A bleak backdrop

The world at war this Easter

EVEN THOUGH Easter is a traditional weekend for hope, world affairs provide a particularly bleak backdrop this year. Not content with launching a barrage of cruise missiles against Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s regime apparently breaking all international protocols with the use of chemical weapons against his own civilians, the USA has now used its aerial firepower to destroy a network of Islamic State-controlled caves in Afghanistan’s foothills.

Deployment of this so-called mega-bomb – described as the largest non-nuclear bomb – ends, after less than three months, President Donald Trump’s ‘America first’ foreign policy. It signals a return to the liberal interventionism so favoured by President George W Bush, and Tony Blair on this side of the Atlantic, before Barack Obama’s caution after al-Qaida’s leader Osama bin Laden was hunted down and killed.

Without a political and diplomatic strategy, it’s difficult to see how such tactics will make the Middle East, and the rest of the world, more stable as a result. Indeed, it might only serve to embolden rogue regimes like North Korea which is widely reported to be planning further provocative nuclear tests of its own this weekend. Already President Trump has said: “North Korea is a problem. The problem will be taken care of.” As the stakes are raised to dangerous new levels, the question, as ever, is how – and at what cost?