Introduction

On the surface, the US has been saying it wants Russia's cooperation on Iran's nuclear program in the Security Council this week. So praktike wonders what to make of the timing of Cheney's anti-Russia speech in Lithuania, in which he accused the Russia government of using oil and natural gas as "tools for intimidation and blackmail," "unfairly and improperly restrict[ing] the rights of her people," and taking "actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

After that bit of raw chutzpah, Cheney proceeded, in the words of the NYT, to wade into the energy battles in Kazakhstan while embracing Nazerbayev with smiling praise for Kazakhstan's "political development." Cheney finished his tour in Dubrovnik with the endorsement of NATO membership for an unlikely trio of candidates, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia.

Altogether, the trip was a tour de force -- a nicely judged combination of high-minded Cold War-style ideological conflict with cynical Great Game competition, carefully tailored at each stop to play to the specific anti-Russian (and pro-US) interests of key local players.

Strategic linkages

I don't think there can be any question that the Bush Admin has been making a number of anti-Russian moves in recent weeks and that Cheney's trip was deliberately designed to be provocative. It appears to me that the Russophobe hardliners within the Bush Admin, led by Cheney, have won the internal debates about how to deal with Russia leading up to next month's G-8 summit in St Petersburg.

As important, I also think the provocations directed toward Russia are part of a parallel program to delegitimize the UN process for dealing with Iran, where the US is transparently engaged in faux diplomacy.

In my view, recent moves by the Bush Admin are comprehensible only when they are seen as linked -- part of a broader "forward-leaning" effort to aggressively reassert US hegemony. My fear is that the tactics the US is using in playing the "diplomatic route" re Iran may not only be extremely dangerous as a way of dealing with Iran itself. Those tactics are likely to have far broader and more profound long-term effects on the structure of the international system.

Where are US foreign policy elites?

Why so little reaction to the Bush Admin's tougher line on Russia by American foreign policy elites ("realists" and "liberal internationalists") who aren't the natural allies ("neocons" and "national greatness" conservatives) of the Bush Admin? Perhaps it's because most foreign policy elites tend to be experts in one area or another with limited overlap -- e.g. nuclear proliferation, Middle East, former Soviet Union, China, Latin America, defense, etc. Or perhaps it's because they've lost the old Cold War habits of seeing linkages across diplomatic and security issues and across regions.

I also think, in part, it's because almost all "schools" of American foreign policy share unquestioningly the assumption that being the sole superpower is in the natural order of things. American hegemony is, at least in principle, assumed to be necessary and/or benign, and its maintenance and assertion is a good thing. What the various schools quarrel about is how best to maintain and assert American power (soft and hard) and "leadership." When liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry and Anne Marie Slaughter question whether maintenance of a unipolar system is actually in American interests, note how gingerly they approach the issue in order to avoid being treated as anti-American heretics.

"Realists" and "liberal internationalists" may tut at Cheney's confrontational style, and some may question his blatant hypocrisy on the subject of democracy. But I'm rarely seeing any challenge to the basic narrative that Russia deserves a smack-down from the US. First, it's become conventional wisdom (albeit of the ahistorical variety) that Russia is rolling back democracy and increasingly flirting with dictatorship at home [ed. - without really explaining why, it seems to be assumed that Putin's "soft authoritarianism" at home should automatically have a negative impact on US-Russia relations on everything from terrorism to trade]. Second, there's a general feeling that Russia has been getting a bit uppity abroad [ed. - Russia is seen as somehow "meddling" where it doesn't belong, even where some American elites actually agree more with Russia's position than that of the Bush Admin -- e.g. issues such as Iran or the Palestinians]

So maybe it's not surprising that it takes a rabid anti-imperialist who doesn't belong to any of the mainstream foreign policy schools, Justin Raimondo, to produce the first article I've read that condemns Cheney's anti-Russia attacks as something more than just undiplomatic and hypocritical. Even Raimondo, however, doesn't fully link Cheney's moves with the diplomatic games vis a vis Iran.

