Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
1 to 10 of about 15
Aside from the tragedy and horror of Anna Politkovskaya's assassination, it is sad and depressing, though not unexpected, to witness how little reaction her murder has caused in Russia. In today's Russia idealism and direct challenges to the government authorities are scarcely regarded as virtues.
Analyzing the crisis in Russian-Georgian relations, Trenin looks at each country's objectives, strategies, and how they are working. U.S. and Russian interests clash where it comes to geopolitics and geo-economics, and this lingering crisis is a cause for major concern and calls for fundamental policy re-evaluation and policy revision.
Global trade talks at the WTO were suspended indefinitely because key countries could not agree on how deeply to reduce tariffs on farm products and farm subsidies. Without real concessions, these talks will fail, and the world will lose an important opportunity to integrate the poorest and most marginalized countries into the global economy.
Trying to understand what is really going on in the Kremlin is like peeling an onion : layer by layer by layer with the only certitude that the process will bring you to tears. Kremlin politics can be described as “democracy within one fortress”; it is almost a completely nontransparent ruthless struggle where the stakes are high for the participants as well as those outside the Kremlin walls.
Rather than being primarily composed of a shadowy subversive network of international terrorists, most of the central players in the A.Q. Khan proliferation network were well-to-do Anglo-Saxons. They were clever and exploited voids in national and international export control laws to sell their wares. Greed was their central motivation.
Vladimir Putin is lucky because he happened to become president of Russia amid skyrocketing oil prices. But Vladimir’s good fortune extends beyond his petro-luck.
This is a dangerous moment for the Middle East, because the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon could easily escalate to involve the broader region. Any strategy to address the present crisis must deal with the realities of the Middle East as they are now, not try to leapfrog over them by seeking to impose a grand new vision. Such a vision would be bound to fail as it did in the case of Iraq.
For the last two decades, Soviet and the Russian leaders worked with Western leaders to integrate the former Soviet empire, and above all else Russia, into the western community of states. To accelerate integration, it is necessary to fortify those multilateral institutions in which Russia is already a member and invent new security institutions that help face common enemies.
It may be years before we have an authoritative account of what went on in Andijan on May 13, 2005, one that includes accounts of both the Uzbek government and of the demonstrators. Given Uzbek authorities' refusal to allow an international inquiry by either the U.N. or the O.S.C.E., the task may fall to historians of some future generation.
The 2006 parliamentary elections in Kuwait have two striking features. First, they are occasioned by an intense controversy over the size of electoral districts—a seemingly technical matter with significant implications for Kuwaiti political life. Second, in this dispute, liberals and Islamists are very much on the same side—a rare alliance in the region, and unusual even in Kuwait.