After three extended trips to Lebanon as a journalist, I’ve learned there’s a certain kind of friend you need to have here. They are the ones who can navigate you safely around a roadblock, or who instinctively know the right guy to bribe. They get things done, when doing so might seem impossible.  The Lebanese have a word for this kind of everyday corruption and street-smarts: Harbookh.  “Shou fal Harbou2!” (This person is such a Harbookh). If you’re here for long enough, you’ll also need to develop this skillset, especially if you’re doing business. These are the survival instincts ..read more

Much has been said and written about Brian Mulroney since his passing, most of it deservedly positive. And I too would like to add some thoughts on the lessons we should all draw about political leadership during his time in power. As an Opposition Liberal MP during his two mandates, four lessons stand out. First, the quiet and credible management of the nation’s affairs is an important obligation for any government. That’s what voters want and deserve. The less drama, the better. But true leadership is much more than that. It’s also about the need to ‘look around the corner’. To address the f ..read more

Now that the US primaries have resulted in the selection of two elderly candidates, that a large majority of Americans say they don’t want, the race between them for the White House can now get fully underway.  Betting averages show a slight advantage for former president Donald Trump, in part because 11% of Democrats hope that someone other than Joe Biden (Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom for example) will be nominated instead. But from a new category of “double-haters” who don’t want either candidate, 8% profess to “hate” Biden less. Meanwhile, a recent Economist cover portrayed the two c ..read more

In my recently published book, Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle Between Russia, China, and America, I describe how the world’s leading autocracies (principally China and Russia, but with increasing support from Iran and North Korea) have plunged the democracies back into a cold war. The major fault line in the current cold war is that authoritarian regimes are refusing to abide by the rules-based international order, exemplified by (but not limited to) Russia’s unjustified war of aggression on Ukraine, and China’s aggressive grey zone activities in the South China S ..read more

It was the speech that upended decades of wannabe pacifist German foreign policy – or so we thought. Two years ago, just days after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed that Germany was “experiencing a Zeitenwende” – a hard to translate German word that means nothing less than a “sea change” or “epochal shift.” In response to the Russian threat, Germany was going to at long last bring its defence spending up to two percent of GDP. It was also going to make a €100 billion (about C$147 billion) special fund available to modernise its severely under-e ..read more

Abdalla Hamdok served as the 15th Prime Minister of Sudan from August 2019 to October 2021 and again from November 2021 to January 2022, when he resigned. Image: Wikimedia Commons Ola A. Alsheikh In Sudan, eight million people have been displaced from their homes since conflict between two army factions broke out in April 2023. Of these, 1.6 million have fled to neighbouring countries. Nearly half the population – some 25 million people – are also in urgent need of humanitarian assistance; 80% of hospitals are out of commission; all schools are closed. Khartoum, the fiercely contested capital ..read more

As the Russia-Ukraine war enters its third year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – even longer considering the seizure of Crimea by Russia in 2014 – there have been times when the conflict has fallen off the front pages and from our social media feeds. A recent, and understandable example of this occurring was the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent war in Gaza that is now front and centre. In the language of David Lowenthal, forgetting, overlooking or ignoring seem to be the nature of “today’s feverish demands” where “the sensory-laden penchant for compu ..read more

On March 1st the Islamic regime in Iran staged new ‘elections’ for the twelfth Parliament and the sixth Assembly of Experts. While the Islamist fundamentalists who took over the popular 1979 Revolution that toppled the dictatorial monarchy in Iran had no interest in a republic or any form of democracy, at the outset they could not disregard the main demand of the revolution for a representative government.  In the revised draft of the constitution which they concocted “the absolute sovereignty of the jurist”,  the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and after him, Ayatollah Khamenei ru ..read more

“The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” was a 1966 American Cold War comedy film directed by Norman Jewison for United Artists. The story involved the grounding of a Soviet submarine near a small New England island and the amusing chaos that followed. Fast forward to February 2024, and in what had the trappings of a low budget sci-fi film, featuring the landing of hostile aliens on the White House lawn, Washington was a buzz about a secret new Russian space weapon that had also arrived seemingly unannounced. The premature public utterance about the space threat by Representative Mi ..read more

The current war in Gaza has spurred renewed calls for the resumption of progress toward the “two-state solution”, wherein Israel and a Palestinian state would live side-by-side, in peace. These calls have come from President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and numerous commentators, including, in OpenCanada, former Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen. Yet there is ample reason for skepticism towards this panacea. In his last interview before his death, Henry Kissinger, who as US Secretary of State initiated the contemporary Middle East peace process by ..read more