A five-pronged strategic offensive?

To see how recent Bush Admin policy moves are part of a broader strategy of reasserting hegemony, I find especially helpful the following observation by DrLeoStrauss (Stop the Spirit of Zossen).

The U.S. is currently conducting five separate strategic grand offensives:

(a) the roll back of the old Soviet imperial periphery across Eastern Europe, down through the Russian 'Near Abroad' of Ukraine and Georgia and Central Asia;

(b) the on again off again stuttering efforts to isolate China as the new 'Peer Competitor' across both the Asian Pacific rim and also in Central Asia [ed. - and in recent months, competition in Africa has been added to the list];

(c) conduct an international war on 'terrorism' (such as it is);

(d) lead new international cooperation regarding nuclear and WMD proliferation [ed. - "lead" is a charitably neutral way of describing the Bush Admin goals of (i) leaving to the US the determination of which countries are worthy of obtaining nuclear technology and weapons and (ii) ensuring that no unfriendly state can achieve deterrence against the US use of force]; and

(e) bootstrap the Middle East into modernity through unilateral American force of arms.

(Sprinkle 'democracy' on all of the above).

What's remarkable is that Iran intersects with all five "grand strategic offensives" plus "democracy." That helps explain how and why the Bush Admin has turned the nuclear dispute with Iran into a "crisis" (with considerable help from the Iranians themselves, of course). The Iranian situation offers the Bush Admin an opportunity to make "progress" on a number of its strategic offensives simultaneously -- not just with Iran or with the nuclear proliferation regime but with China and Russia as well.

The UN process is set up for "failure" in the sense that the Bush Admin is not going to obtain the sort of robust steps against Iran that it has sought. Either the Security Council negotiations will produce some sort of deadlock over the statement or, as Bolton has suggested this weekend, the US intends to proceed without Chinese and Russian support. Either outcome would give the US the excuse to ignore the Security Council going forward -- Rice has already been claiming that the Security Council would suffer a fatal "loss of credibility" if it fails to take action on Iran. Next stop, as again Rice has already suggested, is "coalitions of the wiling."

The Bush Admin will likely pin the blame for failure on the "ineffectiveness" of the UN (and international institutions), in general, and on China and Russia, in particular. We should expect the bill of particulars against China and Russia to be three-fold:

• they are authoritarian regimes that cozy up to tyrants for their own narrow economic and geopolitical purposes
• they threaten global energy security (in their roles as major consumer and major producer, respectively), and
• they are potential threats to their neighbors.

Marketing the program

This three-pronged attack draws on several different policy rationales or motives, each with a different way of defining "threats" to American interests:

• Cold War-style: ideologically-defined enemies, based on the "nature of the regime";
• Great Game-style: challenges to US influence/control of global energy;
• US "global leadership"-style: threats to US predominance in any region.

As DrLeoStrauss suggests, even if the Bush Admin's strategic goals were commendable (which I dispute), the simultaneous pursuit of such an ambitious collection of strategic objectives is likely to produce considerable incoherence in execution. Furthermore, as Cheney's trip illustrated, that incoherence will be compounded by relying on such a mix of "styles." It's difficult to reconcile the Cold War-style (e.g. Cheney's ideological assault on Putin's supposed lack of democracy) with the Great Game-style (e.g. fishing for gas deals with Nazerbayev while praising his fifteen-year contribution to Kazakhstan's "political development").

The advantage of this mixed bag of rationales, however, is the same the Bush Admin enjoyed in assembling support for the Iraq war: a bit of something for everyone -- liberal hawks, ideological warriors, "national greatness" conservatives, and old-fashioned military hawks. The fact that no one can explain the "real reason" the US went to war in Iraq isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Of course, such an ambitious program can't be left entirely to the Bush Admin. They need help from pundits and politicians to frame, legitimize and sell the program. Not surprisingly, we've already begun to hear from the usual suspects. A mere four days before Cheney's appearance in Lithuania, Robert Kagan warned in the op-ed pages of the WashPost of a global threat to liberalism potentially greater than Al Qaeda: a "League of Dictators" (read China and Russia) that will use their positions at the UN to undermine the promise of a new international order. Although Kagan's essay is primarily an example of the Cold War-style, he deftly weaves in the "energy security" card by showing how China's ideological and strategic interests (i.e., access to energy) are likely to coincide in places like Africa or Venezuela.

