Articles

The late-December sentence handed down by a Moscow court against Mikhail Khodorkovsky should have surprised no one. Ever since the Kremlin launched new legal proceedings against the former oil tycoon about three years ago, a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. Still, the repeat conviction of Khodorkovsky, already serving an eight-year term in a Siberian jail, to an additional six years in prison on fresh (and blatantly fabricated) charges speaks volumes about the receding rule of law in Russia. So, too, does Washington's apparent ambivalence about it.

The Senate's passage this week of New Start, the latest U.S.-Russian arms-control treaty, was greeted with some jeers in Washington, where worries over its technical deficiencies persist in spite of White House reassurances. Here in Russia's capital, however, news of New Start's ratification was met overwhelmingly with cheers of approval from officials and experts alike.

More than anything else, however, Russian leaders see New Start as a political victory confirming that their country still matters to Washington and on the international stage writ large. Some Russian officials also have taken it as affirmation that, under President Obama, the United States has adopted a hands-off approach to Russia's interests and political system.

U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state is one of those tempting silver bullets that upon close examination would produce the opposite of its promised result. Rather than promoting peace, it would likely ignite conflict both within Palestinian society and between Israel and the Palestinians.

Never mind that such recognition would undermine the very process of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to which the two parties agreed, which the United States and the global community have endorsed, and which is supposed to produce a Palestine that lives in peace with its Jewish neighbor.

Never mind, too, that we have been here before with a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood followed by strong international recognition, followed not by peace but, instead, by more conflict.

In late 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization adopted a resolution that declared an independent state of Palestine. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat declared himself the president of Palestine, and more than 100 nations have since recognized an independent Palestine over the years.

No state arose and no peace ensued because Israel and the Palestinians had not ironed out the details of mutual recognition, borders and other basic matters that are the sin qua non of real peace. Why anyone would expect a different result this time with the parties wrangling over the same issues defies explanation.

How do you say "chutzpah" in Farsi? That's the question many observers of Iranian politics must be asking in the wake of the latest, hollow round of international diplomacy over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

The two-day meeting which took place between Tehran and Western powers in Geneva in early December may have been heavy on pomp and circumstance, but it was remarkably devoid of substance. Ahead of the talks, Iranian officials had made abundantly clear that they weren't prepared to discuss the main point of discord between their government and the West—their regime's nuclear ambitions. True to their word, the dialogue that followed skirted the substantive issues relating to Iran's persistent nuclear effort, serving simply to set the stage for more in-depth discussions which are ostensibly to follow in the future.

It's probably safe to assume that Australian Internet activist Julian Assange wasn't thinking specifically about Iran when his brainchild, the information clearinghouse WikiLeaks, released its latest round of classified U.S. government cables. Still, the data dump, encompassing more than a quarter-million internal memos issued by the State Department and U.S. embassies overseas, successfully demolishes a number of sacred cows relating to American policy toward the Islamic republic and its burgeoning nuclear effort.