On November 27, 2023, the Twenty-Eighth Session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CSP-28) opened in The Hague, Netherlands. This five-day meeting discusses various aspects associated with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which has been in effect since April 29 1997.
Alexei Navalny, the Russian pro-democratic opposition figure and anti-corruption activist, wrote in an August 2021 article that “[I] did not die from poisoning by a chemical weapon, and it would seem that corruption played no small part in my survival.” Fortunately, he lives to tell this ordeal.
Presentation to the 23rd CWC Conference of States Parties (CSP) Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, The Hague, The Netherlands, November 23, 2018
In his famous 1990 essay in Foreign Affairs, Charles Krauthammer declared that the unipolar moment had arrived. He listed a few reasons to support his argument: there was no challenging power, nor was there likely any in the few decades, no power dispersion at the international level, and the former Soviet Union’s capacity was in decline. Thus, Krauthammer emphasised that at that time, there was no first-rate power in the world that could match the capacity of the US.
The Syrian crisis has achieved the unachievable. It has compelled a communist country to talk peace and democratic/capitalist countries to talk war. Fortunately, it appears that the invasion of Syria by the US forces has been stopped, at least, temporarily. An agreement on chemical weapons stockpiled in Syria has been reached following the talks held in Geneva between the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergey V. Lavrov, and US Secretary of State John Kerry.