The World Today

The conflicts and crises of the Middle East are now inter-linked, but not in the ways currently set out in the official British approach.

With the French presidential elections approaching, Sylvian Touati examines if a new generation of leaders could bring change to France’s influence in Africa and whether the recent shift towards multilateral action is a sign of things to come for the continent.

For most of the last six months politics in and around Serbia and Kosovo has consisted of everyone trying to second-guess what moves the other players would make next in a game of three- dimensional chess.

European leadership is either in transition or confusion, not a promising moment for Germany – which luckily escapes on both counts – to take over at the helm of the European Union and the G8 group of leading economies.

The stand-off between Russia and Georgia is nothing less than the worst relationship between Russia and any other former Soviet state – any state at all in fact – since the fall of Communism in 1991. A small cold war is heating up. And the heat matters because of Georgia’s tilt to the west and the implications for managing Moscow.

Its diplomatic boots bogged down in the Middle East, Darfur and North Korea, the international community lacks the agility to consider an obscure unresolved conflict in the Caucasus. But in the case of Nagorny Karabakh, greater effort now could save anguish later. A younger generation of Azerbaijanis is sounding aggressive and there is much to lose internationally from conflict in this key area.