Since the end of the Cold War, the US has had no serious rivals either to its military or its economic capacity. This puts us in a situation that is "unique in world-historical terms", according to the Princeton international relations scholar G John Ikenberry. Balance-of-power politics, the strategic logic of diplomacy since the dawn of time, has been put on hold: we all live on America's terms now.
What sort of terms are they? Ikenberry wastes time brooding rather foggily on the emotive question of empire, at length conceding that the US has been "crudely imperial" in Latin America and the Middle East. But the defining tendency, he claims, is towards "liberal hegemony" - a world bound by international law and institutions, (relatively) freely subscribed to but essentially owned and operated by Washington.
That combination of legalism backed by military might has made the US order unprecedentedly stable and profitable. Still, the system is in jeopardy: undermined from within, by the Bush administration's self-defeating contempt for international law, and from without, by rising powers in the East. If the US liberal order is to be an enduring feature of world affairs, Ikenberry says, its conditions must be renegotiated.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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THE CLOWN OF GAZA
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Rating: 4/5
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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