The thaw between the US and Russia is superficial and don’t hold your breath for progress to substantive gains any time soon. At recent key meetings in Brussels and Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered an outstretched hand but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov only slightly unclenched his fist. Moscow is preparing to wage a kind of asymmetrical diplomatic tussle with Washington. This is far from Cold War or hostility of any kind. But it is tough competition conducted...

People who love to travel will have a harder time in 2009. In an epoch when the world needs a sense of global community as never before, the global airline industry is headed for a dramatic downturn in 2009 as the recession deepens and widens into many countries outside the US and Europe. The airlines are already flying more than 60 million fewer seats since August 2008 and this figure is set to increase if managements do not find workable remedies. Soon people wanting to travel may not find a...

The unabated global economic turmoil has begun to separate the world by not only emphasis on national rather than international remedies but also slowing down cultural interchanges and tourism. Over time, the slowdown in the physical movement of people through travel for business and tourism may sharply set back consolidation of a global community built on peace and prosperity. In some areas, travel has dropped 35%. People have become cautious in all countries and are cutting back on expenditure....

Most of world outside the US, especially on the Arab street, will see the Gaza ceasefire as a gain for Hamas whatever the spin put on it by Israel and its supporters. Billions of Chinese, Indians and Africans will likely agree with the Arab street. In today’s globalized world, this would be a sorry result for Israel’s existential struggles. Few people outside the West understand the justice of Israel’s biblical right to Palestinian land or the legality of its war fighting. All understand televised...

All Barack Obama had to do to make history in America was to become the first black President in a country run mostly by whites who kept blacks down for centuries. But making history in the world will be a rougher ride. Experts need more time to fully study whether his victory means Americans have durably turned away from racism or it was mostly a wave of panic by voters stunned by the massive current crises of political, war and financial governance. Did they turn to him as a drowning person clutches...

A widely respected Indian astrologer living in Mumbai predicts that Barack Obama will be better for peace and prosperity in the world than American Presidents of the past four decades. He will succeed in bringing some useful solutions to the deluge of problems he faces around the world in addition to restoring a lot of America’s dented prestige among foreigners. Astrologer Bejan Daruwala says Obama’s main astrological trait is that he is capable of saving people from their own worst weaknesses....

Because of President-elect Barack Obama’s genuinely internationalist ambitions, the United Nations will be an indispensable backdrop for the first time in recent decades for the success of US foreign policy. The key foreign policy issues of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the financial and economic meltdown, climate change and energy use have global components coordinated mainly by the UN. On January 1, 2009, Iraq officially starts its post-American era under the agreement recently approved by the...

The recent bloody attacks in Mumbai, India, signal a clutching quicksand potentially more dangerous for President-elect Obama and his defense and foreign policy teams than the Middle Eastern wars or rising tensions with Russia. The main reason is the possibility of dirty nuclear weapons and crude biological weapon formulas falling into the hands of terrorists, as Pakistan slumps into deeper failures of government. Most dangerously, the more severely the terrorists are weakened by Pakistan’s...

I received this today from Karen Smadja, Information, Press & Cultural Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel, 1-3, avenue de la Paix, 1202 Geneva Address by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the special Knesset session marking 13 years since the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Jerusalem, 10 November 2008 Madam Speaker of the Knesset, Dalia Itzik, Honorable President of the State, Shimon Peres, President of the Supreme Court, Justice Dorit Beinish, Members of the Rabin Family, Members of the...

The only way President-elect Barack Obama can expect to live up to the hopes invested in him is to run all the risks on the side honesty. In his forthcoming press conference and speech, he should tell the people about sacrifices he expects from them to rebuild America as well as how he plans to honor his many promises especially for the economy. Obama’s resounding victory demonstrates that the old politics of social divides and religious and nationalist fervor is being replaced by the new will...

This truly is a time of hope for the world. For the first time in decades, ordinary Americans of the kind who work hard every day and earn little money have demonstrated how noble and common sense a democratic process can be. Obama is not transformational or even an agent of change. The people who brought him this success are transformational. They are the change. He is their symbol. He is the repository of their collective hope that the change they caused through their actions during the campaign...

As America’s global elections draw to a close, every news outlet and television network is reporting the polls with details similar to those given to national elections in their own countries. The great excitement is about the possibility of a black politician rising to US President. Much less is being said about policy differences between the Obama-Biden and John McCain-Sarah Palin tickets. It is hard to say whether this focus is a compliment to Americans or a comment on the widespread belief...

Is Barack Obama enough of an American? Can a person be well-educated, dark-skinned and a real American at the same time? Obama’s election hinges on whether a majority thinks the latter is possible or is so self-evident that the question is silly. The McCain-Palin ticket’s central strategy still is to stoke doubt and keep the first question alive. It cannot be denied that this election would get much less attention were it a contest between a young white liberal-centrist and an old white right-wing...

