Atlantic Sentinel

Author: Miguel Nunes Silva

  • Samantha Power, the Millennials’ Savonarola

    Like the sensationalist political pamphlets of the early stages of the printing age, today’s humanitarian activists’ purpose is to, artificially, stir public sentiment through their writing.

    Samantha Power’s manifest A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003) and the professor’s rhetoric seem to nowadays produce the same effect on those who read it.

    Early in the last decade, when the name Paul Wolfowitz was controversial, Power had nothing but compliments for the Bush Administration’s “Iraqi Freedom” hawk. An uncomfortable truth considering that the Democratic Party withdrew its endorsement of the invasion of Iraq once weapons of mass destruction were found not to exist. Certainly if one takes into consideration that for some in the ranks of its pro-war intellectual base, the weapons were never the issue (mirror image apropos of French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner). But an even bigger embarrassment if we take into account that she currently sits on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. (more…)

  • After Libya, Europe’s New Order in the Making

    For all his blunders, George W. Bush may forever be remembered for vindicating the notion of the “coalition of the willing.” Until the world wars, all military alliances were in fact ad hoc and it was only the messianic Western prejudices that followed the defeat of absolutism in World War I, fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War, that temporarily deluded the Western masses into thinking that an “alliance” should have a noble, morally righteous connotation.

    The campaign to oust Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya started as a simple ad hoc coalition led by Paris and London. Only later did it become embroiled in international politics with the likes of Rome and Berlin seeking to exercise some moderation by forcing the British and the French to accept NATO leadership and a subsequent bureaucratization of the intervention into inefficacy. (more…)

  • The Devil We Know

    The balance of power in the Indian Ocean rim has been degrading for some time but China’s recent decision to sell submarines to Pakistan threatens to further upset South Asia’s fragile nuclear balance. The question we must ask ourselves is “who do we want counterbalancing India’s naval might in decades to come?”.

    Pakistan is weak and not getting any better. It is an artificial polity and much of its problems stem from that very fact. It lacks a cohesive core ethnicity, it lacks geographical coherence (the Indus valley having never been an easily defensible position without strategic depth) and its demographic-raw materials proportion is worsening due to population growth.

    What Pakistan has in abundance is geostrategic relevance. All those interested in counterbalancing India (China), Iran (Saudi Arabia) and Russia (the West) have a permanent and vested interest in propping up Pakistan.

    For this reason, Pakistan’s military apparatus always has been and always will be powerful. While the Pakistani army and air force have made the difference in their wars with India and in small deployments to the Middle East (against Israel and later in support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen), Pakistan’s navy has long been the weaker branch. India always managed to control the sea lanes when in conflict with its rival. (more…)

  • The Distorted Legacy of Vietnam

    As far as the Vietnam War is concerned, conventional wisdom is dominated more by ideological perception than historical fact.

    The proponents of the “soft power” doctrine might call it “soft victory.” A victory practically in name only was what the socialist bloc could claim in Southeast Asia. For the nineteen years of its duration, the conflict in Vietnam took countless lives and left the country’s economy in shambles. This was a conflict desired only by the socialist countries which therefore owe some explaining in regards to their “victory.”

    However brutal the South Vietnamese regime may have been, it did not interfere with communist operations north of the 17th parallel. It also abstained from engaging in the same Maoist inspired grand projects that Hanoi invested in, much to its later disillusionment.

    In short, the onus of belligerence falls entirely upon the North Vietnamese and their Chinese and Soviet patrons. (more…)

  • The Ants and the Grasshoppers

    The advent of new governments in many countries around the world during the first decade of the twenty-first century brought with it strategic indefinition. The reason is found in small systemic revolutions that some of these newcomers represented in terms of geopolitics. In such countries as Brazil, Japan and Turkey, the newcomers had been away from power for decades. Thus the elections that swept them into office were practically regime changes.

    The priority given to the worn out promise of “change” made foreign policy departments a prime target. Whereas during the Cold War ideological alternatives were available for different political factions, nowadays the primacy of the free-market model and of the Washington Consensus make alternative governance difficult. As a result, the perception of policy making is largely dependent on symbolism instead of substance. Hence, social conservatism and liberalism are being used as a political platform rather than economic policy. (more…)