Monday, 13th October 2008
Conflicting political ideologies in an uncertain world
Conflicting Political Ideologies in an Uncertain World
In the past year and during the turbulence in the financial markets in recent weeks in particular, we can be in no doubt that we live in a truly global market place. Borders between states are now merely facts of geography and the common market no longer refers to the European community but to the world. But whilst free enterprise is increasingly the route to bridging the gap between nations, there are, in my view, still four conflicting political ideologies that govern the planet. All are progressing at a different pace. But are these potentially unifying forces or a recipe for chaos?
I want to look closely at each of these ideologies in turn today:
(1) The US and EU who follow a strategy of free enterprise, freedom and democracy. They are joined in this philosophy to a greater or lesser extent by countries like Japan, South Korea and Indonesia and by burgeoning new economic tigers like India and Brazil. Basically these nations follow a 21st century political strategy.
(2) China, with a strategy of galloping free enterprise (like Adam Smith on steroids), but with little freedom and no democracy. There is certainly an element of economic freedom, particularly for the urban elite, but no-one is allowed to question or criticise the Communist Party or the Government. Criticism is not tolerated. China follows a 19th century strategy, but is rapidly moving towards the 20th century although they would dearly love to return to their self perceived status (dating from the 17th century and before) as the world’s most powerful and civilised nation. I regard this as essentially an introspective quest. China doesn't seek geographical enlargement – Tibet and Taiwan are seen as reclaiming old territories rather than acquiring new ones. Their quest is more directed towards wealth, status, influence and above all respect.
(3) Russia also follows a mainly 19th century political strategy. It is trying to recreate its imperial past by continuing on a path first set by Ivan the Terrible and followed by all his successors, of gradual imperial accretion. The Warsaw pact was a high point and 1991-2008 merely a setback and now with the situation in Georgia, the direction is forward once more. Energy is not the objective, simply one of the tools. The style is clearly 19th century – great power politics unrestricted. In pursuit of its policy Russia seeks alliances with any oil or gas producing nations that are enemies of the West, like Iran and Venezuela.
Finally, (4) we have the Jihadists. They seek to bring down all the global economies in order that the Imams and Mullahs can rule the world. The Jihadists follow a strictly 7th century political credo.
All four of these diverse ideologies exist side by side and there is seemingly no way that we can find a unifying principle. But two of the ideologies are straight nationalist – Russia and China do not hesitate to use brute force to spread and protect their philosophy. The Jihadists base their philosophy on religion, although, unlike most Muslims, theirs is a religion of nihilistic despair. So only one system, that of the US and the EU is strictly political and spreads by osmosis and example.
On top of this we have to add the toxic mix of globalisation, global poverty and climate change, not to mention economic meltdown. Solving these problems will require universal cooperation, but the world is divided. So where do we go? What does the future hold in such an uncertain world?
Let me examine these differing ideologies one by one and search for answers?
(1) THE US and EU
With the presidential elections taking place in America, democracy is very clearly seen to be at work. Indeed it is estimated that these elections will be the most expensive ever, with both the Republicans and the Democrats breaking the half billion $ mark for their respective campaigns. Most of that money comes from relatively small donations from individual supporters. The Americans love democracy and they are prepared to pay for it. The stark choice on offer between the young, dynamic but some say superficial Obama and the old, grizzled, but experienced war veteran McCain, has turned this race for the Whitehouse into one of the most exciting in decades. Add in the vice presidential race between the old and grizzled Joe Biden and the young and dynamic, but some say shallow - Sarah Palin and you have the makings of a classic political drama. But this all shows that democracy is alive and well and engaging the attention of the public.
The American love of democracy is matched by their love of freedom. This is why they have acted again and again as the world's policeman, sending in the troops whenever they see freedom and democracy under threat, whether in Europe during WWII, Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. They seldom go to war with any thought of territorial gain and they make enormous human and economic sacrifices to try and secure what they regard as necessary protection for US interests.
