Clive Bibby: Deterrent or Paper Tiger

As the Ukraine war drags on with little show of victories (even small ones) on the Russian Front, and the much needed American replacement armaments package stalled in the US Congress, the question surely needs to be asked of the NATO alliance members - “Isn’t the outcome of this war EUROPE’S RESPONSIBILITY?”

Because the current stalemate is looking more and more like a lost cause if the European member states of NATO continue to allow the Americans to do the heavy lifting.

Aris Roussinos: The world should fear 2024

When asked in 2020 to envisage the world after Covid, Michel Houellebecq proclaimed, accurately enough, that “it will be the same, just a bit worse”. It does not take a soothsayer to foresee that the same will hold true for this coming year. The year 2023 saw the greatest global resurgence of armed conflict since 1945: 2024 will be worse. 

We are living, if not through a World War, then a world at war, the great post-globalisation jostling to divide up the spoils of what was once America’s unipolar imperium. This will be as epoch-defining a period as the late Forties were for Britain, or 1991 for Russia.

Chris Trotter: Rewriting History.

A tankie in the newsroom, who would have thought RNZ still harboured such vipers in its ideologically awakened bosom? A pretty well-placed viper, too, one can only assume, since there appears to have been no one over-seeing his or, (less plausibly) her output. An old-timer perhaps, someone clinging to the journalistic principle that reality is multi-faceted, and that what you see almost always depends upon where you stand. A powerful professional incentive – at least it used to be – for journalists to report all major news-stories from more than one perspective.