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How worried should we be?

Steven Shapin: How Not to Handle Nukes, 23 January 2014

Command and Control 
by Eric Schlosser.
Penguin, 632 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 1 84614 148 5
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... Wall Street Journal imagining and urging ‘A World Free of Nuclear Weapons’. Not so long ago, Barack Obama promised an effort to realise that goal, and the UN Security Council endorsed the idea. That’s the good news. The bad news is that while the risk of a world-ending nuclear exchange has probably diminished, the risk of some form of ...

Diary

Antonia Hitchens: At CPAC, 20 March 2025

... Money, Money’, said America was the ‘laughing stock of the world’, questioned where Barack Obama was born and hinted he might run for president. ‘I am well acquainted with winning,’ he said. ‘We will be taking in hundreds of billions of dollars from other countries that are screwing us.’ Trump appeared again in 2023, during his ...

Has Anyone Lost Yet?

David Edgar: the US election debates, 9 October 2008

... clear poll-leader off his stride, the presidential contests have seen John McCain failing to dent Barack Obama’s increasing lead in the polls, a lead that probably owes more to the economic crisis than his performance on TV. The most compelling contest so far has been the one between the vice-presidential candidates. Watched by nearly 20 million more ...

The Race-Neutral Delusion

Randall Kennedy, 10 August 2023

... imposes dilemmas that are avoidable only through delusion. One of its most influential backers, Barack Obama, once said that racial affirmative action programmes, ‘when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students’. But how is that possible? If ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... loathing of McCain has not abated with the senator’s death, nor has his daily preoccupation with Obama and Hillary Clinton, long past the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker ...

Ten Million a Year

David Wallace-Wells: Dying to Breathe, 2 December 2021

... the effective consent of global political leaders. A quarter of the change has taken place since Barack Obama was elected president, having hubristically proclaimed that ‘this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.’ Just a few years later, he bragged to an audience in Texas that ‘suddenly, America is ...

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

... of rhetorical analysis go back directly to Aristotle and Cicero (it’s common to point out that Barack Obama, or his speech writers, have learned their best tricks from Cicero). And so far as the House of Commons is concerned, those 19th-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the parliamentary rules and procedures that we are now familiar ...

Self-Deceptions of Empire

David Bromwich: Reinhold Niebuhr, 23 October 2008

The Irony of American History 
by Reinhold Niebuhr.
Chicago, 174 pp., £8.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 58398 3
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... at all. The jacket of this paperback reprint of The Irony of American History carries a comment by Barack Obama which attempts a summary of Niebuhr: ‘There’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.’ That is a fair digest considering that it was extracted by a ...

The Political Economy of Carbon Trading

Donald MacKenzie: A Ratchet, 5 April 2007

... the most high profile co-authored by John McCain, and with sponsors including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although capping carbon has been an idea more strongly welcomed by the Democrats, Republican strategists will have noted that the announcement of the Californian scheme gave Governor Schwarzenegger’s poll ratings a healthy boost, helping him ...

Should we build a wall around North Wales?

Daniel Trilling: The Refugee Crisis, 13 July 2017

Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move 
by Reece Jones.
Verso, 208 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 1 78478 471 3
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Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System 
by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 0 241 28923 5
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No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance 
by Natasha King.
Zed, 208 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 1 78360 467 8
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... will be encouraged to invest in the refugee zones by ‘lobbying’ from such world leaders as Barack Obama. This points to an additional problem. Their proposal rests on bypassing an international system of refugee protection – which, for all its faults, at least sets universal standards – in favour of ad hoc arrangements based on the goodwill of ...

How confident should she be?

Richard Lloyd Parry: Aung San Suu Kyi, 26 April 2012

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi 
by Peter Popham.
Rider, 446 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 1 84604 248 5
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... is a tremendous appreciation for the leadership of Thein Sein and what he has done here,’ Barack Obama’s state department gofer on Burma, Derek Mitchell, said last month. Thein Sein became president in March last year, four months after a thuggishly rigged general election, the first since Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won ...

Military to Military

Seymour M. Hersh, 7 January 2016

... Barack Obama’s​ repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff ...

After Suharto

Pankaj Mishra, 10 October 2013

... campaign aired on CNN hails the ‘golden moment’ for ‘Remarkable Indonesia’. In 2010 Barack Obama triumphantly ‘returned’ to Jakarta, where he lived as a child, and made a rousing speech at the national university. The US agreed to sell air-to-surface missiles to the country’s military (after years of condemning its human rights ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... about black people’, as Kanye West put it, the aftermath of the financial crisis showed that Barack Obama was keen not to be seen as caring too much about black people. The second black president lectured African Americans about individual responsibility while bailing out his future paymasters on Wall Street.The pandemic, which has killed 130,000 ...

Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz, 27 May 2010

... a series of blistering interviews on the state of Egyptian political life. Sounding rather like Obama in 2008, he insisted that he was ‘not a saviour’, that ‘only with the help of the people could he try to change the authoritarian regime in power for the last 50 years’. It’s easy to understand why Egyptians are tempted to see him as a saviour: an ...

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