I fear their appetite for such interventionist policies is on the wane. I was in Minneapolis/St Paul for the Republican Convention in September and met a number of John McCain's senior foreign policy and security advisers. All of them said that they considered the Iraq war a grave mistake, but equally, all of them thought that pulling out too soon would be just as big a mistake. Iraq has taught them a salutary lesson. Despite their gratitude to British troops for their involvement in Iraq, the Americans feel isolated and unloved. Almost all of McCain’s advisers that I spoke to said that the US will never again go it alone in foreign military adventures. They all want to see a new partnership involving western democracies. Although McCain supported the surge of US troops in Iraq and although he is pragmatic about staying in Iraq and Afghanistan until the war on terror is won, it was clear that most of his advisers have little appetite for any military intervention in Iran.
Having said that, Larry Eagleburger, one-time Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush, is maybe an exception to the rule. He told us that Iran had to be stopped from developing a nuclear weapon at any cost and that a military strike on their nuclear installations might be the only option open to the US. That was a little scary to say the least! A military strike on Iran would simply pour petrol on the flames of conflict in the Middle East and unite the Islamic world against the West.
Eagleburger said the world is a more complicated place now than it was during the Cold War and I agree with him. In the Cold War there was East and West...communists and capitalists. We had the spectacle of MAD or Mutual Assured Destruction, as we pointed our nuclear missiles at each other. But through this madness came a sort of stability. That is no longer the case. Eagleburger told us that if we don't cooperate on eliminating the nuclear threat posed by Iran and North Korea, he fears that a nuclear missile will be fired in anger during the next decade.
To this unstable background we can add the already nuclear armed Pakistan and its new President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the slain Benazir Bhutto, to the danger list. Successive governments in Pakistan have pandered to the Islamic fundamentalists in an effort to bolster their own popularity. This has enabled Al Qaeda to flourish and Pakistan is sliding relentlessly towards the ignominious and highly dangerous condition of becoming a failed state. Iran and Al Qaeda must be licking their lips in eager anticipation.
So what can the West do about this unravelling crisis? With 500 million citizens and 27 Member States, the EU is now considerably bigger than America, but only in economic terms and perhaps hardly even then. Certainly in military terms, we have, to paraphrase Stalin, 'no EU divisions’. However, the individual Member States do have considerable military strength. The combined uniformed forces of the UK, France, Germany, Italy Spain and the Netherlands currently amounts to 1.2m, compared to the US 1.38m. But these forces do not come under EU command. Of course that is something that our federalist friends would like to correct. They want to establish a European Army as the final trappings of statehood in their Utopian scheme for a Federal United States of Europe.
But as Henry Kissinger told us in Minneapolis, the process of transition from nation states to the EU has not yet caught up with the traditional alliances of the old nation states. Their future has not yet caught up with their past. The old trans-Atlantic alliance that bound the UK and America together in a solid partnership under successive leaders, but never more successfully than the partnership between Reagan and Thatcher, is now only a pale reflection. Traditional alliances elsewhere no longer apply. The Euro elite try hard to correct this deficiency by struggling to implement the Lisbon Treaty or constitution, arguing that this will enable the election of an all-powerful President for 5 years and a Foreign Minister, who will be able to negotiate on behalf of the EU and to speak for all 27 Member States in the UN Security Council.
I asked Kissinger if he thought Europe needed the Lisbon Treaty and he said he had been invited to the Library of Congress a couple of years ago, to hear Giscard d'Estaing explain the intricacies of the EU Constitution. "I've never seen an audience so stupefied in my life," he said. His conclusion was that he was happy to leave the question of the Lisbon Treaty up to the EU Member States to figure out!
If anyone thinks that Europe would present a more coherent approach to foreign affairs under Lisbon, then we only have to look at what happened in August when Russia invaded South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. Sarkozy - whenever he heard of the invasion and acting as EU President under the current rotating presidency, phoned Putin and demanded a meeting. First of all it is worth noting that Putin answered the phone to Sarko. He would probably equally have answered the phone to Merkel or even to Gordon Brown. But would he have answered a call from Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, who is tipped for the job of EU Foreign Minister or even EU-President under Lisbon? Would he have answered the phone if Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic had called? Of course not! This is the best possible evidence that the Lisbon Treaty will impede rather than improve Europe’s involvement in conflict resolution. It was not because Sarkozy was President of Europe that he got through to Putin, it was because he was President of France. It is still the big Member States who have the most clout in foreign policy terms and not the EU.
