Tensions between world leaders remained heightened during G20 talks in Bali, Indonesia as top economies look to address the biggest problems facing the globe.
Two major international developments last month, seemingly separate and unconnected, demonstrate the importance of India and its international influence.
Together, these developments show how India, the world’s largest democracy, has been able to navigate between the US and Russia, and remains valued by both by adopting a flexible strategy of resisting China, but not resisting Russia.
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov on May 14, the 80th day of the war in Ukraine, said during a speech that his country was now the main target of a “total hybrid war” by the West, but that it would withstand sanctions by forging
When someone like Boris Bondarev, a Russian counselor to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, slams the door on his employer, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and on his home country, it is only natural to wonder if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s system is showing cracks three months into the dictator’s disgraceful Ukraine adventure.
The answer, however, is “not really.” Despite the relative failure of the invasion so far, prominent defectors are remarkably few in number. The Russian establishment is not about to implode.
For most of the Putin-era breed of establishment figure, carrying on has more upside than defecting.
Bondarev, a
US President Joe Biden yesterday said the crisis in Ukraine was a global issue that heightened the importance of maintaining international order, territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Biden’s comments delivered at the opening of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) with Indo-Pacific leaders in Tokyo come a day after he broke with convention and volunteered US military support for Taiwan.
“This is more than just a European issue. It’s a global issue,” Biden said of the Ukraine situation at the Quad meeting of the US, Japan, India and Australia.
“International law, human rights must always be defended regardless of where they’re violated in the world,”
It is tempting to see in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent diplomatic maneuvers a return to Turkey’s vaunted “zero problems” foreign policy doctrine of the late 2000s, when Ankara aspired to amity with the wider Middle East. Having spent most of the past decade burning bridges across the region, Erdogan now seems keen to repair the damage, but one problem remains: Erdogan himself.
The president’s predilection for flame-throwing remains undimmed, and when faced with political difficulty at home, he tends to train his incendiary rhetoric on Turkey’s friends, near and far. For instance, he has likened Israel to Nazi