If you browse down my blogroll, you will see a link to the excellent and eclectic Normblog.

Norm has asked me to write a piece on a favourite book, which you can find here. Seeing my effort on screen, it seems extremely short and perfunctory. But some of the other efforts in Norm’s “writers choice” series are really good. I particularly recommend the essays by John Lloyd, Francis Wheen and Christopher Hitchens.

Nikita Krushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1956, told the western world: “We will bury you.” Now Dmitry Medvedev, the newly elected president of Russia, has come back with a revised offer: “We will buy you.”

In a speech this year, Mr Medvedev urged Russian businesses to emulate the Chinese and to go on a global buying spree to secure new technology and markets. “This is a very important task,” he insisted.

Russia certainly has lots of money to spend. Its currency reserves of $464bn (€305bn, £234bn) are the third largest in the world. It has set up a $127bn stabilisation fund with a licence to invest overseas. Gazprom, the state-run gas monopoly that Mr Medvedev chaired until recently, is keen to buy assets in western Europe.

 Continue reading Medvedev will not declare cold war

March will be a bad month for those who prefer their elections free and fair. On March 2nd (this Sunday) we have the Russian presidential election. Then on March 14th it is the Iranian parliamentary elections. And then on March 29th, Zimbabwe is holding joint presidential and parliamentary elections.

So much for the inevitable forward march of democracy.

It’s a bit of a toss up as to which of these three electoral charades will be the most blatantly unfair. But I would say that things will get progressively worse as the month goes on. The Russian election will be bad; the Iranian election will be really bad - and the Zimbabwe polls will be grotesque. (more…)

With his fancy hats and fluent English, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan cuts a dashing figure on the international stage. But, while Mr Karzai is a regular at Davos, he keeps a low profile in Afghanistan itself. Holed up in his presidential palace in Kabul, he seemed tired and evasive at a press conference there last week.

Mr Karzai’s erratic behaviour is just one reason for fearing for the future of Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency is still raging across the country. Suicide attacks are occurring at eight times the rate they were in 2006. Diplomats in Kabul are told not to visit restaurants or markets. Last week an International Monetary Fund report portrayed the Afghan economy as based on opium and aid.

Open bickering has broken out within the international coalition that is trying to shore up Afghanistan. The Canadians, who hold the vital region around Kandahar, are threatening to withdraw their 2,500 troops unless allies send reinforcements. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has criticised the counterinsurgency efforts of Nato allies.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” has run into the Middle Eastern sand. The president himself will be the last to recognise this. Speaking in the United Arab Emirates on January 13, he hailed a “great new era” of “the advance of freedom”. “My friends,” he proclaimed to the assembled sheikhs, “a future of liberty stands before you.” Then Mr Bush flew on to Egypt and lavished praise on President Hosni Mubarak, who threw into jail the last man to run against him for the presidency.

As Mr Bush traipsed around the Arab world, Freedom House – which monitors political and civil liberties – issued its annual report. It lamented that “2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom”. The lobby group pointed to events in south Asia, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. The bad news keeps on coming. The violence and instability surrounding the Kenyan and Pakistani elections has underlined the difficulties of holding democratic votes in relatively poor countries with deep ethnic and tribal divisions.

While Freedom House bemoans the setbacks to democracy in places such as Kenya, Pakistan and Egypt, there will be plenty of others who will shrug and say, in effect: “What did you expect?” The Bush administration has been naive. It is pointless – and often counter-productive – trying to push democracy in countries that are not ready for it. Stability and economic growth must come first.

Continue reading this column here.

There are some events that change the world in an instant: the fall of the Berlin wall; the tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square; the aeroplanes flying into the World Trade Center.

So far, there have been no such defining moments in 2007. Perhaps we should be grateful for that, since world-shaking events are often sudden acts of shocking violence. But it makes it both trickier and more interesting to carry out my annual end-of-year exercise – listing the five most important events of the past 12 months. Nonetheless, I intend to try. If you want to make sense of world affairs, it is useful to identify the most significant events. Also, I like making lists. So here goes:

January: the surge. It is too soon to tell whether US President George W. Bush’s decision to increase the number of American troops in Iraq will go down as the moment when the US began to turn the situation around; or just a last, failed throw of the dice. The big questions still have to be answered. Is a civil war in the offing? What will happen when America withdraws its extra troops?

Read the remainder of this column here. Post comments below.

I ended last year with a column that looked back on 2006 and tried to list the "five most important events" of the year. They were - I claimed - Russia’s cut-off of gas to Ukraine; the bombing of the golden mosque in Iraq; the release of an "Inconvenient Truth"; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the US mid-term elections.

I intend to repeat the exercise for 2007 in my column next Tuesday (18th December). But with a slight difference. This time I would like to canvas opinion ahead of time. Please let me know, by Friday, what your nominations are. Of course, I realise this in some ways a fatuous exercise. But that’s never stopped me in the past.

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I met John Howard only once - at a breakfast in London - and he struck me as grumpy and charmless. I was obviously missing something. Howard was a phenomenally successful politician. He won four successive elections in Australia.

Now that he has finally lost, it is tempting to draw a general lesson - and there is an obvious one to hand. Foreign leaders who backed George Bush over Iraq have been punished. First Jose Maria Aznar, then Tony Blair. Now John Howard. One of Kevin Rudd’s first acts as Australian prime minister will be to start pulling troops out of Iraq.

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When the British government surveyed employment in the City of London recently, it came across a pleasingly symmetrical fact. About one-third of the high-skilled workers were foreigners and so were about one-third of the low-skilled workers.

This knowledge that foreign workers are critical to the most dynamic sector of the economy has not stopped Gordon Brown, the prime minister, from growling about “British jobs for British workers”. Across the developed world, politicians such as Mr Brown are responding to public fears about high levels of immigration. In Italy last week, police backed by bulldozers swept through settlements of Romanian immigrants. In the US, Hillary Clinton recently made the first false step in her formidable presidential election campaign by sounding soft on illegal immigration.

Some anti-immigration activists think we are now reaching a tipping point in both western Europe and north America. Immigration is becoming such a hot political issue that politicians will be forced to clamp down. The period of high migration will come to a close.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Comments can be made below.

I was sorry to read today that Joseph "Erap" Estrada, the former president of the Phillippines, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for corruption. I have a soft spot for Erap. He is the only politician I have ever interviewed who actually fell asleep during the interview.

It was in the mid-1990s and Estrada was vice-president at the time. He was also enormously popular with the poor in the Phillippines - largely because he had played a series of heroic roles in low-budget thrillers. He was clearly the coming man, so getting an interview with him was quite a big deal. He had a large office, full of note-taking flunkies. They were as horrified as I was, when the great man nodded off and began to snore during the course of our interview. But I can’t really blame him. It was hot; I was asking a lot of damn fool questions about development and foreign policy. He might have had a few at lunch. He has a reputation as a world-class drinker and womaniser. Eventually I was ushered to the door by a staff member who said:  "I’m sorry about that, but I could tell the vice-president was very interested by your questions until he fell asleep."

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