When Vladimir Surkov talked about Russia’s ‘offshore aristocracy’ he meant that small class of rich Russians who own everything through offshore companies. They don’t pay tax in Russia, they do their IPOs abroad, and they do deals affecting millions of Russians without any regulatory body in Russia knowing what happens. Surkov wants these people to … Continue reading Russia’s offshore aristocracy

US Republican presidential candidate John McCain has proposed a radical new initiative. In his first year as president he would call a summit to set up a League of Democracies. The League would be equipped with a formidable military capacity, based in part on NATO, and in part on the ‘new quadrilateral security partnership’ in … Continue reading American idealism gone wrong

In Yeltsin’s day, reformers used to talk about ‘windows of opportunity’ for this or that reform. These windows had a nasty habit of closing before the reform was accomplished. Perhaps the Medvedev presidency, which started yesterday, offers another ‘window of opportunity’ for economic and political reform, and normalisation of relations with other countries. Consider the … Continue reading Russia under Medvedev: ‘A Window of Opportunity’

Around 1930 the most famous Russian economist was undoubtedly Nikolai Dmyitreyvich Kondratieff. For years his famous ‘Kondratieff cycles – long boom-bust cycles of business activity – fascinated economists and business analysts. Then he fell out of fashion, and is now unknown. By abolishing capitalism, Stalin abolished the business cycle, and had Kondratieff liquidated. In the … Continue reading Two Cheers for Kondratieff

The advent of the Medevedev presidency has brought into focus two opposite conjectures about Russia. The first may be called the geopolitical conjecture, the second the economic reform conjecture. They can be found equally in Russia and the West. A hostile version of the first is represented by the title and content of a new … Continue reading Russia under Medvedev for Moscow

Don’t let economists kid you that globalization has narrowed the scope of politics. What it has done is to multiply the number of economic instruments available for the pursuit of foreign policy aims. That is why economic sanctions are such a prominent part of contemporary diplomacy. There are about one hundred sanction regimes in place … Continue reading Energy Security in Europe

How strong is the Chinese-Russian axis? This, and not Tibet, was what I wanted to discuss when I called in on the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing last week –even though the response of western media to the Chinese ‘crackdown’ in Lhasa gave part of the answer to the question. In the Far East, there … Continue reading The China-Russia Axis

The advent of the Medvedev presidency has brought into focus two opposite conjectures about Russia. One is represented by Edward Lucas’s book ‘The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West’. Lucas argues that Russia is trying to rewrite the last chapter of the Cold War. Under Putin it has been … Continue reading What to Make of Medvedev

According to much Western commentary, a new cold war is brewing between Russia and the West. Russians are coming to be seen as enemies, not partners. We are told that they are obsessed with the thought that the West is trying to strangle Russia; that they believe that Russia must stand up for its sovereignty … Continue reading Russians don’t follow the western script

In his State of Union Address of 2002, President Bush named Iran as part of the ‘axis of evil’ for ‘exporting terror’ and developing weapons of mass destruction. Since then, a ‘cold war’ has frozen relations between the two countries. I am convinced that had things gone better for America in Iraq, Iran would by … Continue reading The Iranian dilemma