Despite his dreadful human rights and anti-democracy record, Vladimir Putin’s first decrees as President could help to reverse centuries of socio-economic backwardness compared with the West and trigger better lives for Russians-in-the-street. They could also give cause for trepidation by triggering changes in the geopolitical balance among the US, Europe, China and Russia. In the ornate room from which the Czars ruled, Putin today declared his own sense of historical mission as, “I think it...

Germany’s Angela Merkel will sleep less easy tonight because the French people have confirmed their opposition to her austerity programs for all Europeans except Germans by electing Francois Hollande as their new President. Tom Janssen, The NetherlandsThe Merkel-Hollande clash will occur soon since she is the first foreign leader he will meet after his swearing in by May 15. He is also likely to clash with the Obama administration at a G8 summit in the US on May 18-19 and NATO Summit in Chicago...

The final week of electioneering for the 6 May Presidential vote between incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and Social Francois Hollande is turning into a foul-mouthed brawl between right and left in France. Both sides are running populist campaigns instead of providing solutions to the country’s very troubled economy worsened by mounting job losses, recession and stagnation in Europe. Sarkozy has accused Hollande of “lying from morning till night” and being a soft, indecisive and “useless” person...

Beleaguered Syrian cities, including Idlib, Homs, Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, Aleppo and Damascus, have enjoyed about ten hours of relative quiet so far on Thursday as President Bashar al-Assad’s gunmen silenced their weapons. But concern is rising that both sides are using the lull to restock and resupply to fight more fiercely within days or even hours. The ceasefire is already starting to look like an opportunity for all sides in the emerging proxy civil war to lick their wounds and regroup. The humanitarian...

China has launched an unexpected initiative for a political solution in Syria and lobbied a 22-nation Arab bloc for support on Tuesday. This is unusual for China, which usually remains non-committal on Middle East matters and lets the US and Europe take the lead. If it disagrees, it simply abstains in votes in the United Nations Security Council. The current initiative is not just a ploy to deflect flak from the West and Arab countries for twice blocking UN moves to prevent President Bashar al Assad...

A specter of Cold War suddenly appeared today as President Bashar Assad’s desperate murders of his own people took a turn towards a dangerous standoff between a US-led coalition on one side and Russia and China on the other, going beyond a civil war in Syria. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told a meeting in Tunis of Assad’s opponents it was distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people were being murdered. “It is just despicable and I ask...

President Barack Obama’s reelection prospects may have improved slightly because the US economy is showing an uptick but the Greek debt crisis could still land a painful punch across the Atlantic in the late summer, hurting both Obama and American jobs. Tuesday morning, European finance ministers reached a complex deal to provide a 130 billion euro bailout for Greece to prevent a government debt default at the end of March. Banks very reluctantly agreed to take a 53.5 per cent haircut on their...

China’s Xi Jinping, comes across as a down home personality with a soft spot for rural values and the agricultural economy. But he has a mind steeped in Chinese nationalism devoted to making his country an equal of the United States. The Vice President, who is expected to succeed President Hu Jintao in late 2012, has given little away during his five-day visit to the US. But his style has raised hopes that he will try to file down rough edges in China’s relationships with America and Europe....

Greece might finally start to pull away from its woes in the next few days because of a likely deal with its creditors to roll over at least €200 billion of government debt. That would make it easier for a second tranche of €130 billion to come in later this year. But Greece’s economic problems are far from over. They hang like a Damocles sword over the Eurozone that includes all large European countries except Britain. The sword’s edge is the severe austerity program imposed on Greece...

Terrorist bombs killed another 72 people in Iraq today, on a day considered holy by the Islamic Shia religion. This is a further sign of bloody sectarian strife boiling over after the withdrawal of US troops last December. It also presages a more significant trend that could make 2012 go down in history as the start of a seismic shift in the political makeup of the wider Islamic Middle East, from Morocco to Pakistan. The shift would be as fundamental as in 1919, after the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s...

