Jonathan Power

Negotiations over Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb-building abilities seem to be stuck in a rut. Given the detailed undertakings by Iran incorporated in the interim agreement made last year it should have only been a hop, skip and a jump to forge a final agreement. In reality it has not been so easy. Over many years […]

It is John McCain, a former Vietnam warrior and the Republican candidate for president when Barack Obama first won the presidency, who has conducted a long campaign against the US using torture. Last week, when the US Senate’s study of the torture used during the administration of George W Bush was published, he was one […]

“If all the world were like Sweden there would be no news to report. The last time that Sweden hit the front page was when its foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was knifed to death by a madman nine years ago on the eve of a referendum on Swedish entry into the Euro zone. The time […]

Over 15,000 foreign jihadists from 80 countries are believed to be fighting alongside militants in Syria, the CIA says. The Syrian war is estimated to have mobilised more European Islamists than all the foreign wars of the last 20 years combined. What to do when the jihadists try to return home? Many of them might […]

Will the real Barack Obama be allowed to stand up? The New York Times’ columnist and Nobel Prize winner for economics Paul Krugman, writes in Rolling Stone, “Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential presidents in American history.” You would not know this if you observed the swing towards the Republicans in the […]

The English language Moscow News newspaper does not worry much about censorship. It goes for the jugular on a regular basis. However, it is doubtful if President Vladimir Putin gives it a thought. Its audience is almost entirely expatriate businessmen, diplomats and journalists. For the Russian-language papers and broadcasting channels it is a different story. […]

Just before former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, on Saturday, made his stunning criticism of the west that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the west had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in […]

President Vladimir Putin is often painted as an ogre in the world’s media. The seemingly eternal president of Russia has an iron grip on his nation and a foreign policy to match. Yet a large majority of Russians give him their support. Is it his early economic success? Or is it because of a new […]

A soon-to-be released report of the US Senate criticises the CIA under President George W Bush for conducting torture of al Qaeda suspects. However, it does not assess the responsibility of Bush himself nor his vice president, Dick Cheney. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, the 6,000-page report is “one of the […]

The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and withdrew, exhausted and demoralised, 10 years later. In Moscow, a joke had long circulated: “Why are we still in Afghanistan?” Answer: “ We are still looking for the people who invited us.” The same is true for the US and NATO who are now moving through […]