Max Boot has similarly been busy on the op-ed pages. The day before Cheney began his trip in Vilnius, Boot was lamenting the "dictatorship dividend" -- the windfall from rising oil prices enjoyed by "noxious dictators" like Putin and Chavez. Boot hit the trifecta -- the challenge to global "energy security," an ideological conflict, and the threat of "regional contagion."

Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

Since in this article Boot is concerned with nefarious energy suppliers, his list of villains doesn't include China, with which he is willing for the US to make common cause, at least as fellow energy consumers. In a longer piece, I'm confident he'd be able to find a way to lodge China in the enemy camp a la Kagan. As Matt Yglesias notes, Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the PNAC folks always need an enemy, and China was their pre-9/11 favorite. So they may just be reverting to form.

If John McCain's speech at the Brussels Forum on transatlantic relations a week ago is any indication, the "national greatness" conservatives are on the same page as the neocons and, according to Dan Drezner, the "muscular liberals" in the person of Richard Holbrooke are in full agreement with McCain. And of course the human rights folks and democracy true believers have long had China in their sights and are delighted to hear Cheney take on the Russians.

Reporting on his attendance at the Brussels Forum, Drezner notes:

The general tenor of the conference so far has been to focus less on transatlantic frictions and more on the geopolitical and geoeconomic difficulties that Russia and China are posing to the West as a whole. More later, but a question to readers -- will the realpolitik of a rising China and a renegade Russia... be the ultimate driver for a closer transatlantic partnership? And should that be the main driver?

Snark aside, Kagan and Boot give us a taste of the sort of arguments, from the same unholy alliance that brought us Iraq, that I expect to hear against Russia and China as the Bush Admin seeks to reassert American hegemony.

This post certainly requires quite a bit more fleshing out, so let's call it an "Intro." As and if I develop some of these thoughts further, I'll update with links to future posts.

cross-posted at American Footprints

About a month ago, on the occasion of a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld at a confab of defense minister types in Singapore, I wondered idly how one says "chutzpah" in Chinese.

We've just received the answer courtesy of Justin Logan in, of all places, Astana, Kazakhstan where, at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we also learned how it's said in Russian and a few other languages of the region. As Justin notes, the participants included as honored guests nearby countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran.

Given the recent reemergence of security challenges in Afghanistan, and the apparent scrambling to beef up security -- shifting UK forces from Iraq, a few Aussie SAS to join special ops, etc. -- perhaps there's a bit of reassessment going on right now in Washington? Is there time still before the current Quadrennial Defense Review is due to rethink some of those lily pads ?

This is good news if the polling in the report described below is reliable. As I've often remarked, economic and political development is as much a change of "mentality" -- of shifting expectations about how "things are done" or should be done. And that takes a generation or more. For the transition economies, one of the biggest challenges has been to create home-grown constitutencies for meaningful, deep institutional reforms.

A necessary starting point, for both economic and legal reforms, is for a significant portion of the population and the politicians to share a vocabulary with which to discuss what would be a better outcome and what needs to be fixed in order to get that outcome. A broadly shared assessment may be starting to emerge after fifteen years, as more and more of Russia's economic activity has become the province of private entrepreneurs and local businesses -- not just kiosk traders from the Caucasus, a handful of oligarchs, and a few multinationals. Note the emphasis on crime and extortion as major threats to business, as well as the widely shared perception that Russia's laws and regulations are so poorly written that it's impossible for anyone to fully comply with the law.

Some of Putin's second term agenda -- including his recent emphasis on reforms to help SMEs -- can be understood as reflecting these public perceptions. Of course, the splits within both the Kremlin and the government too often result in ineffectual or counter-productive responses. But it's a starting point.