And it is just as well Putin answered the phone. Sarkozy said that Putin yelled at him that the Georgians had murdered 60 of his soldiers and that he was sending his tanks all the way to Tblisi to overthrow the government and hang Saakashvili from a lamppost. According to Sarkozy, it was his insistence on an immediate meeting in Moscow that calmed Putin down and avoided a Russian rout of Georgia. Even if Putin’s histrionics were part of an elaborate act, like the time Kruschev beat the table at the UN Security Council with his shoe, it had the desired effect. It meant that Sarko and Barosso scurried to Moscow, without first consulting NATO or their EU partners, certain that if they failed in their negotiations, Georgia would fall.
Whether or not the Russians had ever planned to occupy Georgia, the EU reaction provided them with some key insights. I think it was more likely that their objective was firstly to test the reaction of Europe and the US to the use of violence and secondly, to move closer to the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) pipeline to make the point that they can cut it at will, and thirdly to put the Baltic and Caspian states on notice that the Russians are coming back.
They have proved with comfort that the EU and even the USA presently have no stomach for a hot war to stabilise the borders of Russia. In the process they now sit astride the BTC pipeline and have firmly rattled the Balts and Caspians. Mission accomplished. The subsequent agreements signed by Sarkozy and Medvedev may have stopped the killing and led to the partial withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgian territory. But we are now sitting on a tinderbox, where Russia has recognised the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and stood by while these two territories were effectively ethnically cleansed of Georgians. Russia is also actively distributing passports to citizens of the Crimea, in Ukraine, where it wants to secure its long-term interests in the Black Sea Port of Sebastopol. It is worth remembering that half of all Ukrainians in the east) are actually of Russian extraction. I see Crimea declaring secession from Ukraine some time in the next five years, followed by a rigged referendum – it would not have to be all that rigged – for the return of Ukraine to “federation” with Russia in the five years following.
So Europe has potential flashpoints on its borders, in Georgia, Ukraine, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Republica Srpska, Macedonia, Cyprus, the Baltics, Kaliningrad and along the Southern shores of the Mediterranean. Our security in these areas can best be served not by tinkering with new EU constitutions, but through our traditional alliance with NATO. Instead of re-emphasising our support for NATO, the Eurocrats are continually seeking to develop a Common Foreign and Security Policy that would effectively undermine NATO and undermine our long-standing trans-Atlantic alliance, by giving Europe its own Foreign Minister, European army and defence budget.
Indeed, given that EU Member States and their citizens will not volunteer for a hot war with Russia over our eastern neighbours, it seems to me that the only safe solution is to learn from history for once and for NATO to adopt a strategy of forward defence in strength and depth. This worked from 1949 to 1989 – with roughly a million NATO troops stationed 20-30 miles from the USSR border, fully armed, trained and indoctrinated to move to immediate use of extreme violence if the Russians put one foot over the border. NATO’s navies adopted the same stance, with aggressive SSN and SSK submarines patrolling in the Barents Sea, standing naval forces in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and aggressive forward-basing postures. The strategy worked like a dream. Now the border is five hundred miles further east, but the same strategy would work again.
Russia’s histrionic response to the placing of US ABMs in the Czech Republic is an interesting sign of what really alarms them. They are not alarmed at the missiles themselves which involve a relatively trivial amount of force, as part of the great encircling route of missiles that stretch from Iran to the USA. What alarms the Russians is the principle of forward defence in action.
Now security concerns aside, our western democracies have other global issues to contend with. The collapse of confidence in some of our major banks and insurance companies following the sub-prime crisis set off a roller-coaster in the world’s financial markets which exposed the worst aspects of our capitalist system. Spiralling fuel and food prices, growing concern about climate change and global poverty have all combined to raise legitimate questions about the way we lead our lives and the political ideologies we pursue. One senior European politician said to me recently that America was always famous for three things: its military prowess, its banks and its movie industry. Now, he said, its military has fallen into disrepute, its banks have collapsed and only its movie industry remains. He mused that we were perhaps witnessing the end of an era, with the US losing its place as world leader and Europe moving into poll position. Frankly I wouldn’t write off the US quite so quickly.
