The Londoner

Why a US-EU trade pact would be historic China's model of state-run capitalism needs a massive challenge from the two giant market economies. Obama must win a US-EU trade pact in his second term. President Barack Obama takes his seat for an East Asia summit last month in Cambodia. Next to him is China's outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. Obama said there is a need to "establish clear rules of the road" for trade and investment. For Mr. Obama, one priority should be to ensure that the world’s nations adopt the ideal of openness in their economic ties. That ideal, which the United States championed after World War II, is now being eroded as more developing nations look to China ’s model of state-run capitalism for growth. The Chinese model relies heavily on protecting industries; government-guided banking; and manipulating markets, currency rates, and data. If every nation practiced such economic nati

AS President Obama approaches his second term, few foreign policies are more in need of reassessment than his stance toward Russia. Recent events have eroded the promise of the “reset” proclaimed in 2009. Its achievements — the New START Treaty, cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran, Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization — have faded, replaced by stubborn differences over Syria, Iran and other high-profile issues amid rising, gratuitously antagonistic rhetoric in both capitals. Obama will now try to reverse this deterioration, perhaps demonstrating some of the “flexibility” he promised Russian leaders earlier this year. Putin, for his part, has talked about giving the relations “a new quality” by adding a strong economic dimension. We may hear talk of a second phase of the reset. There may be more deals of the kind ExxonMobil struck with Rosneft . But glib formulations and major energy projects should not cover up the fundamental cho

Americans wondering why North Korea has gotten away with building A-bombs and ballistic missiles—like the one it successfully tested Tuesday—need only consider Jeff Immelt.  The day before the missile launch, the CEO of General Electric and friend of President Obama endorsed China’s economic model and said “state-run communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.” What do the unpatriotic sentiments of GE’s boss have to do with U.S. policy toward North Korea? Both are based on the faulty but soothing assumption held by the elite establishment in American government and big business: that China is our partner. Two successive administrations—Bush and Obama—have based U.S. policy on North Korea on supposed Chinese cooperation. The theory is that Beijing doesn’t want North Korea armed with effective nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles any more than Washington or its allies, and will thus be of help. In 2003, Washington kicked off six-way talks hoping to

We have seen growing speculation about President Vladimir Putin’s health over recent weeks. A break in his foreign trips and reports of a sports-related injury unleashed a torrent of rumors, and even suggestions that the severity of his condition could be being concealed. Unflattering comparisons were made to leaders of the late Soviet period and the ailing Boris Yeltsin . There are few facts to back up this heated speculation. After all, Putin has not disappeared from the public eye, though he has become a little less active. But the intense focus on Putin and his health speaks to the leader’s major, if not overstated role in Russian politics and foreign policy. This year began with stormy political events that cast doubt over the government’s stability and even sparked talk about the end of the Putin era. His victory in the presidential election showed that his opponents’ talk of his decline was preemptory. The government outwitted the opposition in various

Sixteen years ago this month there was panic across central Asia . Having captured Kabul, the Taliban were moving northwards and some commanders were threatening to Talibanise the entire region. That prompted Russia and China to promise support to the ex-Soviet states across the region. A flurry of security officials from Nato, the US and the EU have been visiting the region trying to reassure the governments in Uzbekistan , Turkmenistan and Tajikistan that border Afghanistan, and fragile Kyrgyzstan , over increased aid and security. US officials are also believed to be offering sales of unwanted heavy weapons from the Afghan theatre. But at the same time Russia and China are trying to wean those governments away from the US, with Vladimir Putin in particular making a determined effort to return central Asia to Russia’s backyard . In October Mr Putin signed a new 30-year treaty to secure a base in Tajikistan. A joint Russian-Tajik statement spoke of “the

As the 21st of December nears, Russian authorities are attempting to quell fears that the world will come to end amid panic over what some experts claim are the predictions of the Mayan Calendar. According to the New York Times , there have been scattered reports of unusual behaviour from across Russia, reportedly prompted by predictions of Armageddon. The reports include "collective mass psychosis" in a women's prison on the Chinese border, panic buying of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles, and the building, out of ice, of a Mayan-style archway in Chelyabinsk in the south. According to some experts, ancient Mayans predicted that the 21st of December would signal the end of a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar. Some parts of Russia, which is often said to have a penchant for mystical thinking, appear to have been spooked by the prediction. As a consequence the Russian government's minister for emergency situations ha

DOHA, Qatar - (AP) -- Hassan al-Kubaisi considers it a gift from above that drivers in oil- and gas-rich Qatar only have to pay $1 per gallon at the pump. "Thank God that our country is an oil producer and the price of gasoline is one of the lowest," al-Kubaisi said, filling up his Toyota Land Cruiser at a gas station in Doha . "God has given us a blessing." To those looking for a global response to climate change , it's more like a curse. Qatar -- the host of U.N. climate talks that entered their final week Monday -- is among dozens of countries that keep gas prices artificially low through subsidies that exceeded $500 billion globally last year. Renewable energy worldwide received six times less support -- an imbalance that is just starting

The reelection of Hugo Chávez last month for another six-year term as president of Venezuela elicited almost universal praise from Chinese media and foreign policy analysts. Their general consensus was that his reelection was not only good for the people of Venezuela themselves, but also for economic and political ties between the two countries. However, Chinese government and business leaders who have assumed smooth relations for the foreseeable future are at risk of being unnerved because ties are only as healthy as Chávez himself. Recent reports that Chávez is back in Cuba for further cancer treatment serve to highlight that the new Chinese leadership may have therefore inherited a foreign policy time bomb from their predecessors. China’s blithe optimism about the impact of continued Chávez dominance of Venezuelan politics sits uncomfortably with a growing anxiety about the effectiveness of the country’s political risk analysis This anxiety is directly related to the

A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to energy-hungry China’s billion-dollar bids on oil fields in Canada and the Asian giant’s reliance on oil from countries like Iran and Sudan to fuel its growing economy. But its growing interest in another major oil producer has gone largely unnoticed, and if current trends continue, that Middle Eastern country could become the world’s next “oil superpower,” with China, not the West, acting as both Iraq’s main partner and top beneficiary of its rich resources in what some now call the B&B trade axis (Beijing and Baghdad). In the past decade or so, China waited patiently on the sidelines while the U.S. and its allies coped with Iraq’s new, and often times messy internal dynamics that followed the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein by a U.S.-led coalition. China reemerged in 2008 , however, to sign post-Saddam Iraq’s first major oil deal with a foreign country. While the majority of Iraqi oil deals in the post-Saddam era

The Finnish Army was raised in the revolutionary year of 1918. On the 16th of January 1918, General Lieutenant Carl Gustav Mannerheim was commissioned by the Finnish senate to unite all the home guard (Suojeluskunta) units and to form an army for the new republic. At that time, Finland was divided into two parts, White Finland and Red Finland. Red Finland was controlled by mostly left wing Socialists from the former Finnish Autonomous Republic of Russia, while White Finland was striving to create a relatively democratic state, independent from Soviet Russia. White Finland was decidedly anti-Communist, and Mannerheim and his newly formed troops sided with them. Nearly 200,000 Finns took part in this war and about 18,000 were killed, including civilians. Also on the side of the Whites, was the German Baltic Division lead by Rüdiger von der Goltz (12,000 men) which landed in Hanko, Finland. There were still Russian troops in Finland when the war betwen the Reds and Whites began, and abou