Vladimir Putin seems to be battening down the hatches instead of showing more flexibility in the face of the massive prodemocracy protests since the rigged December 4 elections. In the latest protests in Moscow and several smaller cities on December 24, an estimated 120,000 middle class Russians braved icy weather carrying anti-corruption banners and chanting “Russia without Putin”. On December 27, Putin fired Vladislav Surkov, his chief political strategist of 13 years and of United Russia,...

Bahrain, the close American ally with one of the worst recent records of violence against pro-democracy protestors, received a formal a warning on Wednesday from the UN Human Rights chief. A team from the High Commissioner for Human Rights visited Bahrain from 13 to 17 December and concluded that the repression was unacceptable. It insisted the government should immediately and unconditionally release protestors convicted by military tribunals or still awaiting trial. Failing action, the Human...

The euro currency crisis is sliding from bad to worse. The gloom is likely to deepen on Wednesday when Europe’s executive body has its say on the feasibility of issuing special bonds to refinance government debt. European failure to restore confidence in its economic soundness and solvability will have unpredictable negative consequences for the US and other major countries because all have significant trade and financial relationships with Europe. In particular, their banks may be knee-capped...

Iran today successfully stared down a new move by the US, France, Britain and Germany to push it to the wall despite a strongly worded United Nations watchdog agency report that it might still be trying to build nuclear weapons. Few qualified observers doubt that Iran is covertly conducting a nuclear weapons program and controversy continues over whether it is a year or a decade away from success. But Teheran is running circles round the Western powers, which may suffer significant loss of face in...

The Arab league today gave a three-day extension to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop killing his own people or face expulsion from it, despite being a founding member. This is big. The Arab League, notorious in the Arab world for decades of mealy-mouthed equivocation, is suddenly roaring led by Qatar, a sliver of gas-rich sand with less than 300,000 citizens. Syria, where civilization is traced back to 10,000 years and was a regional power for centuries under Ottoman rule, is standing cap in hand...

Britain and Germany are headed for a major clash on Friday when Prime Minister David Cameron travels to Berlin to tell Germany’s Angela Merkel that his country will not pay to bailout countries that use the euro currency. Britain is not part of the Eurozone and does not see why it should be penalized for the fiscal follies of others. The spat is the latest in the crises of government debt in the US and Europe, which many now fear could kick off a deep recession in Eurozone countries. This is serious...

With the remaining 33,000 US troops in Iraq preparing to leave, bomb blasts and a gasoline blaze in a market on this Muslim festival Sunday killed another 10 innocent persons and injured many others. The troop withdrawal was always known to be fraught with menace but things seems to be going from bad to worse. Bombings and killings occur daily as Sunni insurgents probably linked to al Qaeda and Shi’ite militias perpetrate lethal attacks against each other’s communities. The Obama administration...

The fallouts of the alleged Iranian attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington will heighten Middle East tensions, even as pressure grows on Israelis and Palestinians to sit again at the peace table. If the allegations turn out to be true, the Saudi’s will put intense pressure on the Obama administration for exemplary and swift action. The risk is that the White House might, against its better judgment, find itself in the middle of a centuries-old violent struggle between the Saudi Sunnis...

NATO’s apparent victory in Libya, led by France and Britain with full US support, unveils a defining moment for NATO cooperation to protect civilians from massacre by a tyrant. But it is not one that the Obama administration can welcome without reserve. It seriously eroded American influence by causing China to join Russia, which Beijing leaders distrust and despise, in casting a veto in the UN Security Council. The veto was against the key American foreign policy goal of imposing sanctions on...

The significance for Israel will be small even if the Palestinians get full or limited recognition as a State at the United Nations in coming days. Even though UN resolutions in 1947 and 1949 created Israel, it has ignored dozens of subsequent UN resolutions and refused to implement them. It has done so with impunity since neither the UN nor the US or other governments have the power to force implementation. It can simply ignore the forthcoming resolution without any real diplomatic or other consequences....