Obama's Bold Game of Russian Roulette (UPI)

M.D. NALAPAT

With the same confidence that allowed the junior senator from Illinois to launch a campaign for the presidency of the United States, Barack Obama has decided to "reset" U.S.-Russian relations, banking on the forward-looking vision he shares with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev.

For the U.S. president this has been a high-risk operation, given the undercurrent of suspicion toward Russia within the U.S. strategic community as well as the citizenry. But the benefits are clear. The securing of transit rights through Russian territory and airspace for U.S. military materiel to Afghanistan, as agreed Monday, will reduce Washington's current dependence on Pakistan.

A further warming of ties also may encourage the Moscow-leaning former Afghan Northern Alliance groups to stop sulking and participate in the war against the Taliban. Leaving this struggle to the ethnic Pashtun groups alone would be a mistake that could cost Afghan President Hamid Karzai at least one-fifth -- if not one-third -- of his country. The Taliban has to be rooted out of both Pakistan and Afghanistan if the region is to have a chance at rapid social and economic development.

NATO's substantial outsourcing of Afghan strategy to the Pakistan army has resulted in the neglect of former elements of the Northern Alliance, despite the group's experience in fighting the Taliban. This should be rectified through reconciliation between the former anti-Taliban fighters and NATO, a process that the Obama-Medvedev initiative begun in Moscow on Monday could accelerate.

Russia Starts "Lukewarm War" with the West (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — The Soviet Union became a superpower during the rule of Josef Stalin, who terrorized those territories that he did not immediately annex. After the 1939-45 war, the USSR controlled Eastern Europe and challenged the primacy of the United States and its European partners across the world.

But since Stalin’s death in 1953, Moscow has almost always given way when confronted with a resolute Western response. Nikita Khruschev blinked hard in Cuba in 1962, with the United States agreeing only to avoid another invasion of Cuba -- a course that anyway had been shown to be folly a short while earlier -- in exchange for a humiliating withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the island.

Throughout the Cold War, although Moscow enjoyed considerable conventional military superiority in Europe, its forces never once strayed beyond the boundaries set in 1945. Had it done so, the history of Europe may have been different in that such tensions would almost certainly have affected the economic environment negatively.

As it turned out, it was the USSR that imploded economically, drained both by a dysfunctional central-command system as well as by military spending that would have been justified only if the armaments so expensively procured were put to use to secure geopolitical gains.

The Afghan war most exposed the strategic cowardice of the Soviet leadership. At any stage in the decade-long conflict, an attack on Pakistan would have resulted in the immediate drying up of the flow of supplies from across the border to the mujahideen. It is unlikely that the United States and other NATO partners would have risked a flare-up of Warsaw Pact-NATO tensions in Europe by seeking to protect Pakistan from a Soviet assault. Peshawar and other centers of Afghan resistance would have been pulverized by Soviet bombing, and international jihad -- which today has morphed into a severe threat to international security -- would have lost its Afghan-Pakistani sanctuary.

U.S. Tilt Cools India-Iran Ties (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Tehran, Iran — While Sonia Gandhi prefers the European Union, Manmohan Singh's favorite country is the United States. Both as India's finance minister from 1992-96 and from 2004 onwards as prime minister, Singh has been open in his belief that a Washington-set agenda is in his country's best interest.

Sadly for him, few share this view, with the result that his efforts at implementing the Bush team's prescriptions for India have stalled on opposition within Parliament, even though Sonia Gandhi has managed thus far to silence dissent within Singh's own Congress Party, and has backed the prime minister in his U.S.-centered policies.

Largely as a result of the perception that he is following Tony Blair in the role of White House poodle, several countries otherwise friendly to India have distanced themselves from the Sonia-led regime now precariously in office. Russia made Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee undergo the indignity of a body search at Moscow airport recently, while Vladimir Putin declined to find the time to meet with visiting Indian Defense Minister A. K. Antony.

Moscow's mood has not been improved by Manmohan Singh's second rebuff of Russia's efforts to sign a nuclear deal with India that would enable the country to import four more nuclear reactors from Moscow. The move would cut into the potential profits being factored in by U.S. corporations eager to enter the Indian nuclear energy sector on advantageous terms.

India and Russia: With China or the U.S.? (UPI)

M.D Nalapat

MANIPIL, India, June 15 (UPI) -- Under Russian President Vladimir Putin ties between India and Russia have recovered the closeness that was a geo-political given until the Yeltsin years. Before, the Mafia ruled in Moscow and external interests manipulated the two countries into compromising national interests for protection abroad.

Today, India's best friend has recovered from the chaos of those years and is on track to restoring its superpower status and responsibilities. New Delhi and Moscow come as a package. An alliance with the one implies an accommodation with the other.

While the United States is a bi-continental -- in fact, quadric-continental -- power thanks to its superb cultural amalgam of Europe and Asia, Russia is equally so because of geography.

Unfortunately, thus far, the hidden opposition of France and Germany -- eager to retain their shared domination over Europe, a control that would dissolve in the event of Russia's entry -- has prevented Moscow from being offered terms for integration into European structures that are commensurate with its potential.