Election Day 2008 will be an epic reckoning between old and new America. For the first time, battle lines are drawn defining a divide not between left and right or Democrat and Republic but between those who see the US as a part, albeit overwhelmingly strong, of a global community and others who see it as a fortress besieged by the world. Donald Rumsfeld’s derision of old and new Europeans turns out to be truer about the US than it is about the continent that first exported people to settle...

If elected, Barack Obama will be the first truly independent President of modern times without a large debt of gratitude to big business and financiers. For the nearly two grueling years of campaigning, he is carried aloft by millions of ordinary people and financed for the most part by contributions of less than $100. His debt is to the people. Obama has already made history not because he is black but because he has signposted an inspiring electoral process truly based on people’s involvement....

Anti-Americanism is good politics and flourishing in most countries. It will receive fresh energy from the McCain-Palin ticket’s new definition of an anti-American as being anyone who is not Joe Six-pack living in Middle America. This parochial narrative of Palin’s handlers, who seem to be as unaware as she of the world out there, is far from the values of most other nations. But it comforts the perception of Americans and their government as being hypocrites whose actions are far less noble...

The entire world wants Barack Obama. If he were to stand for President of Earth, he’d be voted in by 75% to 99% in favor from Chile to Papua New Guinea and Iceland to South Korea. Web developer Seth Carnes and a few friends have set up an interesting web site called “THEWORLDFOR.COM: Help select the new President” where non-Americans (and Americans) can vote to choose between the Obama and John McCain tickets. Overall, people around the world are 89% in favor of Obama compared with 11% for...

Barack Obama and John McCain are locked in the wrong battle of words over the panic stricken American economy as it slips into recession. They are sparring over the kind of tax relief each will deliver, incentives to save jobs and regulations to curtail the greed of investment bankers and fund managers. Though relevant for the longer term, these are mistaken prescriptions for the next 6-8 months because the fear causing financial collapse worldwide goes beyond demand issues, the US tax system, banker’s...

The Senate’s $700 billion bailout plan is getting a lukewarm reception in Asian markets, including Japan, where investors have been watching it very closely. Japanese markets opened without much excitement although it is still too early to see any real trends. The wariness abroad stems mainly from fears that the underlying US bricks and mortar economy, also called the real economy, may not be as strong as everyone hopes. The financial economy, especially the giant investment and mortgage banks...

Joe Biden’s virtues as a foreign policy stalwart, especially his personal access to foreign leaders, are being overstated. Despite the opining of American analysts, he is not well known in Europe and even less so in other parts of the world. Obama is the star feted by the world. He is the one who pounded Hilary Clinton and put the Republicans in a defensive crouch. Now there is an even chance that Biden will take some shine off the star instead of adding to it. International audiences knew little...

NATO’s decision to freeze relations with Moscow and Washington’s inept handling of Pakistan are strategic foreign policy mistakes. They are interlinked and give cause for celebration to al Qaeda and other rabid anti-Americans. The Western allies may regret them in coming years. The mistakes stem from a conceit among US leaders including Barack Obama and John McCain that America is much more important for Russia than Russia is for the US. This should be reviewed seriously and with an open mind...

By whatever name, the Cold War has already begun because the NATO allies meet in Brussels tomorrow to find ways of punishing Russia for its invasion of Georgia. The premise of this search is hostility, not friendship. At the same time, the invasion and Russia’s victory have revealed the true cost to America and Europe of the wars in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever the White House spin on the invasion and its aftermath, people outside the West see that Russia successfully stood by its friends...

The Russian invasion of Georgia has removed the lid over the simmering tensions between Russia and the Western allies that could easily turn into a new Cold War, stoked by hardliners on both sides. This “Cool War” is low intensity compared to the one with the former Soviet Union but the mistrust between Russia and the Western democracies can no longer be papered over and will take a long time to heal. The US is faced with a fait accompli. Russia has effectively obtained a conquest over disputed...

Senator Barack Obama will get a much warmer welcome in Europe than in Israel after his fact finding trips to Iraq and Afghanistan but the honeymoon could be short-lived were he to become President. The people in Germany, France and other countries are enthusiastic about Obama because having anyone other than George Bush in the White House would be a relief. Many would like to see Obama there because he is young and charismatic and thinks more like them about international issues. For many Europeans,...

Iran’s goal seems to be to bait Israel into quickly making precision attacks on its nuclear installations before diplomatic options are exhausted. Its apparently irrational regime may think the mess in the region will be so great that it will obtain even bigger gains in political influence than those from the debacle in Iraq. So it is deftly buying time through diplomacy and has received another prolongation of deadlines to halt its nuclear fuel enrichment activities. This concession was won a...