Global Outlook

Momentous challenges are pressing in on us on all sides. One day it is Covid, the next day Ukraine, the day after the ravages of climate change, then the many ugly faces of racism. The list goes on. Are these just unconnected afflictions, or symptoms of a deeper ailment? How do we make sense of it all? Can we go beyond political spin, propaganda, platitudes? How do we communicate with others about all this? How can we respond? The 7-week series is one modest attempt to address these questions.

The latest IPCC report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability shows that the effects of climate change are more severe than previously thought, that the situation will deteriorate globally faster than expected if no decisive action is taken now, and it highlights that low-lying island nations and islands will be hardest hit and be faced with truly existential threats. This is bad news particularly for the Pacific Island Countries (PICs).

While in Iranian territorial waters, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles to bring down the Iranian plane with the loss of all 290 on board on 3 July 1988. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were later awarded medals. Vice President George H W Bush insisted he would ‘never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are’.

Climate change is bound to have far-reaching implications on tribal societies even though they have traditionally lived in close harmony with nature. For them, climate change is an issue of human rights and equity as it threatens to disrupt their traditional ways of life and production through land degradation, agricultural shifts, changes in rainfall patterns, higher incidence of pests and diseases.

The First Meeting of the States Parties of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons TPNW (CMP-1) is scheduled for mid-2022. What does the future hold for this controversial instrument?

Resorting to what President Barack Obama called the Washington Playbook of militarised response to a foreign policy crisis, Arta Moeini writes, the ruling elites in the West collude with the mainstream media in a Manichean framing that ‘redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation’. This doesn’t just enable, it ennobles the American war machine. For this to work, though, one’s own culpability in creating the crisis in the first place must be forcefully rejected.