.” However Brazil still resists, in part, the probing eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
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Mary Fitzgerald
Latin America's new poster boy?
With the summit of the Americas due to open in a couple of days, Bogota-based journalist Anastasia Moloney looks ahead to what we might expect from President Obama’s first diplomatic visit to Latin America.
In her article, free to read online this week, Moloney argues that Brazil’s outspoken President Lula (who recently blamed the global economic crisis on “white and blue-eyed people”), will be the lychpin at the summit: a diplomatic bridge between the US and the radical leftist regimes of Venezuela, Ecuador’s and Bolivia. With Venezuela struggling with double-digit inflation and plummeting oil revenues, the regional influence of the combative of Hugo Chavez is waning. Instead, Washington is looking to Lula (the first Latin American leader to get an invite to the White House during the Obama administration) to help it forge a new policy towards the region. Afghanistan may be the US’s top foreign policy priority: nonetheless, ending the 50-year standoff with Cuba is also crucial—and in this, as well as in global trade and climate change negotiations, Obama know that an alliance with Brazil, the world’s tenth largest economy, will prove indispensible.
Share your thoughts on Moloney’s article, and the summit as it unfolds, here.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
What happens when it goes wrong?
Despite the vast amount of coverage of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, it is remarkable how little of it directs the finger of blame, moral, legal or otherwise, towards those who are ultimately responsible.
The extraordinary circumstances of that day are the single most important factor in this accidental killing of an entirely innocent man by armed police. This in itself goes a long way to explaining quite how unusual this event is in the history of the United Kingdom. There is simply no precedent for an unarmed man being deliberately killed by armed officers in a non-criminal situation.
Obviously, safe-guards must be in place for such a set of circumstances but, given that London is not Tel Aviv, any such set of controls will necessarily be insufficiently tried and tested. However, it does seem that there were certain failures of communication within the command structure of the security operation. The question which must be answered, and it is unclear from the open verdict given today whether or not it directly was, is whether these failures are tolerable, i.e. unavoidable, within the operational constraints of an emergency situation with high potential casualties.
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