During his sojourn in Paris last Friday and Saturday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his entourage of Russian economics ministers and business executives signed a number of important commercial agreements with their French counterparts. These two-dozen deals will result in increased French involvement in various Russian energy and automobile enterprises, in return for sizable injections of French financing and technology into these sectors. “We are on the way to achieving this goal to transform our good, high-level political relations in the sphere of the real economy,” Putin joyfully told journalists. “I think it is a real breakthrough in the [...]
“Rebalancing” has been the watchword of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy to date: rebalancing the global economy between East and West, rebalancing domestic needs and foreign responsibilities, and — soon enough — rebalancing the international security burden among the world’s great powers. One number explains why that last rebalancing is necessary: It costs the United States $1 million a year to keep a soldier inside a theater of operations such as Afghanistan. The math is easy enough: For every thousand troops, the price comes out to $1 billion a year. So when the president announces, as he’s expected to do [...]
In May, I raised concerns that the “first steps” taken by President Barack Obama had given the administration some “breathing room” in terms of deliverables. No one expected back then that Washington would be moving on key initiatives. It was understood that the new team needed to get settled: The first hundred days is not a good time for breakthroughs. But six months later, it still doesn’t seem like a good time for them. At the Guadalajara summit in August, any effort to move forward on a series of important issues dealing with North America — trade, energy security, coping [...]
