Dear Editor,

On the Israeli leg of his recently concluded West Asian tour, President Joe Biden reiterated America’s commitment to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

While it is true that a policy favouring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons is in the best interest of the human family, we are still left to ponder why it is the Caucasian nations and their closest allies are allowed to maintain their stockpile of nuclear weapons while simultaneously bullying other nations into scrapping their nuclear programmes.

In a perfect world, all nations would no doubt beat their swords into ploughshares and pursue the path to peace with vigour. Our world, unfortunately, is far from perfect. There have always been and there always will be nations and leaders with an appetite for conquest, plunder, and general mayhem. Having a well-trained, well-equipped, and disciplined army is a prerequisite for national survival in a world full of belligerent elements.

The Caucasian nations are well aware of this reality and have therefore taken every necessary precaution to defend their territorial integrity. The stockpiling of nuclear weapons, predominantly among the Caucasian nations, is a pragmatic deterrent strategy to reduce the possibility of being attacked by other nations. The threat of a nuclear reprisal is often enough incentive not to attack a country with a nuclear arsenal.

President Biden presides over the only nation ever to have deployed nuclear weapons against another nation. From the evidence available it can be deduced that Caucasian nations are the prime risk candidates as far as the deployment of nuclear weapons are concerned. Caucasians are the only ethnic group that has used nuclear weapons against its enemies. President Putin of Russia has put the world on notice that he is quite willing to detonate a few nukes in Europe if he is pushed up against the proverbial wall.

The Americans, the Europeans, and their trusted allies are hypocritical at best when they impose sanctions or seek to destroy the nuclear programmes of other nations. After climbing the nuclear ladder, America, Europe, and their trusted allies are kicking down the ladder as a way of stymieing the efforts of other nations to join the nuclear club and enjoy the benefits of having nuclear weapons.

President Biden’s pronouncement on nuclear deterrence aimed at Iran is just the latest example of the bad Samaritan politics of Caucasian nations and their trusted allies. The US and Western Europe used cheap fossil fuels to advance their industrial development. Now that they have reached the pinnacle of their development, facilitated by the use of fossil fuels, they are preaching to China, India, and Africa about the dangers of using fossil fuels and its corollary climate change.

The bad Samaritan politics of the Caucasian nations is playing itself out in real time in Europe as the European Union imposes sanctions on Russia while spending hundreds of millions of euros daily on Russian oil and gas. It is a comedy of errors that the Europeans have joined with the Americans in threatening crippling sanctions against any country that provides aid to Russia while they are providing hundreds of millions of euros daily to support Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine.

Bad Samaritan politics is political hypocrisy at its worst. The oft commented on fist bump between President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud of Saudi Arabia comes at a time when the US is desperately seeking to increase the global supply of oil to help force down the price of fuel in the US. So much for Saudi Arabia becoming a pariah State. The Americans have also granted a sanctions waiver to India after the latter purchased five units of the S-400 air defence systems from Russia.

African, Caribbean, and Pacific states will continue to watch from the sidelines or become victims of the politics of the bad Samaritans simply because we have chosen to remain weak and divided. From Independence to the present has not been our finest hour, geopolitically speaking. African, Caribbean, and Pacific states will either learn how to swim together or we will all drown separately in an ocean dominated by those who practise the politics of the bad Samaritans.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

rodneynimrod2@gmail.com