(2) CHINA
As China celebrates the spectacular success of the Olympic Games, it is worth assessing how this burgeoning economic giant is faring. Firstly, let me give you a few staggering statistics. I said that China's attitude to free enterprise is like Adam Smith on steroids, but did you know that 80% of the world’s photocopiers are made in China? So are 60% of mobile phones, 60% of digital cameras and 60% of global textiles. 40% of the world’s microwave ovens are produced in a single factory in Shanghai!
If these facts don’t shake you then consider this - China has the biggest financial reserves in the world now standing at $1.3 trillion and the Chinese economy has grown by 10% per annum, year on year, for the past 28 years. Even with the international financial crisis going on across the globe, China has only seen a modest downturn in economic growth from 10.8% to 10.4% in the last semester. Exports drive the Chinese economy and their hunger for imports drives up the price of basic commodities worldwide. Indeed rising demand for rice, grain, steel, cement and other supplies have caused prices to soar in the West. The Chinese are a frugal and cautious people. 44% of the entire GDP goes into savings, compared to only 15% in the UK and minus 1% in the US.
However, there are many areas in China where the third world clashes with the first. Of the 1.3 billion population, over 800 million live in the countryside with no health care whatsoever and with rudimentary access to education. Chinese cities account for more than 70% of GDP. In trying to address this disparity, the Beijing government has recently abolished agricultural taxes which have been around in one form or another for 2600 years. They are keenly aware of the need to increase political ‘happiness’ in rural China in case things go badly off the rails and have started investing in health care and education for rural Chinese as well as the hordes who have moved to the cities. Even the Chinese authorities themselves admit that more than 300 million people live below the poverty line and have no access to clean water. There are around 200 protests every day across the whole of China, mostly involving poor people complaining about lay-offs, land-grabs and corruption.
Religion in China is harshly controlled. Political dissent is not tolerated and the right of the Communist Party to rule unchallenged is elemental. While the government claims that the incidence of the death penalty is gradually reducing, it is hard to prove this as statistics are never released.
On the environmental front, 16 of the world’s most polluted cities are in China, with Beijing itself heading the list, although there have been major improvements before and since the Olympics. China opens a new, dirty, coal-fired power station around every 5 days in an effort to meet its rapidly escalating demand for energy and yet, because of the growing gap between rich and poor, China only produces 4 tons of CO2 per capita, compared to 11 tons per person in Europe and 19 tons in the US. Indeed the Chinese argue that if the West reduced its per capita CO2 emissions to that of China the whole question of global warming would be resolved. This cheeky bit of logic fails to recognise that more than half of China’s population has no access to electricity whatsoever, bringing the other half, who mostly inhabit the vast, polluted cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Chengdu, more into line with Western CO2 emissions.
Experts predict that the Chinese economy will continue to grow apace for at least the next 5 years. However, the gap between rich and poor will have to be closed. Only signs of advancing prosperity will keep the masses happy and achieve the objective of “a harmonious socialist society” that their leadership seeks, although their belief in ‘socialism’ is certainly a million miles away from what Charman Mao might have understood.
In terms of foreign policy, China is keen to be seen as a friendly and responsible partner to anyone who does not try to criticise them over Tibet, Taiwan or their record on human rights. They hate to be lectured. Meanwhile they are making inroads into Africa, with Chinese companies involved in major infrastructural projects from one end of the continent to the other. This has led to some disquiet in the west over their failure to use their influence with the Sudanese government to alleviate the appalling situation in Darfur. But Chinese moves in Africa are entirely about getting their hands on oil and metal ores. They are completely amoral in respect of how the states they deal with act towards minorities, so long as it doesn’t interfere with China’s long-term objectives.
China used to be known as the sleeping giant. There is no doubt that the giant is now wide awake.
(3) RUSSIA
If anyone is in any doubt about who is running Russia then let me tell you what happened when Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso flew to Moscow in August to stop the Russian invasion of Georgia. Barosso told me that after three hours of tough negotiations with President Medvedev, the three of them finally reached agreement and signed the document that called for a phased withdrawal of Russia’s troops from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Before the ink was dry, Medvedev announced that he had to run the agreement past Prime Minister Putin and disappeared into Putin’s office. Shortly afterwards he re-emerged with two key paragraphs scored out. Sarkozy was outraged, rose to his feet and stormed out of the room with Medvedev in hot pursuit, shouting for him to come back and assuring him that the two offending paragraphs would be reinstated. Thus it was only by calling his bluff and threatening a walkout, that the agreement was secured. But nothing could more clearly illustrate where the power lies inside the Kremlin.
