The media is rightly focused on Iran and Syria lately, but something brewing in southern Africa merits our attention, specifically the Obama administration's attention. Zimbabwe slips further into the abyss as President (for life) Robert Mugabe keeps winning at the game of dictatorship. Two news items stand out: the dictator announced he's running for president again, and opposition leader-cum-Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has gone over to the dark side.

Mugabe has been in power for over thirty years and all he has to show for it are grinding poverty and a deplorable human rights record. But it gets worse. His announcement comes amidst reports that his party, ZANU-PF, is not happy that he is running again. It is not yet clear why they are unhappy, but we can speculate. Though the party elite is privileged and comfortable -- benefitting also from the seizure of white-owned lands among other forms of corruption, injustice and economic mismanagement -- it realizes that perpetual dictators are not faring very well these days and their international allies are growing weary of supporting them. Watching the solidarity among Arab authoritarians breakdown must give them pause. Besides, the young dictators-in-waiting might simply be tired of waiting on the old man to retire. Mugabe arrogantly notes "Our members of the party will certainly select someone once I say I am now retiring, but not yet." He has more to do he says, such as continuing to defend independence (who threatens it? The British whose aid programs help keep him comfortable? -- see below) and furthering "black empowerment." With his dismal economic record, that last part as a campaign slogan adds insult to injury.

But it gets even worse. That other news item is a commentary in The Daily Telegraph that asks "Is the U.K. aiding corruption in Zimbabwe?" The piece notes that the British Department for International Development (DFID) is providing tens of millions of pounds for schools and health care while the Zimbabwean government spends nothing on capital outlays for schools and little for health care. So far, no story here. But the piece goes on to note that what the Mugabe regime is spending money on by the tens of millions is international travel and luxury living for the president and his regime -- including the opposition leader whom Mugabe allowed to share power with him three years ago after disputed elections and much violence. The Daily Telegraph is asking why the British government is enabling the dictatorship and its now compromised opposition leader to spend lavishly on itself for parties and palaces while the British taxpayer picks up the bill for the needs of the desperately poor and deprived Zimbabwean citizens. Good question.

Aid programs have been fraught with such waste and enabling for years, but in this day and age to help a dictator stay in power and aid in the debauching of a once-heroic opposition leader like Tsvangirai, is unacceptable.

So now we have Mugabe undaunted and running again, aided in his quest by British aid; the corruption of the opposition leader; and quite possibly the beginning of the internal breakdown of the authoritarian regime that could sow chaos if the young decide to dethrone the old and there's no opposition with integrity to pick up the pieces.

Now is the time for the US and the EU to pay attention and speak out against this turn of events and to encourage the UK to rethink its aid policy in Zimbabwe.

How to explain the Russian and Chinese vetoes of the U.N. resolution condemning the Syrian government's continuing killing spree against its own people? What strategic interest or moral imperative dominates their thinking?

Officially, Russia and China claim to be preventing the international community from doing another Libya; they are insisting on patience and "balance." The U.S., UK, France, the rest of the Security Council and pretty much the rest of the world, including the Arab League, beg to differ. Those speaking out the most forcefully don't buy what they consider excuse making for a bloody dictator.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice finds no ethical stance that can justify it, calling the vetoes "disgusting" and "shameful" and warning that the blame for the future deaths of Syrian civilians is on Russia and China. Amb. Rice does not comment on what strategic interests the vetoing states might be pursuing, though we can certainly speculate.

For Russia, Syria's dictatorship is its last client left standing in the Middle East, both political and economic since Syria provides a warm seaport and buys Russian weaponry. To watch it fall means ceding the field largely to the U.S. and the EU, and losing revenue. The stakes are indeed high for Russia. For China, the best explanation is inertia; China defines its national interest -- apart from its freedom to engage in commerce wherever it can -- according to the principle of non-intervention. Its reaction to the Syria situation is like its reaction to every other such situation: everyone should mind his own business, we like things as they are. (That China seems to contradict itself when it comes to Filipino, Vietnamese, or Japanese territorial interests requires a little semantic gymnastics.)

