Category: Russia

Russia joins South America’s ‘great game’

September 7, 2011 1:16 pm by John Paul Rathbone

The days when a foreign correspondent occasionally felt like George Smiley died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. But in South America, if you squint, those old John Le Carré days of Russian espionage can sometimes seem as though they are back  – at least if the Gazprom representative that I met recently in Bolivia is anything to go by. With his watery smile, impeccable manners and icy handshake, he seemed to have stepped out of KGB central casting.

Continue reading: “Russia joins South America’s ‘great game’”

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Posted in Latin America, Russia |

FT podcast: World Weekly with Gideon Rachman

October 1, 2010 12:16 am by Financial Times

The Irish fiscal crisis; the power struggle in Moscow; and the succession path in North Korea

In this week’s podcast: How can Ireland escape its fiscal crisis? The mayor of Moscow is ousted in a show of strength by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev – but is the power struggle over? And in North Korea a succession plan is emerging as Kim Jong-Il’s third son is promoted to general – but what role will his aunt play? Gideon Rachman hosts the world podcast, with guests David Gardener in the studio, Catherine Belton in Moscow and Christian Oliver in Seoul. Produced by Rob Minto

Posted in North Korea, Russia, World affairs |

The USSR and modern China

August 27, 2010 11:31 am by Gideon Rachman

I was on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning, discussing a new book that makes parallels between optimism about the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the euphoria about modern China.

Here’s the link to the programme.

Posted in China, Foreign affairs, Russia |

FT Podcast: World Weekly with Gideon Rachman

July 2, 2010 12:31 am by Financial Times

Petraeus, Google and Russian spies

In this week’s podcast: We look at how General Stanley McChrystal’s replacement General David Petraeus is getting on in his first week as head of UN and Nato forces in Afghanistan. We hear from the FT’s Beijing correspondent Kathrin Hille about Google’s final attempts to rescue its presence in China; and finally we turn our attention to the alleged Russian spies arrested in the US earlier this week.

Presented by David Gardner, the FT’s international affairs editor, with Helen Warrell, Asia page editor, Neil Buckley, Eastern Europe editor and James Blitz, defence and diplomatic editor.

Produced by LJ Filotrani

Posted in Russia, US politics, World affairs |

Bankruptcy could be good for America

January 11, 2010 11:29 pm by Gideon Rachman

Pinn illustration

In Winnie-the-Pooh, there is a significant moment when the bear is asked whether he wants honey or condensed milk with his bread. He replies “both”. You can get away with this sort of thing if you are a much loved character in children’s literature. But it is more problematic when great nations start behaving in a childish fashion. When Americans are asked what they want – lower taxes, more lavish social spending or the world’s best-funded military machine – their collective answer tends to be “all of the above”.

The result is that the US is piling up debt. A budget deficit of about 12 per cent of gross domestic product is understandable as a short-term reaction to a huge financial crisis. What should worry Americans is that, with entitlement spending set to surge, there is no credible plan to bring the budget deficit under control over the medium term.

The US has formidable strengths that will allow its government to be profligate for far longer than other nations could get away with. But if the US keeps running huge deficits, sooner or later the country will start flirting with bankruptcy. Oddly, it might be best if the crisis came sooner rather than later. For a surprising number of countries, running out of money has been the prelude to national renewal.

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

Posted in Asia, China, Financial crisis, India, Obama, Russia, US politics |

WTO: Group mulls action – talks continue

December 2, 2009 5:39 pm by Alan Beattie

By Alan Beattie, world trade editor

It looks like my decision not to go to Geneva for the WTO ministerial was vindicated. The only real debate in Geneva was about whether and when to have the next meeting, suggesting that the machinery has become largely detached from the function. Someone on the world trade circuit once told me that the perfect catch-all news headline for international meetings was “Group Mulls Action – Talks Continue”, and it’s performed pretty well for the first eight years of the Doha round, during which time the world has changed.

I’ve long thought it was time to take a few issues – perhaps all services, perhaps “green goods” like wind turbines and so on – and try for some standalone plurilateral deal with a smaller group of countries. It’s not as good as multilateralism,  but it’s better than bilateralism, and the WTO system needs to show some wins.

