I FOUND Chris Deerin’s article terrifying for two reasons; first for the clarity with which he stands back and takes a wider, more analytical view of the current state of the world than the petty, self-serving, power-hungry so-called “leaders of the free world” seem capable of; and secondly because, now that my concern is more for the next two generations of my family than my own, he reinforces the very fears that I have found increasingly difficult to shake off (“Why the world could be on the brink of a new age of war”, The Herald, January 2).
The United Nations seems totally incapable of exercising any sort of control over current disputes and wars and the question is surely, why? Perhaps the answer lies in the make-up of the Security Council itself. Set up after the Second World War, the focus was naturally on the part of the world that had been the main field of combat. But the world has changed dramatically. So now we have a Security Council of five members, all northern hemisphere and all, bar one, white, westernised and protagonists last time round – no representation of the now powerful and highly dangerous Arab world, or for that matter, any part of the hotspots of the Southern hemisphere.
I believe that, to have any success in negotiations or dispute resolution, one must have a dog in the fight, that is, something to lose and something to gain directly from the result. But the UK is now too weak and impoverished even to defend our own islands properly, let alone play any meaningful part in foreign affairs. With only borrowed air/sea reconnaissance, a less than minimum level of forces personnel, and all resources spent on a “deterrent” that if used to protect our security, would deny us survival, or on two ships that provide the most unmissable enemy target for a guided missile, we are no longer any sort of world power on whom others could rely as an ally.
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Contrary to the dreams of the Brexit fanatics who think the countries of Empire and Commonwealth, whom we impoverished and then abandoned, will fall over themselves to support us and “make the UK great again”, when we leave the EU, the UK will become a complete nonentity on the world stage. Is it not therefore time to reform the Security Council so that it has dogs in the fight more representative of the world today and who stand to gain or lose by the joint negotiations and decisions?
Without conversation, compromise, tolerance, respect and above all friendship, the world has no future but war.
P Davidson,
Gartcows Road, Falkirk.
BIG war is often a clash of national governments’ political values. These values are of course transient; for example the old Soviet Union was once known as the evil empire mainly because it supported atheism, as the ruling Communist Party in China does now without meeting the same hostility.
Moreover safeguards – checks and balances – are absent. Effective oversight of the activities of political stewards is discouraged, especially for the trillions of dollars of public finance throughout the world. This custom is likely to doom even attempts at advanced politics such as in the European Union.
As a result of the complacency the present United Nations system also – supported in part by Nato, democracy, international law, and open economies – may no longer be the way forward. The only winner could be whoever benefits from unregulated global finance, for example a footloose ‘Wall Street’.
A number of years ago, a US academic wondered why there had been no official and effective investigation into the causes of Germany’s behaviour that escalated into the biggest war to date, the Second World War. Likewise the Nixon shock to the global financial system in 1971 wasn’t investigated. And then there was 2008. Next?
Ian Jenkins,
7 Spruce Avenue, Hamilton.
IAN Johnstone (Letters, January 3) skates over the murderous activities of the Soviets in Eastern Europe with the weasel words that this can be "debated and disputed". He also indulges in the worst sort of moral equivalence by trying to equate the Soviet and thence Russian record with that of the US and its allies.
I never at any stage suggested that the West had a blameless record. However, I am sure that the descendants of the hundreds of thousands who were massacred, deported or imprisoned in the areas the Soviet Union forceably annexed, and the millions throughout the rest of Eastern Europe who lived in police states supported through force of arms by the Soviets, would be dismayed by Mr Johnstone's characterisation of this as simply "meddling".
R Murray,
28 Maxwell Drive, Glasgow.