Putin’s domination of Russian politics and his determination to impose his geopolitical will by the political use of Russia's energy resources, has set the scene for a new power struggle. Europe could be heading this winter, quite literally, for a Cold War. The EU relies on Russia for 45% of our oil and gas. Some of the Eastern Bloc accession states are in an even more vulnerable position. Hungary gets 90% of its gas from Russia. The Hungarian economy could be shut down in mid-winter at the flick of a switch. Russia, meanwhile, earns around $500 billion a year from the sale of oil and gas to Europe. To put it in context, this is more than the entire annual military budget of the US! Russia gets richer as the West gets poorer. On the other hand, Russia also relies on Europe for this income, so its ability to use energy as a political blackmail tool comes at a cost.
George W. Bush famously said that he looked into the eyes of Putin and saw an honest man. John McCain said “I looked into his eyes and saw a K, a G and a B!” But there is no doubt that Vladimir Putin looks back nostalgically to the days of the Soviet Empire. He would dearly like to rebuild Russia as a global player. This was made clear following a meeting in 2007 when Putin was President. He gathered together a group of leading history teachers to talk about his vision of the past. “We cannot allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt upon us,” was his message. The result has been the publication of a new history textbook which has just been distributed to hundreds of thousands of Russian school children.
The new textbook explains that “The Soviet Union was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.” This would, of course, be heartening news to the 60 million Kulaks murdered by Stalin during his forced collectivisation policies and the ensuing famines that laid waste to vast tracts of the USSR. It would also cheer up the millions of intellectuals, political opponents and plain innocent citizens who died in the Gulag archipelago, under Stalin's brutal dictatorship which Putin apparently reveres.
The school textbook goes on to denounce those responsible for the loss of empire, regardless of their politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is seen not as a watershed from which a new history begins, but as an unfortunate diversion that has hindered Russia’s progress. Gorbachev is described as ‘stupid’ for regarding Western partners as his political allies. Finally, the textbook reveals the sinister course of Putin’s personal philosophy by blaming America and the West for instigating revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine which “turned the former Soviet territories into Western military bases,” effectively undermining Russian security.
It is quite clear that Vladimir Putin intends to claim a sphere of influence over the independent sovereign states that once fell under the Soviet yoke. He will not tolerate the idea of those states joining NATO, never mind becoming members of the EU. His belligerence is backed by threats to cut off energy supplies, as he seeks to bring these countries to heel. The EU response has been weakly to call for sanctions. But even this was deemed to go too far. In the end it was decided to suspend negotiations with Russia on a partnership and cooperation agreement. So Russia invades a neighbour and Europe responds by ending negotiations on a partnership agreement! You couldn't make it up! The old knee-jerk EU response to aggression always leads down the road to appeasement.
(4) JIHAD
As President George W. Bush nears the end of his discredited presidency, it is certain that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain will thank him for the legacy of conflict one or the other will inherit in the Middle East. Both of them have named Iran as a key policy issue, but both from dramatically different perspectives. Obama wants to sit down and negotiate with President Ahmadinejad, the crazed leader of Iran, who has repeatedly told the world that he wants to wipe Israel off the map and is busily building the nuclear weapons that will enable him to do so. McCain ominously says that he will use all the power at his disposal, if he becomes President, to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon. The choice between appeasement and military intervention looms large.
Being strongly opposed to war, the EU sees no alternative but to pursue relentlessly its policy of appeasement. Javier Solana pretends to talk tough in Tehran, but bends to every demand from the mullahs. But there is an alternative to either military intervention or appeasement. There is a third way. We should give our support to and empower the main opposition movement to the mullahs and help them to achieve regime change. Instead of that, at the direct request of the mullahs, we have done the very opposite. We have treated our enemies as friends and our friends as enemies.
