An opinion poll released last week revealed some heartening news for the US. President Barack Obama is the most popular political figure in the world. The least trusted leaders, according to a poll of 20 countries conducted by worldpublicopinion.org, are President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran and Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister. When Mr Obama has breakfast with Mr Putin in Moscow on Tuesday, it will be a meeting between the world’s romantic hero and one of its pantomime villains.

But charm and good looks can only get you so far in geopolitics.Mr Obama’s charismatic aura is obscuring an uncomfortable truth. His foreign policy is in crisis.

The arms-control agreement signed on Monday between the US and Russia will give the president some badly-needed positive news to bring back from Moscow. But beneath the smiley surface, relations between Russia and the US remain tense and suspicious.

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It was only when Sarah Palin popped back into the news that I realised how much I had been missing her. The general opinion in the hated mainstream media (MSM) is that her slightly bizarre resignation as governor of Alaska has polished off her chances of becoming president in 2012.

Maureen Dowd speculates that Palin has gone crazy. Even conservative commentators seem to feel she has done herself in. Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post that Palin is a hypocrite. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard says - “Forget about Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and possibly ever.” Toby Harnden of London’s Daily Telegraph titillates his readers by saying that Palin is an empress without clothes - and says that he is abandoning the effort to keep defending her.

I’m sorry - but it’s way too soon to write off Palin’s chances of the presidency. Just take a look at the polls and you will see that she has a real shot at it. A recent Pew survey shows that amongst Republican voters she is far more popular than any alternative candidate for the party’s nomination in 2012. Some 73% of Republicans had a favourable view of her - compared to a 57% positive rating for Mitt Romney and 55% for Newt Gingrich, her two most plausible rivals.

Ah, say the Palintologists, but she will fall apart in a primary campaign. And - even if she doesn’t, she has no chance in a general election. Neither argument is persuasive.  Continue reading "Palin for president - you better believe it"

Real Madrid’s £80m purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United will doubtless be portrayed, in some quarters, as meglomaniacal madness. In fact, it is part of a carefully thought-out and rather clever business strategy.

About seven years ago Florentino Perez, who has just re-assumed control of the club, built the first team of Real international superstars or Galacticos - including Zidane of France, Roberto Carlos and Ronaldo of Brazil, Beckham of England and Figo of Portugal, Critics denounced this as a team of show-boaters - the Harlem Globetrotters of football. They pointed out that Perez had sanctioned the sale of a key member of the side, the unglamorous ungalactic defensive midfielder Claude Makelele - and that Real’s fortunes declined shortly afterwards.  The galacticos never won very much.

But the critics missed the point. The galaticos were part of a commercial strategy that hugely boosted Real’s income through guest appearances, the sale of merchandise and television rights. Real now have the highest revenues of any football club in the world, and they have doubled since 2002.

I once discussed the strategy with Real’s commercial director who compared football to the movie industry. Real, he argued, was a content provider - just like a Hollywood studio. So just as it was rational for a film studio to pay millions to get a box-office star like Tom Cruise in their movie, so it was rational for Real to pay huge amounts to sign Beckham or Zidane. Their celebrity could then be leveraged into higher sales. Real were already looking forward to the age of video-enabled mobile phones. Their dream was to build up a global community of Real fans. Then whenever Beckham or Zidane scored a goal, these fans would get a text message and would be able to watch the goal on their phones - for a price.

It seems to me - seven years on (I had this conversation in 2002, while researching The Economist survey of world soccer - tough assignment) that the technology is just about there. The original Galacticos have moved on - although Beckham played quite well for England last night. But a new generation of content-providers is about to arrive in form of Ronaldo and Kaka, the star of the Brazilian national side.

Related reading:

History of the world transfer record

There was a moment, a few months ago, when sensible people in rich countries were considering pulling all their money out of the bank, buying gold ingots and hiding them under the bed. But now that the panic has passed, something less frightening and rather bleaker is beckoning. Welcome to the politics of austerity.

Across the developed world, unemployment, public debt and taxes are rising. When the global economic crisis first hit, it was natural to assume that the poorer and more recent democracies would be most vulnerable to a political backlash. Without the accumulated wealth or the welfare systems to cushion the blow, their populations looked vulnerable. Most countries in central Europe or Latin America only made the transition to democracy in the 1980s, so authoritarian nasties might still be lurking in the shadows.

But perhaps we are looking for trouble in the wrong places. It could be that it will be the richer democracies, such as Britain and the US, that find it most difficult to adapt to the politics of austerity.

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By any conventional political analysis, the governing Congress Party should have done badly in the Indian elections. The economy is suffering because of the global recession. And the Indian government has appeared powerless and clueless in the face of a spate of increasingly bold terrorist attacks. Both issues should have played into the hands of the right-wing opposition party, the BJP.

Instead Congress has done much better than expected. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, might have been exaggerating slightly when he claimed that the election results have handed his party a “massive mandate”. But Congress has clearly out-perfomed expectations. Before the votes were counted, the conventional expectation was that Congress would get around 150 seats - instead they seem to have won over 200 seats, and should be well placed to form a reasonably stable coalition.

Early comments from the BJP suggest that their leaders are baffled by their defeat. The hardline Hindu nationalists in the party will argue that the party suffered by not pushing the issues of security and Pakistan harder. A lot of the blame is sure to attach to the BJP’s elderly leader, LK Advani, who will surely now be elbowed aside. Predictions that Mayawati, a leader of a party that appeals above all to Dalits (”untouchables”) would be the rising force in Indian politics have also been confounded. She has done surprisingly badly in her home state of Uttar Pradesh.

Instead the coming man in Indian politics now looks likely to be the latest scion of the Gandhi family - 38-year-old, Rahul. With Manmohan Singh now 76-years-old, Rahul Gandhi is clearly well-positioned to be the next party leader.

When President Barack Obama welcomes the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the White House on Wednesday, he will be meeting two leaders the US relies on – and deeply distrusts.

The Americans desperately need both Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to get a grip on the deteriorating security situation in the region now referred to in Washington as “AfPak”. But both men are regarded as incompetent leaders with whom the US has a scratchy and difficult relationship.

Mr Obama will doubtless greet the two leaders with his trademark grace and bonhomie. But behind the scenes US officials will be anxiously weighing the options for alternative leadership. Is it too late to find a better candidate to run against Mr Karzai in the Afghan presidential elections this year? Is there a more competent would-be president of Pakistan waiting in the wings?

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“I will never apologise for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” President George H.W. Bush’s statement in 1988 was more than just a “Bushism”, of the sort that his son later made famous. It was also a pithy summary of a whole school of thought in the US.

For many conservative Americans, one of the besetting sins of their liberal rivals is a tendency to go around apologising for their country. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative, memorably excoriated liberals as the “blame America first” crowd.

Now conservatives are complaining loudly that one of those namby-pamby, self-flagellating liberals is sitting in the Oval Office – abasing himself and the country before foreigners. President Barack Obama, they complain, has turned himself into “global apologiser-in-chief”. Rush Limbaugh, the doyen of conservative talk radio, rages that “everywhere he goes, he’s just apologising for the United States”.

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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.

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