[Via the daily email (No 9150) from Johnson's Russia List. NB: The translation of the article provides little in the way of sources of the opinion polling or the context, but given that the article gives breakdowns of responses to a number of specific questions, the data are unlikely to have been invented from whole cloth. In any event, the article is more interesting for what it says about broad attitudes rather than the detailed composition or movement of opinion on specific issues. Therefore, I've reproduced it in full rather than snip excerpts.]

Novoe Vremya, No. 19, May 8, 2005

A FATEFUL TRIANGLE: BUSINESS, GOVERNMENT, AND THE PEOPLE

Russian citizens are changing their attitude to private enterprise

Author: Nikolai Popov
Translated by Pavel Pushkin
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

[Attitudes to the private sector and businesspeople who make fortunes from it changed significantly in Russia in recent years. Increased personal acquaintance with businesspeople as friends and relatives leads to a situation where attitudes to this group grow more positive.]

Attitudes to the private sector and businesspeople who make fortunes from it changed significantly in Russia during the period of perestroika and market reforms.

Increased personal acquaintance with businesspeople as friends and relatives leads to a situation where attitudes to this group grow more positive. When asked the question "What is you attitude, in general, to the people who run private enterprise (small and medium-sized businesses)?" 36% of respondents said that this attitude is "good," 44% - "rather good," 5% - "bad" and 9% - "rather bad." Only 6% of respondents could not answer.

Attitude to the state structures on which small business depends is mostly negative: 44% of respondents believe that "state officials" hinder development of private enterprise and 27% of respondents believe that they help small businesses.

According to majority of the population, obstacles for small businesses on the part of the state bodies are not the main problems for businesspeople. Fear of gangster or police racket is still widespread, which can be seen in answers to the following question, "Do you think that running of private enterprise is safe now (what is the crime situation)?"

The overwhelming majority of respondents (81%) believe that running business is dangerous and only 15% of respondents think this is safe. It is possible that positive attitude to small businesses is caused partially by sympathy of the people to this dangerous occupation.

more below the fold
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There's an old joke -- so old I can't quite remember how it goes, other than the punch line. The story has something to do with a scientific discovery about elephants. When the news comes out, the Brits promptly write a white paper on the policy implications for elephant habitats. The Germans produce an encyclopedia covering all things elephant. And the Poles publish a treatise entitled "The Elephant and the Polish Question."

I've been reminded of the punch line more than once over the past several weeks as I've read endless lectures to the Russians on how they should go about remembering the defeat of Nazi Germany sixty years ago. Anne Applebaum's op-ed in the Washington Post fits the almost-universal pattern.

Try, if you can, to picture the scene. A vast crowd in Red Square: Lenin's tomb and Stalin's memorial in the background. Soldiers march in goose step behind rolling tanks, and the air echoes with martial music, occasionally drowned out by the whine of fighter jets. On the reviewing stand, statesmen are gathered: Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former dictator of Poland -- and President George W. Bush.

That description may sound fanciful or improbable. It is neither. On the contrary, that is more or less what will appear on your television screen May 9, when the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II is celebrated in Moscow. I have exaggerated only one detail: Although Kim Jong Il has been invited, his attendance has not yet been confirmed. But Jaruzelski is definitely coming, as are Lukashenko, Bush and several dozen other heads of state. President Vladimir Putin of Russia will preside.

Of course, conveniently airbrushed from this Soviet-esque word-picture are the other leaders gathered in Red Square from the wartime allies of America and the USSR. But left out of this picture is also Red Square itself -- its colorful vitality, its glorious collection of ancient and modern symbols, Lenin's tomb and rock concerts. Standing in Red Square, one has the sense of an ageless, changeless society characterized incongruously by its never-ending arduous struggle to remake itself. This is not a place or a people trapped for eternity in a snapshot of politburo members atop a reviewing stand. That fact is, for me, one of the many reasons to celebrate this May 9 and makes Red Square an appropriate venue, among many, for those remembrances.

