Epstein Secrets

o western Europe and North America. It is worth noting that in an arc of Middle East nations from Turkey, through Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Jordan to Tunisia — and including the Palestinian territories — unfavourable views of Russia predominate and are growing. None of this matters much to Mr Putin, who i

eakened and disorganized Russia watched first as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and then as the Soviet Union itself did. In both regions, especially Central Europe, the Kremlin might have responded with military force as it had before, possibly even with tactical nuclear weapons, but happily clearer heads prev

ragua are simply power-hungry, Islamists are illiberal by ideological design. Even the most moderate among them, Rachid Ghannouchi, the founder of Tunisia's Nanda party, has written, according to Mr. Hamid, that Islamic governance "is the dividing line between faith and disbelief." I don't think this

would be a smaller and more poorly situated power than the Soviet Union. Germany remains united, Poland is free, and Russia cannot hope to dominate Central Europe as the USSR once did. European fecklessness dragged the Clinton administration kicking and screaming into the morass of the bloody wars of the Yugo

lavia and Belarus or, at best, Ukraine. We, and they, may get lucky, and the revolutions in the Arab world may lead to something that looks more like Central Europe than like Central Asia. That would be a nice surprise, but we should not be placing large bets that this will actually happen. China, by the way, doe

already are doing a lot. We've got organizations like the National Democratic Institute, or the International Republican Institute, that are all over Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, and other places, trying to help them organize political parties, trade unions, civil-society organizations, that hopefully will