Category: Politics

{Foreign minister says Russia and US could start discussions on ‘fighting terrorism’ in Syria at summit in Kazakhstan.}

Sergey Lavrov has said Russia is inviting representatives of the incoming US administration to attend upcoming Syria talks in Kazakhstan’s capital.

Speaking on Tuesday in Moscow, the Russian foreign minister praised what he called Donald Trump’s focus on combating “terrorism”.

“By concentrating on a pragmatic search for mutual interests we can solve a lot of problems,” he said.

He voiced hope that Russian and US experts could start discussions on “fighting terrorism” in Syria in Astana when Syrian government and opposition representatives meet there for talks on Monday.

He said: “We hope that the new administration will be able to accept that proposal,” adding that the talks in Astana will offer “the first opportunity to discuss a more efficient fight against terrorism in Syria”.

Lavrov said Russia expects that cooperation on settling the Syrian crisis will be more productive than it was with the administration of President Barack Obama.

“What we hear from Donald Trump [on Syria] and his team speaks to how they have a different approach [to Obama] and won’t resort to double standards,” he said.

Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from Washington DC, said Russia seemed to be trying to “lock in what it sees are military gains that it and the Assad regime have made in the recent months.

“Astana talks is where Russia believes it has influence. Russia will be controlling the process.

“It hopes to turn the diplomatic situation in a peace deal in the same way as it managed to turn the military situation to Russia’s advantage”.

Nuclear weapons

With regard to the interview Trump has given to The Times of London, Lavrov questioned whether the US president-elect had really suggested he would be ready to drop US sanctions on Russia in exchange for nuclear arms cuts.

He said his own reading of the interview did not suggest any linkage between the two issues.

But he said Russia wanted to start talks with the US on nuclear weapons and on the balance of military power between the two former Cold War foes anyway.

“It’s one of key themes between Russia and the United States. I am convinced we will be able to restart a dialogue on strategic stability with Washington that was destroyed along with everything else by the Obama administration.”

Such talks could cover hypersonic weapons, the US anti-missile shield in Europe, space weapons, and what he said was the US refusal to ratify a ban on nuclear testing.

Trump has called for a nuclear weapons build-up.

Some commentators have said Senate hearings for some of Trump’s picks show they will be tough on Russia.

However, Lavrov said he had been encouraged by Rex Tillerson, the incoming secretary of state, whom he cited as saying Russia’s behaviour was not unpredictable.

“[That] means that we are dealing with people who won’t get involved in moralising, but will try to understand their partner’s interests,” Lavrov said.

Tillerson had extensive dealings with Russia when he was the head of Exxon Mobil oil company.

{As Barack Obama prepares to leave office on January 20, here are 10 things his presidency may be remembered for:}

{{Making history }}

If historians were to write only one thing about Barack Hussein Obama, they would likely note that – 143 years after slavery was abolished – a young Illinois senator became the first black president of the United States.

Obama, just 47 at his 2009 inauguration, harnessed magisterial oratory to rally a diverse electoral coalition behind a message of “hope and change.”

In office, Obama however sometimes struggled to turn his poetry into the prose of governance.

{{Too big deal }}

Obama’s first term in office was dominated by economic free fall.

A real estate crisis spawned a financial meltdown that torpedoed Wall Street banks and lenders, and was metastasizing into an economic crisis of global proportions.

Outgoing president George W. Bush and the Federal Reserve had kicked off the government’s first panicked efforts at containment, but Obama faced down ideological opposition to large fiscal stimulus, extending government spending by $831 billion and providing ballast to the economy.

As he leaves office, the political and social aftershocks of that financial cataclysm are still being felt, but the economy has added jobs for 75 straight months.

{{Justice has been done}}

“Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.”

With those words on May 2, 2011, Obama exorcised the anger and frustration of millions of Americans — that the most powerful country on earth could not hold the man accountable for the 9/11 attacks.

The risky Special Forces operation was also illustrative of Obama’s controversial drone-and-raid approach to counterterrorism. As he leaves office, Al-Qaeda offshoots and affiliates remain potent, but their leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been decimated.

{{Legislative toil }}

“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancour and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” Obama said in his final State of the Union address.

From the moment Obama was elected, Republicans in Congress vowed to oppose him tooth and nail.

Efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and enact gun controls — even after the 2012 massacre of young students in Newtown, the emotional nadir of his presidency — would fall victim to partisan rancour.