I've also found remarkable, in the editorials and media coverage leading up to May 9, that the costs borne by all of the Allies in the defeat of Nazi Germany seem to have been overlooked or even lost altogether. Searching for "Stalingrad" or "Leningrad" or the "Eastern Front" produces hardly a single recent item. For that matter, until President Bush appeared on Saturday at an American battlefield cemetery in the Netherlands, virtually nothing has been heard about those who lost their lives fighting the Nazis on the Western Front. That generation, which has been called the "greatest" in the US, endured horrors and made sacrifices that are simply unimaginable today. The last of that generation will be walking proudly to the "echoes of martial music" in Red Square on May 9. While some of them are still with us, we should remember them and the stories they wrote with their lives.

Certainly, we should never dismiss the real problems at the heart of quarrels over several centuries of Central and Eastern European history, including the Cold War period of Soviet domination. Russia itself is suffering from the failure to fill meaningfully huge lacunae in its historical narrative. A number of thoughtful comments have recently been written on the questions of "facing up to history" and reconciliation, and I'll try to take up those themes in a future post. But today I feel like assembling a few of the pictures -- undoubtedly familiar to most of you -- that are part of my impressionistic mental scrapbook but aren't likely to make much of an appearance in the media this VE Day.
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From The Scotsman:

A major row has broken out between China and Russia over the location for joint military exercises.

According to the Kommersant daily newspaper, the Russian military had suggested the Xinjiang autonomous region of China, because of the area’s problem with Uigur separatists and its proximity to Central Asia, a focus for the international fight against terrorism.

However, Beijing flatly rejected the proposal, and instead suggested the Zhejiang province near Taiwan.

Exercises in this area, the newspaper noted in its report yesterday, “would look too provocative and trigger a strong reaction not only in Taiwan, but in the US and Japan, which recently included the island in their zone of common strategic interests.”

“Beijing is trying to use Russia as an additional lever of pressure on the disobedient island,” it said.

Beijing is presumably also mindful of the history of Russian influence in Xinjiang prior to the assumption of full PRC control (the warlord Sheng Shicai who ruled the province prior to the arrival of KMT nationalists during the 1930s operated under heavy Soviet patronage, and the Soviets invested in the area during the period of the second East Turkestan Republic in the late 40s), which might explain why they would be leery about inviting the Russians into what remains a sensitive area.

From the Asia Times Online's Sergei Blagov (under, ironically enough, a blinking banner ad for $250 gas cards..)

MOSCOW - The Kremlin's decision to approve the East Siberia-Pacific oil pipeline and pump its Siberian crude toward Japan has come as a blow to China's hopes of securing its own slice of Russia's hydrocarbon riches. And Moscow's energy overtures toward Beijing as a consolation prize are not much by which to set store.

On New Year's Eve, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov approved the Taishet-Nakhodka oil pipeline blueprint, the government said in a statement. The annual capacity of the East Siberia-Pacific pipeline system would eventually reach 80 million tons, the statement said. ...

Russia's decision to build a Siberian oil pipeline to the Pacific port of Nakhodka will please Tokyo, but upset Beijing. Japan backed the Nakhodka route, while Beijing favored an alternative pipeline that would have brought the oil to Daqing in northwest China. Russia has been toying with both options, but in March 2004 indicated that it could favor the Japanese-backed project.

Tokyo has been lobbying for an oil pipeline route to the Pacific. To back up its lobbying, Japan reportedly promised up to $14 billion funding of the pipeline as well as $8 billion in investments in the Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 oil and gas projects, according to Russian media reports. The estimated cost of the oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to Nakhodka could reach $11-12 billion. The Taishet-Nakhodka route is seen as a strategic asset for Russia, allowing it to funnel crude not only to Japan but to Korea, Indonesia, Australia and the US west coast as well.

