Year: 2023
A Modern Mercenary Group
This comes by way of follow-up on a previous post of mine about mercenaries in the Ukraine war. At the time I wrote that, I was only partially aware, if at all, of what is now the most famous mercenary force in Russia, the Wagner Group. This group is interesting because, unlike the mercenaries that …
Peace of Westphalia in the News, February 2023, Continued
Most mentions of Westphalia that I come across relate to sovereignty, and do so in a deductive way that is hardly worthy of discussion. An article in Telos, on the other hand, is much more thoughtful. I’m not sure if it’s right, but it definitely has caused me to stop and think about it. The …
Peace of Westphalia in the News, February 2023, ContinuedRead More
Peace of Westphalia in the News, February 2023
Finally I get to present three news items that definitely relate to the Peace of Westphalia, if only indirectly (as opposed to most of the alerts that I get, which are about articles that mention Westphalia once as the origin of the nation state and then go on to talk about other things). First, we …
Peace of Westphalia in the news, January-February 2023
As our belated look at Peace of Westphalia news comes into the current year, we are presented with a curious article in a Spanish journal called Atalayar under the title, “Diplomacy, a concept to be rescued.”The context, of course, is the Ukraine War. The author believes that there is a lack of sincere diplomacy on …
Peace of Westphalia in the news, January-February 2023Read More
On U.S. Defense Policy Toward Taiwan, prompted by Vivek Ramaswamy’s comments
I saw recently that Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had answered a question about the U.S. Navy in which he drew attention to our relationship with Taiwan. Ramaswamy argued that we must defend Taiwan as long as they are the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer (this article gives some statistics) and we are dependent on them. …
On U.S. Defense Policy Toward Taiwan, prompted by Vivek Ramaswamy’s commentsRead More
Peace of Westphalia in the news, November and December 2022
Alfred de Zayas, the author of an article I referenced in my previous entry, appears again with another article in Counterpunch. I didn’t much care for his other article, and this one is significantly worse. In the last paragraph, he seriously argues that “NATO could easily be considered under the prism of articles 9 and …
Peace of Westphalia in the news, November and December 2022Read More
Peace of Westphalia in the news, 10/22
Continuing our tradition of catching up with Westphalia in the news at least 9 months in arrears, we now bring you some mentions from October of last year. The first is an article in Euractiv called “How to End a War.” It briefly mentions the Peace of Westphalia as one of the most important treaties …
Papal Mediation
The war in Ukraine now has something in common with the Thirty Years’ War: the pope has offered to mediate. (I am speaking of “mediation” broadly here, in the sense of “acting as a go between”.) The papacy makes a likely mediator because it is not itself a political power. It made a lot more …
Peace of Westphalia game
I made a very simple card game based on the Peace of Westphalia, which you can find on The Game Crafter. I was excited to find that a user gave it a five-star review a couple of months ago. This game has not been picked up by a publisher, but, now that I have had …