The recent debacle over the blacklisting in Europe of the main Iranian opposition – the People’s Mohajedin of Iran (PMOI) exposed the worst excesses of this appeasement strategy. Growing unrest within Iran and widening support for the PMOI has inflamed the paranoia of the mullahs. These turbaned tyrants preside over a regime committed to oppression on a scale that would even embarrass North Korea. Executions and torture are part of the daily staple. 29 political prisoners and criminals were hanged on a single day this summer in the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran.
Freedom and democracy in Iran are a forgotten dream. The mullahs see Tehran as the centre of a Jihadist Empire, ruled under a strict Sharia code. To spread their vicious Islamo-fascist philosophy, the fingerprints of the mullahs can be found on almost every terrorist atrocity worldwide over the past 20 years. Their malign influence is evident in Palestine, where they fomented the civil war and the division of that country. They backed Hezbollah in the war against Israel in Lebanon, supplying arms and cash. And, as Obama and McCain know only too well, they are steadily consolidating their hold on neighbouring Iraq, funding and supplying trained military personnel and sophisticated weapons to inflame the insurgency and murder innocent civilians and allied soldiers alike.
The mullahs fear and loathe the PMOI and their political arm, the National Council for Resistance in Iran (NCRI), led by the inspirational Mrs Maryam Rajavi. Their commitment to a secular democracy with recognition of human rights, women’s rights, freedom, an end to torture and the death penalty and the abolition of nuclear weapons, is the direct antithesis to everything the mullahs stand for. Since coming to power 29 years ago, the mullahs have murdered 120,000 PMOI supporters in Iran and assassinated many others around the world. Their determination to wipe out this key threat to their stranglehold on power, defines their foreign policy. Every negotiator from the West is met with a list of demands, top of which is an insistence that the PMOI be designated as a terrorist organisation, so that their assets can be frozen and their activities severely curtailed. The West, with pathetic naiveté and a fawning lust for petro-dollar contracts, is always keen to oblige.
When Jack Straw was Britain’s Foreign Minister, he admitted that he had placed the PMOI on the UK terror list and successfully persuaded the Council of Ministers to put them on the EU terror list as well, at the specific request of the mullahs. This wretched charade fell apart recently when the UK court of appeal ordered the British Home Secretary to remove the PMOI from the UK terror list, stating that there was no justification whatsoever for their blacklisting, adding that "It is a matter for comment and for regret that the decision-making process in this case has signally fallen short of the standards which our public law sets and which those affected by public decisions have come to expect."
Undeterred, the mullahs quickly found another EU Member State willing to do their bidding in exchange for lucrative contracts and the elusive pledge to end their escalating uranium enrichment programme. France was persuaded to place the PMOI on their terror list and then to seek the approval of the Council of Ministers to maintain the PMOI on the European blacklist. Both decisions are a blatant breach of European law and both will be subject to challenge in the French and European courts respectively. But meanwhile, at Tehran's request, the PMOI have been neutralised and Ahmadinejad is laughing all the way to his nuclear bunker!
Of course promises by the mullahs that they will cease their nuclear enrichment programme are never fulfilled and recent intelligence revealed to the West by the PMOI proves that work is continuing apace on the construction, not only of nuclear warheads, but also of the delivery systems to launch them. We also know that in blatant breach of UN sanctions, several EU Member States are ignoring the activities of major national corporations who are supplying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) with tunneling equipment for their nuclear installations and other advanced dual-use technology. For such countries, money shouts louder than the screams of the oppressed.
The Jihadists are on the march and their champions hold the reins of power in Tehran.
(5) CONCLUSION
So my argument really breaks down to this: The world is currently divided by four clear political and ideological strategies with five cities - Washington DC, Brussels, Beijing, Moscow and Tehran vying for pre-eminence. It seems to me that even if freedom and democracy are not universally revered in every one of these five capitals, at least free enterprise in one shape or another is pursued diligently in four of them. So the unifying force is the market place and our need to survive and grow economically. America, the EU, Russia and China have that in common. Only by working together can we hope to tackle global issues like climate change, poverty and disease. Only through a unified approach can we hope to find a solution to the long-running issue of Palestine.
But one thing is certain, our common enemy is the Jihad and we have to unite to fight that common enemy. It was Napoleon who said "The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemy’s." In this uncertain world it is our duty to make sense out of the chaos and to ensure that we control it rather than allow it to engulf us.
