Oriental Review

We Want War, And We Want It Now

With friends like these … It all had to do with that Friends of Syria (fools for war?) meeting in Istanbul. Picture Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal – who seems to have a knack for sending US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into rapture – feverishly arguing that the House of Saud, those paragons of [...]

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Is BRICS Challenging the West?

The fourth BRICS summit representing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was held on March 28-29, 2012 in New Delhi. Despite the limited timeline, its results might be defined as outstanding. In any case it’s obvious that the leaders of the member countries had no intention to confine themselves to purely symbolic resolutions, so [...]

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BRICS: Going Strong to Change the World Scene

On 28-29 March 2012 a BRICS summit was held in Indian capital New Delhi. The theme was “BRICS Partnership for Stability, Security and Growth”. This was the fourth BRICS summit that brought together the leaders of the emerging economic powers to discuss a host of global issues. The event took place against the backdrop of [...]

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Why Putin Is Driving Washington Nuts

Forget the past (Saddam, Osama, Gaddafi) and the present (Assad, Ahmadinejad). A bet can be made over a bottle of Petrus 1989 (the problem is waiting the next six years to collect); for the foreseeable future, Washington’s top bogeyman – and also for its rogue North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners and assorted media shills – [...]

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The BRICs and the Construction of the Multipolar System

Ten years ago, the acronym BRIC entered the lexicon of international economics and finance. Since then, cooperation among the emerging countries contained in that acronym has taken on an increasingly marked geo-economic and geopolitical record. The consolidation of relations among Brazil, Russia, India, China and, since 2010, South Africa has been possible not only because [...]

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BRICS Flame Continues To Shine

Just as the fizz seems to be going out of the BRICS grouping, the member countries have scrambled to put their act together. Apropos the crisis in Syria, which is arguably, the “hottest” issue in international politics today, the BRICS showed up worrying signs of an identity crisis of its own. Russia and China vetoed [...]

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Russia and the Changing World

ORIENTAL REVIEW republishes the latest article by Vladimir Putin, Russian PM and front-runner of the presidential campaign due to culminate next Sunday, March 4, 2012. The article focuses on different aspects of the Russian foreign policy. In my previous articles I have discussed some of the key foreign challenges that Russia now faces. This subject [...]

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Looking For Ways to Make Anti-Syrian Aggression ‘Legal’

The recent weeks events in Syria give rise to new apprehensions. Thanks to Russia’s efforts the situation in Syria was not formally included into the agenda of the UN Security Council session that took place on January 24, so the issue was considered indirectly. The official agenda was “The situation in the Middle East”. Oscar [...]

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Why Washington is opposed to Vladimir Putin election as Russian President

There seems to be no limit to Washington’s idiocy in international relations, when clearly as a premier economic power US is declining fast and like a seriously diseased patient, on drip, just about surviving. Yes, it spends over $ 700 billion on defense at the behest of military and energy combine underpinned by corrupt financiers [...]

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BRICS’ Rising Profile

The 3-4 November 2011 G-20 summit at Cannes that grappled with various raging issues governing the world economy particularly the Euro zone crisis also brought into focus the rising profile of BRICS as a major player towards resolving global issues including the financial crisis. As rightly pointed out by Russia’s top economic advisor Arkady Dvorkovich [...]

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Russia’s Role in East Asia

To begin with, I need to briefly describe a new problem that Russia encountered in the first decade of the 21st century and which promises to become central to its foreign trade and foreign policy. Western civilization has lost its former economic and military might in recent years. First of all, as Samuel P Huntington [...]

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Can BRICS Soften Dollar Crisis?

On April 10, in an interview with a CNN host and political observer Fareed Zakaria, the former secretary of state James Baker, when he was speaking about the current global changes, said the following: “The biggest challenge facing the U.S. isn’t turmoil in the Arab world. It’s our debt bomb”. He said that without a [...]

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