{{A deal with a half-life }}

For more than two decades, the United States had rolled out sanctions and covert actions to prevent arch-foe Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Obama tried a different tack, engaging in secret talks with the Islamic Republic.

That gambit ultimately yielded a deal that saw Iran halt its sprint toward a nuclear weapon, in return for substantial sanctions relief and a dollop of international legitimacy.

The pact would strain US relations with Iran’s enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia, but prevented a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and defused tensions between Iran and the United States that have simmered since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

{{No turnabout on Syria
}}

No international crisis tested Obama’s foreign policy or his high bar for US military intervention like Syria.

Even when Bashar al-Assad defied Obama’s red line on chemical weapons use and killed countless thousands of civilians — along with Russian and Iranian forces — the man who came to office on an anti-war ticket rejected calls to step in.

Syria will likely be in crisis for years to come.

Critics will long argue about whether Obama’s policy was sensible and to what degree his decision damaged America’s reputation, allowed the Islamic State group to grow, fuelled a flow of migrants that destabilized Europe, and allowed Russia and Iran to extend influence in the region.

{{Change the climate }}

After the climate skepticism of Bush, Obama’s eight years in office resulted in a tidal wave of environmental legislation, protecting marine ecosystems, curbing carbon emissions and boosting renewable energy.

In a bid to ingrain environmentalism into America’s body politic, Obama hiked Alaskan glaciers, snorkelled at Midway Island and rushed through ratification of the Paris climate accord.

But Obama’s environmental agenda is likely to come under sustained assault from his successor, putting the durability of that legacy into question.

{{A very big deal }}

Democrats had tried and failed for decades to provide Americans with universal health care. Obama wasn’t quite able to do that but he extended insurance coverage to tens of millions of citizens who previously had none.

Republicans decried the “Obamacare” plan as socialism incarnate, at one point claiming it would even create “death panels.” But they failed to stop it from passing. They may yet have a crack at repealing it under Donald Trump’s watch.

{{Racial tensions persist }}

Many hoped that America’s first black president would help the nation overcome racial inequality. But the man elected with the overwhelming support of the nation’s minority voters of all colours disappointed many.

Racial tensions — underscored by police shootings of unarmed black men and conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace — persisted, and the president remained cautious about weighing in on the issue — too cautious, for some.

But the very fact of his election confirmed monumental changes in society, and he sometimes offered very personal, searing messages about the struggle of blacks in America.

In 2012, after the fatal shooting of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin in Florida, Obama said: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

{{Meet the neighbours }}

Obama’s trip to Cuba may be remembered in the same way as Richard Nixon’s visit to China, but in truth it was the capstone of a much broader effort to improve US relations with Latin America.

Resurgent left-wing populists in the region had rekindled past memories of “yanqui imperialism” — US-led coups, death squads and heavy-handed intervention.

Barely 100 days after Obama took office, he told regional leaders at a Summit of the Americas that the United States had changed. The approach was to deny leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez any excuses for sideshow anti-Americanism.

He shook Chavez’s hand, met Nicaraguan firebrand Daniel Ortega and visited the tomb of a popular Salvadoran priest killed by US-linked death squads.

Obama alluded to “mistakes” in a coup that installed dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile, released documents about involvement in Argentina’s dirty war and, of course, visited Havana.

{Early election to be be held on March 2 following the collapse of the region’s power-sharing government.}

Northern Ireland will hold a snap vote on March 2 to elect a new assembly following the collapse of the region’s power-sharing government, Britain has announced.

The elections were triggered as a Monday deadline passed for Catholic socialists, Sinn Fein, who refused to fill their top post in the two-party government, denouncing their Democratic Unionist partners as corrupt and bigoted.

James Brokenshire, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said he had no power to compel the opposite sides in Northern Ireland’s nearly decade-old government coalition to keep working together as the territory’s 1998 peace accord intended.

“No one should underestimate the challenge faced to the political institutions here in Northern Ireland and what is at stake,” said Brokenshire.

He said the assembly would dissolve on January 26 and urged its feuding parties to mend fences.

“We need to ensure that this election is conducted in such a way that does not divide … that seeks to bring people back together,” he said.

“We are obviously concerned about the impact of a divisive election campaign.”

{{Sour relations}}

Northern Ireland’s power-sharing executive and assembly were formed after a 1998 peace deal that ended three decades of violence between pro-British unionists and Irish nationalists who wanted to join the Republic of Ireland and allowed border checkpoints to be dismantled.

