The Kremlin's support of Bashar al-Assad's regime appears to be working for now, but protecting unpopular autocrats hardly seems a sustainable long-term strategy.

The expansion of Pakistani-Russian ties to include a significant arms relationship appears to depend on a deterioration in the Russian-Indian relationship that Moscow will not initiate and desperately wants to avoid.

Russian foreign policy-makers seem convinced that playing both sides against the middle with other nations is a clever way to advance Moscow's interests. It may take many more foreign policy setbacks before they are persuaded otherwise.

Moscow's balancing act between Washington and Baghdad [has] failed, and its balancing act between Washington and Tehran is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. … [A] reluctance to establish clear priorities among competing interests threatens to undermine both its relations with the United States and its influence in a region of continuing strategic importance to Russia.

It is the tribal view that the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’—more so than common religious and ideological affinities or hostility toward the West—that motivates certain Yemeni tribes to cooperate with Al Qaeda. … Al Qaeda is merely the most recent in a string of ‘friends’ who have supported these tribes against the government.

Although the same ‘root causes’ that helped previous transnational revolutionary leaders have also aided Osama bin Laden, he also faces the same obstructing factors they did, and thus his grandiose revolutionary ambitions are failing too.