I suppose it's probably too much to hope that all this new oil will mean a new look at the wonders of central heating on the part of the Japanese (I spent about half my time there on a visit last winter scorching my leg hair off under one of these things), but this is still good news for Japan all the same. China, which has its own energy needs to feed, is probably not going to be so happy:

Russia had been discussing a China-bound oil pipeline for nearly a decade. In June 2002, Russian officials pledged to invest $2 billion to fund the construction of the 2,247 kilometer pipeline from the Russian city of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region to Daqing in northeastern China, which was scheduled to begin in 2003 and commissioned by 2005. ...

In the past, Russian and Chinese officials have raised the possibility that a branch of Russia's Pacific pipeline could eventually be diverted to China. However, the December 31 announcement mentioned no China-bound branches of the proposed pipeline. As consolation, on December 30, Russia said it would offer China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) up to a 20% stake in a new state-owned entity that would control Yuganskneftegaz, the main asset of the collapsing Russian oil company Yukos.

I haven't studied Chinese energy and resource consumption as a topic in itself, so I can't offer much speculation on how this particular development will impact it in concrete terms. You never know — maybe all those tens of thousands of Chinese engineering students being trained in their university system will end up devoting themselves towards coming up with some of the clean energy alternatives Matt's looking for.

Edit: China better find something to keep the lights going soon, though. As the UN Population Fund's China representative warns, "China will get old before it gets rich." The one-child policy, while still not enough to prevent China's population from increasing by 8 million per year, is now firmly entrenched within the urban population, presenting China with a looming demographic crunch.

The desire for a son has also so skewed the gender balance that there are now 117 males for every 100 females. To round off the China articles for this evening, we learn that in this corner of China, though, daughters are seen as a valuable commodity for sale in the Southeast Asian sex trade. Those that find success "working outside" bring great wealth to their impoverished homesteads, but also, inevitably, further exacerbate China's HIV and AIDs problem. As a solution to prostitution within China:

the government has set up "re-education centres" in every province. Much emphasis in these centres is put on educating women on the "social evils" of prostitution but they usually only provide limited information about sexual health and how the prostitutes can protect themselves. A study amongst prostitutes in China found that only a few knew that condoms could be protective (14-30%). They all mentioned abstinence as much more protective. Very few (2-30%) perceived themselves at risk of contracting HIV.

Sadly, that's exactly the style of sex education that George W. Bush and his supporters like to see, so I don't suppose there's much hope of the US pressuring the Chinese to get their act together on this front any time soon.

Did the last pretense of democracy in Russia just drop away?

More Russian fun here.

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[UPDATE] by nadezhda

At first I thought that Dec 17 in Russia must be like April Fools Day in the US, because if it's a send-up it's a great one. But I don't think so. Can you imagine what these guys could do with Michael Powell's powers to fine broadcasters!?!   more »

A Fistful of Euros notes that papers are now available from a conference held in Berlin this week on the Ukraine elections (scheduled way in advance of the crisis over the second round fraud). The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Applied Policy Research (CAP) and the German-Ukrainian Forum hosted a range of speakers including the leader of the OSCE election observation mission and the the director of the school of political analysis at the National University in Kiev.

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

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Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
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Ukraine's Supreme Court has invalidated the results of the second round and ruled in favor of a rerun of the second round of voting, to be completed by Dec 26.

This puts at least one nail into Kuchma's attempt to rerun the entire election, with a new candidate to replace Yanukovych. That was the scheme for which he got Putin's blessing when he rushed off to Moscow yesterday.

Now we'll see what else Kuchma has up his sleeve.

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[UPDATE] A lovely piece of FT snark:

The European parliament usually has difficulty organising a roll call, so how to explain the mass appearance of hundreds of orange scarves as MEPs debated the crisis in Ukraine on Thursday?

Step forward Jacek Saryusz-Wolski and his fellow members of the centre-right Civic Platform from Poland.

The MEP sent an assistant out to find 1,000 scarves and paid for half of them himself, the rest coming from a whip-round of colleagues.

Nevertheless, Observer hears some of the more couture-conscious MEPs went out to buy their own, designer, brands.