New sanctions on Iran? The Times reports:
The United States, Germany, France and Britain will push Russia and China at a meeting expected to be on Friday to agree to new UN sanctions against Iran. (…) Western officials say that talks this week will culminate in new sanctions, which could be passed by the Security Council. They acknowledge that the measures are unlikely to amount to the crippling sanctions that Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, has threatened but contend that a new Security Council resolution passed with the backing of Russia and China will send an important message of unanimity to Iran.
The smoking gun? The Times also claims it has gotten access to “confidential intelligence documents” which show “that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb”. The report is here. The Washington Post has more:
Western and U.N. nuclear officials are evaluating a secret Iranian technical document that appears to show the country’s nuclear scientists testing a key component used in the detonation of a nuclear warhead, according to intelligence officials and weapons experts familiar with the document. The document, if authenticated, could rank as one of the strongest pieces of evidence pointing to a clandestine Iranian effort to build nuclear weapons, said former intelligence officials and weapons experts. They were responding to a published report of alleged sophisticated research by Iran on one of the final stages in the construction of a nuclear device.
What happened to the new Great Depression? It didn’t come, Fareed Zakaria says in Newsweek:
Pundits whose bearishness had been vindicated predicted we were doomed to a long, painful bust, with cascading failures in sector after sector, country after country. (…)
One year later, how much has the world really changed? Well, Wall Street is home to two fewer investment banks (three, if you count Merrill Lynch). Some regional banks have gone bust. There was some turmoil in Moldova and (entirely unrelated to the financial crisis) in Iran. Severe problems remain, like high unemployment in the West, and we face new problems caused by responses to the crisis—soaring debt and fears of inflation. But overall, things look nothing like they did in the 1930s. The predictions of economic and political collapse have not materialized at all. (…)
This revival did not happen because markets managed to stabilize themselves on their own. Rather, governments, having learned the lessons of the Great Depression, were determined not to repeat the same mistakes once this crisis hit.
Read today on Global Europe. Part eleven of Global Europe’s series on EU foreign policy in 2010: Limited ambition. Catherine Ashton’s dilemma, by Anand Menon, Director of the European Research Institute at the University of Birmingham.
To receive the Global Europe Morning Brief every weekday by email, send an email to globeurope@gmail.com