But let's look at this matter from thirty thousand feet. This latest turn in the Syrian tragedy reminds one of Talleyrand's famous comment applied to Napoleon's judicial murder of a noble: "[I]t was worse than a crime, it was a mistake." That is, the stance the Russians and the Chinese are taking hinders them from attaining the very goal they seek: to be seen as legitimate world leaders on par with the U.S. and the EU. When the West and the Arab League are on the same page, and most of the second and third ranking powers and beyond are with them, any state taking Bashar al-Assad's side is hard-pressed to stake a claim for world leadership. Syria's blatant violation of the norms of the U.N. Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights is patently obvious, as was the late Muammar Qaddafi's. For Russia and China to fail to recognize that and join the rest of the world in condemning it and seeking an end to these violations is in some ways worse: We expect tyrants like al-Assad to do what he is doing, but since the democracy revolutions and the Arab Spring, we rightly expect a different reaction from members of the Security Council entrusted with the only international organizational authority to do something about it.

No one expects Russia to lightly watch an ally go down, or for China to acquiesce in what it considers the violation of the most important international relations principle. Neither country wants to see further precedents being set of the average citizen rising up to challenge the established power. But I'd use their own words against them, the words they used in announcing their veto regarding the need in the resolution for "balance." There was a certain logic to calls for "balance" during the Cold War no matter how clanging it sounded. Much of international relations was a zero-sum game. But the Cold War is over. The publics of the Middle East are all in various stages of uprising and rebellion against centuries of tyranny, and they are aided by technology and social media in a way that means they will not be deterred short of death. That is a fact. Therefore, to oppose them and call for "balance" or "restraint" is to side with those who would without compunction kill as many of their citizens as they have to in order to stay in power; we're talking genocide now as a matter of course and endless instability. The democracy genie is out of the bottle.

So now the logic of "balance" is moot; urging acceptance of the democracy-crushing status quo is a spent force. International prestige and legitimate claims to world leadership now rest on those who accept that history has indeed ended in this sense: People want the dignity of self-government and they have the technological means to perpetually bring once unshakeable dictators to the nightmare scenario. Would-be world leaders should choose the right side now. After all, both ethics and logic point the way clearly now. That's the real "reset" that is needed, and it is good to see the Obama administration's diplomats at the UN representing it.

The numbers are still lopsided: tens of thousands of riot police  against hundreds of opposition protestors. The latter are organizing via social networks and plan a demonstration in the thousands on Saturday across Russia. Vladimir Putin faces demonstrations increasing in determination and anger as international criticism mounts. What set it off is the disputed Russian Duma elections in which Putin's United Russia party claims to have barely won a majority.

That such protests even exist and are growing is an encouraging sign for Russia democracy watchers. The shattering of the myth of "stable" authoritarianism has come to Putin's new czarist state.

Many of us had all but given up hope that Russian democrats were bold enough and of sufficient numbers to attempt to reclaim freedom . Now we have media reports abounding and with pictures and video of Russians chanting "Russia without Putin" and other anti-regime and pro-democracy slogans.

Having jailed as much of the opposition as he thought necessary as well as controlling the media and the electoral machinery, Putin seemed to assume over the last couple of years that his plan to let his hand-picked President Medvedev spell him for a term in the Kremlin while Putin served as prime minister was succeeding. He even counted on wowing Russians with shirtless horse-rides and exotic hunts for dangerous animals. What he seems not to have counted on is that it is hard to kill a democracy movement so easily in a country connected to the internet, Facebook, and Twitter, and one with large numbers of citizens regularly interacting with the West. He seems not to have calculated that there would be an Arab Spring and his democratic countrymen would take courage from it. I confess to having been rather doubtful myself that there could be a second Russian democratic awakening.

But in the last several weeks, as Putin was getting less and less affirmation from Russians for the figure he was trying to cut on the stage of Russian politics -- he was booed vigorously at a recent martial arts expo -- it became clear that Russians care more about the sad decline of the economy that United Russia has presided over than his theatrics. They care more about justice and rights and good governance than the stability Putin promised (threatened?) through the "managed democracy" he said they preferred. They have this in common with a lot of people in the world, from Caracas to Tehran, from Cairo to Lusaka.

Witness Putin's being able to barely take 50 percent of the seats in the Duma and that was probably accomplished with a good dose of electoral fraud. It must be particularly irritating for Putin to have both Secretary of State Clinton and Gorbachev teaming up on him. She has called for a full investigation of the electoral fraud charges; Gorbachev is increasing his denunciations of Putin's tenure and calling for new elections. Putin has reacted by blaming the U.S. for inciting the protests. While Putin will very likely stay in control because there are enough parties for sale in the Duma to make a substantial majority, nevertheless, the bloom is off the rose.

