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A global competition is underway between democratic governments and autocratic governments. The great powers are increasingly choosing sides and identifying themselves with one camp or the other. This competition will become a dominant feature of the twenty-first-century world, with broad implications for the international system.
This is a first for Russia: We have a president-elect even while his predecessor continues to discharge his duties. Also new: President Vladimir Putin, unlike predecessor Boris Yeltsin, has no plans to fade into political obscurity.
On my way out of Moscow on the day when George Bush and Vladimir Putin met for the last time in Sochi, Russian blogs were alight with complaints about how Putin had lost big at the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest the day before. As I flew across the ocean a few hours later, I sat next to a well-placed Washington operative on his way back from Bucharest. "Bush lost big at the summit," he said."
The aftermath of recent financial crises, such as the U.S. housing slump and near-collapse of Bear Sterns, underscores the concentration of power among a select, insular group of global elites, unchecked by any international mechanism. An often unregulated “superclass” of 6,000 individuals governs not only business and finance, but politics, the arts, the non-profit world, and other sectors.
NATO's decision not to offer Georgia an immediate path to membership appears at first glance to be a blow to Washington. Although the NATO secretary-general announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members, Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, confidently predicted that nothing would change anytime soon.
Symposium on Nuclear Nonproliferation held at Rowan University on April 11, 2008. 
Event Video
David Rothkopf discusses his new book, Superclass, at a launch party at Carnegie Washington.
Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, appeared on the English-language Russia Today to discuss the state of affairs after the recent April NATO summit in Bucharest. Trenin laid out the various motivations behind the Bush administration's decision to push the issue of Georgian and Ukrainian membership and analyzed the recent dynamics of U.S.-Russian relations.
The next Russian administration, with Dmitry Medvedev as president and Vladimir Putin remaining at the helm as prime minister, may evolve into something different from Putin's current rule. But the expectations of liberalization that Medvedev's rhetoric and non-KGB background might have raised in some circles are wishful thinking.
With Dmitry Medvedev's triumph in the presidential election grabbing the spotlight, elections for regional leaders went almost entirely unnoticed, despite the fact that elections were held simultaneously for legislative assemblies in 11 regions and a large number of municipalities and mayors as well.
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