by Barry Rubin
Exaggerations of Israel’s demise are greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain.
The question is: why is this suddenly happening now and–even more important–what is the impact of this fad going to be? The answer to the second question is very surprising so keep reading.
The suddenness of this trend is illustrated by a telling anecdote. [...]

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Fear are growing that Robert Mugabe’s regime had been strengthened ahead of a presidential election with the secret delivery of a shipment of arms from China.
Reports said the weapons, including three million bullets, mortar bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, had been off-loaded from the Chinese vessel, the An Yue Jiang, at the Angolan port of Lobito [...]

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This is an interesting article. It gives us a clue about why South Koreans have no problem showing their anti-Americanism but might be hesitant about showing anti-Chinese behavior. They fear the Chinese and don’t fear the Americans.
From the article:
An American living in Seoul recently asked me this unexpected question: “What would have happened if the [...]

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Evidence of Venezuela’s support for terrorism could carry Hugo Chávez to the pariah status he deserves.
THE CONFIRMATION by an international forensics team that laptops and hard drives captured by Colombia originated in a camp of FARC terrorists ought to open a new era in relations between the democratic world and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government. Whether [...]

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In their concise and eloquent report, Nemtsov and Milov present a devastating picture of Putin’s eight years in the Kremlin. Indeed, the report’s appraisal of Putin and his administration is so damning that the Kremlin attempted, with considerable success, to block its distribution. Originally, the publisher, Novaya Gazeta (which produces the newspaper of the same [...]

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At about $124 a barrel, the price of crude oil has more than doubled since the start of 2007. The vast majority of government forecasters, stock analysts, economists, traders, and journalists who follow oil failed to see it coming. Even now their price estimates for the next several years are all over the place, ranging [...]

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Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out of control.
As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union under Mr. Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet empire and [...]

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The U.S. Navy has positioned its advanced communications flagship off the coast of Lebanon ahead of a larger mission, an intelligence report says.
U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Patrick Foughty said the the USS Mount Whitney, a 620-foot command and control flagship for the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, is in the region “to support additional communications requirements [...]

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More than 80 percent of Americans now say that we are on the wrong track, but many if not most still believe that the history of other nations is irrelevant — that the United States is unique, chosen by God. So did all the previous world economic powers: Rome, Spain, the Netherlands (in the maritime [...]

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JUDGING from the news lately, Russia is well on its way to restoring that old Evil Empire image. Military parades have returned to Red Square. Key businesses are choked by corruption or are under state control. Journalists who probe too deeply turn up dead. And critics of the Kremlin are jailed, pushed out of elections [...]

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WHEN the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, arrived at a Jerusalem ballroom in February to address the grandees of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (a redundancy, since there are no minor American Jewish organizations), he was pugnacious, as is customary, but he was also surprisingly defensive, and not because of [...]

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The battle for “ownership” of the polar oil reserves has accelerated with the disclosure that Russia has sent a fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers into the Arctic.
It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to annex “unlawfully” a vast portion of the ice-covered Arctic, beneath which scientists believe up to 10 billion tons of gas and [...]

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Just ten months before a deadly earthquake struck Sichuan Province’s Beichuan county on May 12, a scientific study warned that the Chinese region was ripe for a major quake.
“The faults are sufficiently long to sustain a strong ground-shaking earthquake, making them potentially serious sources of regional seismic hazard,” the Chinese, European, and U.S. geoscientists wrote [...]

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