World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

There are encouraging signs that the US-Russia agreement on the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons is actually being taken seriously by both the Russians and Syrians.  Many observers, including me, we quite skeptical of the sincerity of those two states, but the Russians seem to have taken on the responsibility to make sure that the agreement succeeds.   The initial reports from the US on the list provided by the Syrians of their chemical weapons sites suggest that the list correlates well with US intelligence.  And it also seems that there are few actual “weapons.”  Most of what has been revealed is that the Syrians have the components for chemical weapons, but have not actually assembled them into usable form.

Stanislav Petrov is not a name that many people know.  But Mr. Petrov saved the world in 1983 by ignoring a machine that told him that the US had launched a nuclear attack on the USSR.  Mr. Petrov’s job was to alert his superiors in case of a nuclear attack.  Fortunately for all of us, Mr. Petrov decided to trust his own gut rather than obey the machine authority, and did not report the purported “attack.”   Apparently, he decided to confound Stanley Milgram.

We may (or may not) be facing the re-emergence of a political and economic crisis in Italy.  The current government is a strange coalition of center-left and center-right parties, and the center-right party is threatening to pull out if former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is forced to leave his seat in the upper house of the Parliament.  The removal was the penalty imposed on Berlusconi after his conviction of fraud.  If the center-right party pulls out, it is likely that the Italian government will collapse.  If that occurs, investors in Italian debt will get scared, and Italian borrowing costs will skyrocket.  The fear that the Italian government may not be able to pay off its debts may precipitate a general economic panic among investors in Europe, which will most certainly slow down economic growth throughout the continent.