Tag Archives: war

Below is my speech on Ukraine in the House of Lords on the 25th of October. Unfortunately, time constraints forced me to leave out two bits of my argument which I will put in brackets in the text. “My Lords, I am usually put last on the speakers’ list in any debate on this topic, but I treat that as a badge of honour. I welcome the opportunity we have been given to take note. I have been taking note of the Government’s position on Ukraine for over two years now. It is unchanging: the...

There is only one acceptable end to the war in Ukraine. And it doesn’t involve giving Kyiv the weapons it would need to entirely drive Russia out Aug 14, 2024 “The nation must clearly speak with one voice,” declared Baroness Neville-Rolfe, then Conservative minister of state at the cabinet office, on 20th February 2024. No remark so neatly captures the mindset of Britain’s foreign policy and defence establishment on Ukraine.  The official view, from which Labour has never...

This popped up. What not to do on a sunny day in the Nevada desert. The F-89 Fighter Fired ‘Mini’ Nuclear Bomb Rockets to Make Russia Freak, msn.com A new design F-89J flying overhead was carrying a different and altogether deadlier payload. An approximate three-meter-long rocket with a 1.5 kiloton nuclear W25 nuclear warhead in its tip.  The rocket was designated MB-1 Genie, later renamed the AIR-2A, and popularly nicknamed the “Ding Dong.”...

To the death toll of the violence in Gaza, around 15.000 additional deaths of infants and children between 1 and 5 have to be added. This is a rough and, in my opinion, a lower-bound estimate. However, the calculations are based on robust information, and sizeable additional mortality in infants and young children in Gaza is real. Next to the direct victims of war, there are indirect victims who die because of lack of proper medical care or because of harsh circumstances. Here, I´ll...

Dear friends, I said I wouldn't post any more on this site. But Elon Musk doesn't like me posting Substack links on Twitter. And Substack itself is a mess. The home page looks amateurish, and new posts don't even appear on it until they've amassed enough views to push down previous posts. It's an absurd way of organising a site. So I have decided in future to post links to my Substack posts here. Hopefully this will mean you can find them more easily, both on Google and Twitter. Some of my...

Nov 8, 2022 ROBERT SKIDELSKY and PHILIP PILKINGTON Decades of deindustrialization have hollowed out the UK economy and made it woefully ill-prepared for wartime disruptions. As the financial speculators who funded its current-account deficits turn against the pound, policymakers should consider Keynesian taxes and increasing public investment. LONDON – A wartime economy is inherently a shortage economy: because the government needs to direct resources toward manufacturing guns, less...

Liz Truss is the United Kingdom's new prime minister—that brings the number of female leaders in the G20 to two. She enters world politics at a tense moment: Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine looks unlikely to end anytime soon, and tensions in the Taiwan Strait are greater than ever. The risk of a great power war between the West and Russia or China seems greater than any point in 30 years.Maybe what we need is more women in charge, and fewer macho men. Surely that would...

James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, recently predicted that the Russia-Ukraine conflict would end this year. Some experts, such as Stavridis, expect a stalemate and frozen conflict. Others hope for negotiations to begin. After all, this is what usually happens. War is brutally expensive and exhausting, so most conflicts are brief. Over the last century, the average war was just 100 days long.   Unfortunately, some wars last because sustaining the...

Between 1998 and 2003, Ksenia Yudaeva and Konstantin Sonin were colleagues, first at the Russian-European Center for Economic Policy and then at the Center for Economic and Financial Research and Development. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Sonin (now a professor at the University of Chicago) reached out to Yudaeva (who today serves as the first deputy governor of the Central Bank). Fearing data insecurity on Facebook and Telegram, she asked him to install Signal....

Sergio Cesaratto – The economic and social consequences of the war on Europe and Italy Brave New Europe, May 12, 2022 Political realism offers useful keys to interpreting the international political economy, which has never been more endangered than today by the military escalation in Ukraine. The EU and Italy risk to be the pots and pans in the unprecedented economic crisis looming ahead. Sergio Cesaratto teaches European monetary and fiscal...