Federico Bordonaro

Vladimir Putin lancia messaggi contraddittori sull’Iran, adotta la linea dura sul Kosovo, fa capire che potrebbe creare problemi molto seri alla Georgia. Fino a che punto si tratta di tensioni momentanee, ancorché prolungate, e fino a che punto invece si è di fronte a una crisi pericolosa? Se lo chiede Frederick Kempe sul sito di Bloomberg:

In the past year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has morphed from a noisy irritant to the West who was reaching the end of his two-term limit to a swaggering antagonist who isn’t going away.

At least that’s the view of senior Bush administration officials, who increasingly see Russia as a rising strategic challenge.

They fear a serious and perhaps even dangerous showdown with Russia later this year over the independence of Kosovo as a breakaway Serbian province. It’s just one of several explosive brewing disagreements.

Putin’s threat to retaliate by then declaring the Georgian region of Abkhazia to be independent may sound esoteric. Yet one senior official talks about the ugly events that may well follow: an Abkhaz ethnic cleansing of Georgians in the region, a Georgian military move to protect its minority, followed by armed Russian intervention and then Western retaliation of some kind.

The best U.S. foreign policy minds don’t believe Putin wants that sort of open conflict with the West, but they worry that in his current mood he may get it by overreaching.

For the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants, place of birth remains the most powerful determinant of a lifetime’s experiences. Even in the modern era of mass migration and global interaction, place of birth is crucial. Our world remains a jigsaw of countries, a patchwork of religions, a Babel of languages and a mosaic of innumerable customs and traditions. One’s chances of surviving through infancy and childhood, and later one’s opportunities for advancement in a competitive world, are strongly influenced by one’s place of birth. And this means that geography — environmental, cultural, economic, and political — is destiny. To understand the geographic layout of our world is to comprehend the challenges of its diversity.

Harm De Blij

Intervista per NewsWeek:

Canberra has also vowed to join a multibillion-dollar U.S.-Japanese effort to construct a missile-defense shield. The plan calls for Japan to contribute valuable high-tech expertise and could see Australia offer its powerful ground-based radar, which can spot distant missile launches better than a sea-based system. The missile shield will ostensibly be dedicated to warding off attacks from North Korea. But many observers see it as a hedge against Beijing. Federico Bordonaro of the Rome-based think tank PINR argues, “The U.S. is going to need Australia’s support for checking an ambitious China in the region.”