"As the future ripens in the past,/so the past rots in the future -/a terrible festival of dead leaves." – Anna Akhmatova
History and anniversaries, of world wars' first shots and of the Cold War's closing act, weighed in on us last year – spirits of the past stalked the globe. One of those old ghosts, still living, but definitely a man of another age, Mikhail Gorbachev, spoke at an event close to the Brandenburg Gate marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He warned that tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have put the world on the brink of a new Cold War. The 83-year-old former leader of the Soviet Union accused the West, particularly the US, of a dangerous "triumphalism". In Washington and Moscow the rhetoric of the Cold War has certainly returned, with President Vladimir Putin fulminating against threatening, provocative western encirclement, while conservative US circles describe Putin as little less than the reincarnation of Stalin.
But if history is repeating itself as the year turns, it is a pale shadow of those days – no confrontation of Cold War equals. Russia’s adventures in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, like its occupation of Georgia in 2008, and daily pinprick provocations against the Baltic states or Moldova, are hardly clashing tectonic plates of continental empires. On the contrary, Putin’s ambitions, fuel for the nationalist rhetoric that distracts so well at home, seem largely confined to holding on to small chunks of a fading former empire. And Russia’s integration now into the world economy, not least its heavy dependence on oil and gas exports, has demonstrated a vulnerability, that at year-end saw the rouble tumbling and real questions being asked about how long into 2015 Putin can survive.
Isis redraws the map
In the Middle East the emergence of the Islamic State in
Iraq
and the Levant, a brutal genetic variation on al- Qaeda, saw a dramatic extension of Syria’s civil war to northern Iraq and the reengagement of the US and allies in an air campaign to relieve pressure on the vulnerable new Iraqi government. Genocidal attacks by Islamic State on the minority Yazidi community, reports of widespread executions in the roughly one-third of Iraq now under the group’s control, increased evidence of its international reach and fears of the effects in western societies of returning jihadists, have galvanised a new regional dynamic which has seen a slow military pushing back of Islamic State. And with it an unspoken acceptance that the stalemate in Syria’s war, which has to date cost over 200,000 dead, is unlikely to be broken and that President Bashar al Assad is now becoming an implicit ally in the war against Isis.
In Israel a general election looms in March. Communal tension has been rising following both last summer's assault and war on Gaza in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died, and bitter feuding over access to Jerusalem's holiest site. International frustration at Israel's continued illegal settlement of the West Bank has seen growing support for recognition of Palestinian statehood. Emboldened, the latter has applied to join the International Criminal Court. That would allow the court to take jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestinian lands and investigate the conduct of Israeli and Palestinian leaders over decades. The move has enraged Israel and its ally the US who are threatenining to increase sanctions against Palestine. Hopes, albeit faint, for any resumption of talks with the Palestinians now rest on the election in which there is a real prospect of conservative Binyamin Netanyahu being displaced. Probably for economic reasons.
Tensions in the Pacific
The comfortable re-election of Japan’s PM
Shinzo Abe
may allow him to complete his package of economic reforms and boost the economy. But his determination to allow
Japan
to shake off military neutrality and rearm will do little to calm rising tensions in the Pacific where neighbours, not least China, are engaged in brinkmanship over disputed islands. The ranks of the region’s like-minded conservative nationalists have also been swelled by the election of Narendra Modi in India and China’s Xi Jinping has been drinking at the same nationalist well.
Meanwhile, closer to home, seriously shaken by the Scottish independence referendum and by the apparently iirresistible rise of the Ukip, UK politics lurches towards the May general election. With voters north of the border determined to make Labour pay for its referendum stance, and those in the south deeply divided at least three ways, though Labour is still marginally ahead in the polls, nobody can predict who will be able to assemble a stable governing coalition. Feelers are even going out from the Tories to the DUP. There is a huge amount at stake – there are real fears across the EU that the Tories have pushed the UK inexorably on to a “Brexit” path from which no retreat will now be possible.