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On March 2, 2025

© By John Arkelian

Copyright © 2025 by Michael de Adder.

Former President Jimmy Carter’s public funeral on January 9, 2025 presented a stark contrast to the current occupant of the White House.  Carter and his late wife were admirable human beings.  Alas, the integrity, decency, and compassion they exemplified in public and private life are in woefully short supply today.  In 2016, before Donald Trump’s first election as president, the actor Richard Dreyfuss, in an interview by Larry King, was asked for his view of Trump.  His one-word response (“indecent”) is as succinctly apt today as it was then.  Americans have reelected a man utterly lacking in decency when the quality of a man’s (or woman’s) character ought to be the sine qua non for such a position of trust.

In “Lament for a Nation,” we examine America’s betrayal of its friends (among them Canada, Europe, and Ukraine), its shameful finding of common cause with Russia’s tyrant and war-criminal-in-chief, the shocking self-debasement of America into a country that, under Trump, no longer deserves the trust of the Free World or the mantle of leadership, the howling void where decency used to be, a world awash in deceit, attacks on the rules-based international order, the undermining of good governance in America itself, and the danger of moral decline and collapse.   See “Lament for a Nation” by John Arkelian, together with a gallery of editorial cartoons by Michael de Adder at:   https://artsforum.ca/ideas/in-depth

On August 4, 2024

© By John Arkelian

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” (Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 1865). How far we have strayed from a society based upon Truth, Compassion, Liberty and Justice! Illustration © 2024 Linda Arkelian.

The United States has been wracked in recent years by the growth of rabid partisanship and by socio-economic and cultural divisions.  The nation’s wellspring of strength has traditionally flowed from its general unity, its adherence to longstanding conventions and norms, an informed populace, the division of its government’s executive, legislative, and judicial powers, its history (until lately) of an orderly transfer of power, its free and fair elections, its promise of equal opportunity, its free press, its history of incrementally overcoming its own injustices, and its people’s shared optimistic vision of a better world.  Despite all of the political rancor of recent years, the cultish embrace (by too many) of a self-serving demagogue, the alarming blurring of the once clear border between fact and fiction, and a troubling development of a seemingly unbridgeable ‘us versus them’ divide, there is no reason that goodwill, a civil and collegial competition of ideas, a spirit of compromise, and a shared emphasis on the things that unite rather than divide Americans cannot again prevail.  That’s going to require wise leadership, a better-informed public (who rely far less than they do now on distorted and inflammatory nonsense on social media), and active participation by more people in public affairs.  But one place to start is to reinforce the foundations that have served the country so well for nearly 250 years.  Constitutional reform is no instant panacea:  it cannot cure sourness of spirit or the selfish and shortsighted impulse to put faction above unity.  But it can strengthen the foundations upon which the shared national edifice rests.

See “Curing What Ails America:  Fashioning a More Perfect Union Through Constitutional Reform” at:  https://artsforum.ca/ideas/in-depth

On January 20, 2023

© By John Arkelian

“Let it not be said that the dedication of those who love freedom is less than the determination of those who would destroy it.”  (Margaret Thatcher)

There are a myriad of compelling reasons why we must defend freedom and defeat aggression in Ukraine.  The moral imperative to act is that a fellow democracy is the victim of an unprovoked attack by a bigger neighbor.  Protecting freedom, democracy, and human rights is at the very heart of our core values.  Without those core

Copyright © 2022 by Michael de Adder

values, we are nothing.  If our professed allegiance to those values has any meaning, we must stand ready to fight to protect and preserve them — at home and abroad.

The humanitarian imperative to act is the responsibility to protect those who are in mortal peril from lawless violence and oppression.  And the violence being perpetrated by the Putin regime in Ukraine could not be more wanton, lawless, and cruel.  Civilians are being targeted, countless lives (of men, women, and children) have been lost, millions have been forced to flee their homes, entire cities have been destroyed, and the contrast between right and wrong could not be clearer.  This is one conflict that has no shades of grey, no moral ambiguity.  A ruthless autocrat and his own duped citizens have inflicted a murderous war of aggression on their neighbors and erstwhile kin.

The legal imperative to act is our obligation to defend and enforce the legal tenets to which we have sworn fealty.  Engaging in a war of aggression is a crime in international law; so, too, are war crimes (such as targeting civilians or acting with a reckless disregard for their safety), crimes against humanity, and genocide.  All of those crimes are on blatantly open display in Ukraine — with the systematic bombing, rape, torture, forced deportation to Russia, or outright murder of civilians.  We expect to be free from those outrages; we must ensure and enforce that same expectation for others.  Our commitment to justice and to the rule of law requires us to act when the most sacred of laws are being shamelessly contravened.  And, there is another legal imperative.  The United Nations was founded in 1945 in order to save mankind from the scourge of war:

We have sworn allegiance to those principles, and we have a consequent moral and legal obligation to uphold them.  Alas, the U.N. Security Council is hobbled in its ability to prevent wars of aggression by the presence among its permanent (veto-power wielding) members of two of the world’s worst bad actors — Russia and China.  The United Nations serves some useful purposes; but, it generally cannot fulfil its core mandate — to prevent wars of aggression — because two of the worst state-villains can (and do) block it from acting.  The Free World therefore needs to do what the U.N. cannot — by forcefully intervening to defeat aggressors and to thwart systemic human rights abuses around the world, using its might to defend the weak when others would oppress, enslave, or kill them.  Because Ukraine is not a member of NATO, there is no contractual (treaty) obligation for us to defend it, but, that matters not one whit in the face of the other compelling imperatives that impel us to do exactly that.

The geopolitical imperative to act ought to be crystal clear.  We learned at great cost, 90 years ago, that appeasing aggressors does not work.  The only effective response to aggression is to meet it head-on with force and to defeat it.  Failing to do so only emboldens the aggressor and invites more of the same.  The West failed to respond adequately (or sometimes at all) when Putin’s regime used lawless brute force within Russia itself (in Chechnya) and elsewhere (in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, and, in 2014, in Ukraine).  Our weak responses to those acts of aggression did nothing to disincentivize Putin from ‘upping the ante’ with a full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  Defeating aggression elsewhere is therefore not just a matter of altruism, it is also a compelling matter of our own vital self-interest.  As the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said, “The war of Russia is not only the war against Ukraine.  Russia is trying to defeat the freedom of all people in Europe, of all the people in the world.  It tries to show that only crude and cruel force matters.  It tries to show that people do not matter.  The world must stop the war.  I thank everyone who acts in support of Ukraine, in support of freedom.  But the war continues…”

Note:  Our in-depth analysis sets out the moral, humanitarian, legal, and geopolitical imperatives for us to act to defend freedom and defeat Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.  It considers what the West’s objectives should be and how much force is required to achieve them.  It makes the case for not blinking in the face of nuclear blackmail.  And it posits sixteen new rules of engagement designed to defeat and expel invading Russian forces from Ukraine.  See “The  Imperative of Defeating Aggression in Ukraine” at:  https://artsforum.ca/ideas/in-depth