Liberal Russians are reinvigorated and taking to the streets. They are now facing off against all those who have been bought off by the United Russia machine-not just the government through its interior ministry and police forces, but also all those whose material well-being is afforded by allying themselves with the regime; Putin's cadres are out in the streets to show support for the regime.

We cannot yet know how this will turn out: will brute force once again cow the demonstrators? Will this unrest lead to an investigation and admission of fraud? Or, might it possibly lead to his own failure to win the presidential election next year, or at least his having to steal it in such a way that it cannot be plausibly hidden?

There is precedent: the Soviet police state apparatus failed to uphold the Communist Party's interests in 1990-1991, leading to the downfall of Gorbachev and the rise of a more liberal if chaotic order under Yeltsin. It is too soon to know if such a thing could happen again, but given how many of the corrupt and authoritarian regimes the world over have fallen or are tottering today, Putin is likely to take no chances. We should expect prolonged disorder and violence if the protestors are determined for the long haul this time.

What should U.S. policy be? First, let's be done with "reset" policies and take a lesson: pretending that authoritarians are democrats is not only a waste of time, it is to be on the wrong side of history. The Obama administration should see the regime for what it is and treat it and the Russian citizenry as what they are: a corrupt dictatorship hanging on to power by force and fraud leveled against a people who demand to be treated as citizens, not slaves. Who knows how numerous the opposition is, but the elections reveal it is no longer a handful of people.

Irving Kristol wrote over twenty years ago at the dawn of the new Russia that while the Russian people might never clamor for a full U.S.-style democracy, now that they have the vote, they will demand that it and the rule of law be respected.

We should be on their side, the right side of history, and help move history by encouraging the good guys and supporting them in material ways as we have before in our long history of being the last best hope of freedom for mankind.

We don't often have reason to celebrate political developments in Africa, but Michael "King Cobra" Sata's Sept. 23 victory in the recent Zambian presidential elections is a reason, indeed. The 74-year-old tough-talking opposition leader has managed to score a victory for democracy in Zambia and against Chinese neocolonialism.

Credit is due to the recent incumbent, Rupiah Banda of the Movement for Multi-party Democracy, who gave up power peacefully after a clear defeat to Sata and the Patriotic Front Party. In the aftermath of the election, both men appear determined that the peaceful change of power be accepted as normal with both retribution and sour grapes being set aside.

But a larger and more interesting issue is the fulfillment in Zambia, and in the person of the new president, of the idea that Africa should not become prey to a new colonial power, that of the Chinese. China-watchers have been observing for about a decade now the growing influence of China as it buys friends in the developing world among the producers of raw materials to feed the growing Chinese economy. A combination of Chinese party, government, military and preferred businesses have been extracting and importing raw materials -- in the case of Zambia, copper -- by means of cheap labor and sometimes abusive labor practices and with the complicity of the host country's government.

Sata was transparent about his plans and tough in his talk regarding the Chinese during his campaign for office. He called the Chinese investors "infestors" and vowed that if elected he would put an end to the flouting of labor and tax laws and other abuses, abuses that cannot happen if the government is determined to stop them. In other words, through corruption and neglect, many African governments allow foreign interests to treat their countries as easily commandeered cheap resource pools. Sata was so insistent that the Chinese threatened, in an obvious attempt to sway the election, to divest in Zambia should the people elect Sata. The people were undaunted, Sata is now elected, and there is no sign that the Chinese will make good on their threat. They can hardly afford to do so given that Zambia is the continent's largest copper exporter.

Sata has no intention of closing Zambia for business; rather, he simply is requiring that his country's labor laws and safety regulations be respected by both foreign firms as well as the government itself. He has embarked without delay on his promised 90 days of reform, sacking people and reforming the government. He sounds like he'd perform well in the current GOP debates: not only is he announcing plans to battle corruption -- that is a given for a newly elected leader in a developing country -- but he is also announcing his intention to slash the size of government. Further, he intends to review all mining contracts with the Chinese to ensure they are in the interests of Zambians and to make sure that the wealth of Zambia is shared with the nation as a whole through fair contracts, fair wages, and a distribution of wealth not encumbered with corruption, cronyism, and bloated government.

