By Roula Khalaf, the FT’s Middle East editor

It doesn’t take much to charm the Arab public after all. Combine romantic television drama and anti-Israeli comments and you win instant sympathy from public opinion.

The simple formula has been well practised by Turkey, a former colonial power during Ottoman times now making its way back to the Middle East.

Driven by the ambitions of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, which has Islamist roots, and Turkish disappointment with Europe’s reluctance to embrace it, Ankara embarked on its Middle East journey with a soft approach: the export of weepy soap operas that have captured the Arab world’s imagination.

Its charm offensive was followed with strident criticism of Israel during the December Gaza offensive, which strained relations with the Jewish state but went down well with the Arab public.

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By Alan Beattie, FT World Trade Editor

To the usual putdowns of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation - “four adjectives in search of a noun” and “A Perfect Excuse to Chat” - my colleague Kevin Brown has added another ahead of this week’s big meeting: “a grouping that speaks for half the global economy but decides almost nothing”. If anything, this is a mild understatement.

Still, Apec has been doing its best to prove its relevance: here is a paper arguing that Apec members see more trade integration amongst themselves than do non-Apec members. It’s careful not to delineate a firm causal link, and just as well - even as it is the paper verges on blatant goalhanging in inviting us to infer some relationship.

More likely is that Apec was lucky enough to include all the countries (Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, later on China and Vietnam, etc) that organised themselves into the “Factory Asia” disaggregated supply chain - and which was focused on western markets. And not even the actual bilateral trade agreements in the region (as opposed to Apec’s “voluntary” i.e. toothless one) contributed much to that process either (see previous link). Meanwhile,  pace one very vocal advocate, the chances of turning Apec into a proper free trade zone are the square root of Doha.

The best reason for Apec, one east Asian official once confided to me sotto voce, was that it forced the US president to travel to Asia at least once a year. But surely any good CEO visits his biggest suppliers and creditors regularly in any case?

By Roula Khalaf, the FT’s Middle East editor

It is easy to dismiss Mahmoud Abbas’s decision not to contest the next Palestinian presidential election as a capricious cry for attention.

Since taking the helm of the Palestinian Authority after the 2004 death of Yasser Arafat, he has often looked uncomfortable in the job and has frequently threatened to resign.

Under his leadership, the PA has been a far less corrupt administration and one genuinely committed to the peaceful pursuit of an end to Israeli occupation. But it has also presided over the worst divisions in the Palestinian national movement’s history. And its purpose – to negotiate the creation of an independent state – has looked increasingly hopeless.

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

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Christina Larson in The New Republic: A Journal of Politics and the Arts

Obama meets the Lobby - Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy  (Walt returns to the subject of his bitterly controversial book, “The Lobby”)

On Versions of Goodness - Bagehot in The Economist

The New Scramble for Africa - Mark Weston in EMEA Finance

Someone give the FT a dose of valium, please - Daniel W. Drezner in Foreign Policy

Thirty years after the Iranian revolution, could we be witnessing an Iranian counter-revolution? In the short term, events in Iran are depressing and alarming – a stolen election, violence in the streets, repression. In the long term, the weekend has provided heartening evidence that Iran, and the Middle East in general, need not be immune to the great wave of democratisation that has swept the world since the late 1970s.

Of course, there are those who think that – despite the turmoil in Tehran – President Mahmoud Ahamdi-Nejad may actually have won the election. Their line of argument is that western journalists and middle-class Iranians have been deceived by focusing too much on opinion in the capital city and amongst the educated elite. Iran might be like Thailand – a country that has recently been through political turmoil because the urban middle-classes are regularly out-voted by the rural poor.

These arguments are unconvincing. The Iranian election bears all the hallmarks of a stolen vote. The official count has Mr Ahmadi-Nejad winning even in the home town of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, his main challenger. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is said to have won even in Azeri-speaking constituencies, despite the fact that Mr Moussavi comes from an Azeri background. The official tally gave Mr Ahmadi-Nejad 63 per cent of the vote, which is way out of line with most pre-election predictions. The Iranian regime has reacted to popular protests with all the instincts of a dictatorship – beating up protesters, locking up opponents, shutting down text messaging services and internet sites.

The remainder of the article can be read here. Please post comments below.

Barack Obama is a soft power president. But the world keeps asking him hard power questions.

From North Korea to Guantánamo Bay, from Iran to Afghanistan, Mr Obama is confronting a range of vexing issues that cannot be charmed out of existence.

The problem is epitomised by the US president’s trip to the Middle East this week. Its focal point will be a much-trailed speech in Cairo on Thursday June 4, in which he will directly address the Muslim world.

The Cairo speech is central to Mr Obama’s efforts to rebuild America’s global popularity and its ability to persuade – otherwise known as soft power. The president has been trying out potential themes for the speech on aides and advisers for months. He is likely to emphasise his respect for Islamic culture and history, and his personal links to the Muslim world. He will suggest to his audience that both the US and the Islamic world have, at times, misjudged and mistreated each other – and he will appeal for a new beginning.

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The Darul Aman palace is a huge neo-classical pile with hundreds of rooms, set against the backdrop of the snowy mountains that surround Kabul. From a distance, it is an imposing sight. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I visited a few weeks ago, it is also a ruin. The palace was all but destroyed in the Afghan civil war of the 1990s.

Darul Aman was built in the 1920s by Amanullah Khan, a reformist king who also promoted women’s rights and discouraged the wearing of the burqa. Ninety years later, the king is long dead, his palace is a wreck and the burqa is ubiquitous in Kabul.

I thought of King Amanullah’s reforms this week, as debate flared over a law recently passed by the Afghan parliament. The statute, which applies to the country’s Shia minority, would require women to get their husband’s permission to leave the home and make it illegal for them to refuse to have sex with their husbands.

The remainder of the article can be read here. please post comments below.

And so it was that Barack Hussein Obama visited Europe. In London, he rescued the world economy. In Strasbourg, he healed the Nato alliance. In Prague, he rid the world of nuclear weapons. In Ankara, he reconciled Islam and the west. And on the seventh day, he got back on to Air Force One and disappeared into a cloudless sky.

Was it all a dream? I fear so.

On many levels, the new US president’s first tour of Europe was indeed a triumph. Mr Obama was articulate, ambitious and charming. His personal style has a touch of the emperor and a touch of the rock star – but with an appealing humility that is common to neither profession.

While his manner was relaxed, Mr Obama also consistently displayed an instinct for bold action that seems to be beyond the European leaders he mingled with. He wants to abolish nuclear weapons, shock the world economy back into recovery and redouble efforts to win the war in Afghanistan.

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