The current month-long Indian elections, whose results emerge on Friday and Saturday, hold more jeopardy than almost any in the past for both domestic policies and likely impacts on India’s attitudes towards the West. First, let’s note that India and its democracy are inspirational for the world. This country of nearly 1.2 billion has over 714 million voters of whom about 350 million voted. Over 52% actually cast ballots in 828,000 polling stations across 543 constituencies secured by over 6...

The recent stock market rallies around the world hold peril because they are encouraging governments, especially in Europe, China and India, into thinking that the worst is over and reforms are less urgent. The toxic assets of major global banks are far from being on the path to purification, mostly because of policy confusion. This is despite the nearly 3 trillion earmarked by the US, Europe and China for domestic spending over three years to bail out banks, remove their bad debts and provide economic...

A deepening sense of disappointment is sweeping over the main European countries as the dust settles over President Barack Obama’s first trip to Europe. Coming weeks may demonstrate the unthinkable: that the bubble of Obama-mania in Europe has sprung enough leaks to start bursting soon. The people’s love affair with him continues albeit with added caution but specialists find few substantive changes in US positions on key issues, as they sift with rested heads through what his team actually...

There are growing murmurs in Europe that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has overplayed his hand under advice from the Americans, setting off the slow demise of Pakistan not only as a democracy but also as a governable country. A nightmare is shaping up on the streets of cities big and small in Pakistan. Pity its people battered between the hammer of military dictators and the anvil of civilian despots and Islamic totalitarians, blind to their struggle to feed and raise children in safety. The...

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...