Trade is not an isolated example. Currency valuations, economic imbalances, carbon emissions – there are a whole bunch of really quite important issues on which global agreement is proving elusive. My longer take on the reasons why is here, but the fundamental problem is that too many governments see international institutions either as a means for projecting their views on the world (such as the US perpetually trying to use the IMF as a halberd to wave menacingly at China over their currency) or to solve their problems for them (such as chucking the whole carbon issue into the Copenhagen process).

What do we learn from this? It’s not the global mechanisms that are wonky. It’s the weakness of the national governments pulling the levers. This would be as true of a plurilateral trade deal as of a multilateral, of course. There is no technocratic solution to the Doha round. It’s a political problem.

Posted in Foreign affairs, Russia |

Apec Schmapec

November 12, 2009 1:31 pm by Alan Beattie

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?

Posted in Asia, China, Development, Foreign affairs, Iran, Japan, Middle East, Obama, Russia, US foreign policy, US politics |

Russia mulls tapping capital markets to help finance Moscow’s yawning public deficit

November 5, 2009 4:36 pm by Financial Times

By Stefan Wagstyl, the FT’s eastern Europe editor

Among the many would-be borrowers planning to raise money from the capital markets before the current rally fades is the Russian government.

Alexei Kudrin, finance minister, has been talking to bankers and fund managers in London about a proposed bond issue to help finance Moscow’s yawning public deficit. He will not want to be reminded that the last time the Russian authorities tapped the market was shortly before its 1998 default.

Nobody is suggesting that the same could happen again – given the careful way that Russia has managed its accounts in the last decade, stashing away surplus oil and gas export revenues for a rainy day. But those reserves are draining away fast – hence Mr Kudrin’s visit.

One key element has changed little since 1998 – the country’s dependence on oil and gas. Repeated promises to diversify the economy have gone nowhere. The current crisis has clearly not been bad enough for Russia to force any serious policy changes. And now that oil has recovered to around $80 a barrel, up from near $30 earlier this year, the pressures are easing rapidly.

In the short-term, that is good for Russia – and will help in getting the bond away. But in the long-term, it delays the development of a diversified modern economy able to repay its bondholders whatever the financial climate.

Posted in Financial crisis, Russia |

Russians, Pakistanis and Tories in Manchester

October 6, 2009 11:19 am by Gideon Rachman

I am in Manchester at the last Conservative Party conference before the next British general election. The Tories should be jubilant because they are all but certain to win and return to power, after thirteen years in the wilderness. There is certainly a buzz about the place. But the party is trying to avoid any hint of triumphalism. Champagne has been banned from the conference hotel, to avoid television pictures of champagne-swilling toffs, celebrating prematurely in the midst of a recession. My colleague Phillip Stephens attempted to buy a bottle of champagne at bar at the Midland Hotel (purely in the interests of research) and was turned away. Frankly, he was lucky not to be handcuffed.

While most conference-goers are understandably focussing on the British political battle, people from all over the world are drifting through Manchester this week, to get a sense of Britain’s government-in-waiting. Last night I went to a dinner with Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, and now a leading figure in the opposition. I was fascinated to hear what Nemtsov had to say about the Putin-Medvedev relationship. American officials I have spoken to are very intriuged by what they see as a nascent power struggle between the Russian president and prime minister. They point to Medvedev’s recent published critiques of lawlessness in Russian society and interviews with the independent press, as a sign that he is pushing back against Putin. The Americans even think that Medvedev might run against Putin for the presidency in 2012.

Continue reading: “Russians, Pakistanis and Tories in Manchester”

Posted in Afghanistan, Foreign affairs, Pakistan, Russia |

Further reading

July 28, 2009 1:34 pm by Financial Times

Peacekeepers declare war on climate change, boy scouts in reserve: Richard Gowan in Global Dashboard

European-Moroccans and the lives they lead: Charlemagne’s notebook in The Economist

Diplomacy 101 from Joe Biden: This post from Daniel W. Drezner in Foreign Policy presciently foresaw that the Russians would be distinctly unamused by Joe Biden’s remarks

Posted in Russia, US foreign policy |
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with Gideon Rachman

About this blog About Gideon Blog guide
Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs.

Gideon became chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times in July 2006. He joined the FT after a 15-year career at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Bangkok. He also edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections.

His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation
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