In 2007, a government led jointly by the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein came to power and, until recently, had governed the region with few blow-ups.

The political crisis began when Martin McGuinness, a veteran Sinn Fein politician, resigned as deputy first minister last week over his power-sharing partner’s handling of a controversial energy scheme that could cost the province hundreds of millions of pounds.

Al Jazeera’s Neave Barker, reporting from Belfast, said the British government had no choice but to call the early elections.

“Under the protocol of the power-sharing agreement when one of the two leaders of the coalition resigns, the other one automatically has to go also,” he said.

He also said the reason of the dispute seemed to be deeper than the disagreement over the energy scheme.

“Over the last few months, the relationship between the rival leaders has really soured,” he said. “This seems to be more about the way they have felt about working together.”

The political crisis is overshadowing the bigger issue the province is facing following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, Barker said.

Northern Ireland is widely seen as the part of the UK most exposed to Brexit as it could upend trade and the free movement of people across its land border with the Irish Republic

Overall, 52 percent of the UK voted in favour of leaving the EU in June’s referendum, but 56 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland backed remaining.

Theresa May, British prime minister, has said she plans to launch the EU exit procedure by the end of March.

{Incoming US president says weapons should be reduced, weeks after joining Putin in call for nuclear expansion.}

Donald Trump, the US president-elect, has told a British newspaper that he will offer to end sanctions against Russia in return for a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Kremlin.

In an interview with The Times of London published late on Monday, Trump said he wanted nuclear weapons arsenals of the world’s two biggest nuclear powers – the United States and Russia – to be “reduced very substantially”.

“They have sanctions on Russia – let’s see if we can make some good deals with Russia. For one thing, I think nuclear weapons should be way down and reduced very substantially, that’s part of it,” Trump was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

However, on December 22 Trump tweeted that the US must “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until the world comes to its senses regarding nukes”. Around the same time, Russian leader Vladimir Putin also called for the strengthening of “strategic nuclear forces”.

In Monday’s interview, Trump said that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance formed to counter the military power of the former USSR, has become obsolete.

NATO has not been “taking care of terror”, he said.

Trump also criticised Russia for its intervention in the Syrian war, describing it as “a very bad thing” that had led to a “terrible humanitarian situation”.

The interview was conducted by Michael Gove, a Conservative Party member and prominent Brexit campaigner who is known to be close to Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News.

In Moscow, members of parliament gave a mixed reaction to Trump’s statement on the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis.

Konstantin Kosachev, head of the upper house of parliament’s international affairs committee, was cited by the RIA Novosti news agency as saying getting the sanctions annulled was not a goal in itself and not worth making security concessions for.

But another Russian senator, Oleg Morozov, was quoted by the same agency as saying that Moscow would be ready to discuss the issue of nuclear cuts, something he said Russia itself favoured.

{{Russian connection}}

News of Trump’s plan came as the outgoing US intelligence chief said that Trump lacks a full understanding of the threat Moscow poses to the US.

CIA Director John Brennan’s message on national television came five days before Trump becomes the nation’s 45th president, amid lingering questions about Russia’s role in the 2016 election.

“Now that he’s going to have an opportunity to do something for our national security as opposed to talking and tweeting, he’s going to have tremendous responsibility to make sure that US and national security interests are protected,” Brennan said on Fox News, warning that the president-elect’s impulsiveness could be dangerous.

“Spontaneity is not something that protects national security interests,” Brennan said.

Questions about Trump’s relationship with Russia have dominated the days leading up to his inauguration.

Retired General Michael Flynn, who is set to become Trump’s national security adviser, has been in frequent contact with Russia’s ambassador to the US in recent weeks, including on the day the Obama administration hit Moscow with sanctions in retaliation for the alleged election hacking, a senior US official said.

After initially denying the contact took place, Trump’s team publicly acknowledged the conversations on Sunday.

“The conversations that took place at that time were not in any way related to the new US sanctions against Russia or the expulsion of diplomats,” said Mike Pence, the incoming vice president, also in an appearance on Fox News.

Contact as Obama imposed sanctions raised questions about whether Trump’s team discussed – or even helped shape – Russia’s response.

Russian President Vladimir Putin unexpectedly did not retaliate against the US for the sanctions or the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats, a decision Trump quickly praised.

“Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!” Trump tweeted.

Trump has repeatedly called for a better relationship between the US and Putin’s government.

“I think he has to be mindful that he does not have a full appreciation and understanding of what the implications are of going down that road,” Brennan said.