We should wish him luck and our government should support him, because he will need it, but we should be encouraged given that few African leaders have been so bold to have staked their election in part on such a program of reform. Importantly, Sata's election represents the working out of the predictions of some observers that if the Chinese, in collusion with dictators and de facto presidents for life, continued to unfairly exploit developing countries, there would be a backlash redounding to the harm of both the incumbent governments as well as the foreign interests. Those of us who have worked in foreign assistance often heard how unwise we were to let the Chinese provide visible support such as the building of infrastructure and schools while we supported the intangibles of democracy, the rule of law, fair labor practices and economic freedom. We averred that if we did the right thing, the best thing, in time the fruit of our labor would be the movement of developing states from the category of failed and dependent to stable and flourishing. I trust that we are being proven right in Zambia and that this example will spread. It is too soon to predict that a backlash is building generally across the globe against the Chinese exploiters and against aid practices that only further dependency, but the ripples of the Zambian election -- and what it could mean for development policy -- are likely to be felt beyond its borders. 

All who hope for the democratization of mainland China should celebrate a recent development in Liaoning province. Upwards of twelve thousand Chinese converged on the public square in Dalian, seat of the province's government, to demand that a petrochemical factory be closed and moved due to the public's concerns that the plant puts their health at risk. This story comes amid a continuing outpouring of stories over the last few years of the environmental degradation and health risks attendant with the booming Chinese economy, a boom the Communist Party government is desperate to keep alive as its only hope to ensure stability and thus stay in power. The Tiananmen Papers revealed how nervous China's leaders are when citizens speak out. While it is no surprise that "growth at any cost," including the costs of the safety and health of citizens, is the strategy of a government that expects citizens to trade political freedom for prosperity, it is striking to see that the citizenry increasingly seems determined to renegotiate the bargain.

In this latest event, riot police and demonstrators clashed and there was some violence, but many among the protestors were savvy enough to sing the national anthem and wave patriotic banners in an apparent attempt to avoid the fate of most Chinese that dare to criticize the government.

Perhaps the tactic worked: the mayor and a party official, within hours of the beginning of the protest, announced that the plant would be closed and moved in response to public concern. They did this after it was clear that simply saying they would do so was not sufficient for many of the demonstrators; they demanded a timetable for the action. Of course the state got very busy censoring and cleansing the Internet as best it could of any reporting of the events, but Western media outlets have widely reported the protests and the government's backing down.

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Morocco took an important step forward last Friday in approving constitutional changes. The vote was symbolic and substantive, and both characterizations are important. The United States should take note and show support for the changes and how they were brought about. The European Union has already weighed in affirmatively.

The symbolism is important because King Mohammed VI has taken a step that other Arab monarchs are reluctant to even contemplate, much less take. The House of Saud is using dollar diplomacy and other forms of persuasion to encourage all Arab monarchs to stand pat and not respond to the Arab Spring with reforms of any significance. Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and former deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams has commented incisively on this issue. The monarchies have been in less political trouble than the fake republics, and so the pressure to respond to demands for reform is less intense; the Saudis believe this passionately and want fellow monarchs to remain in the fold. Thus, King Mohammed VI's careful trek down this path to a constitutional vote in which the yes vote garnered 98 percent (with 73 percent turnout) is encouraging.

As to substance, the new constitution does not represent earth-shattering changes, and the real power of government continues to be in the hands of "one man," as the youth movement rightly points out to its dismay (the movement had encouraged the public to boycott the vote while most civic, media, political, and religious groups supported it). The king will retain control of the military, religion, and the judiciary; and a prime minister will be chosen from the largest party in the parliament and will be head of government with executive over the rest of the government.

But the point is that the king, who has a history of showing his concern for modernization and acting on it cautiously, has offered a new constitution that breaks with the typical oriental despotism of the Arab world: The king will not continue to control every aspect of government and will share power with others -- notably, elected representatives of the people. That might not be earth-shattering in terms of Western notions of government, but it counts for such in the Arab world. And it will be understood that way in Morocco and, importantly, in other Arab countries by rulers and ruled alike. The symbolism is, therefore, the most important substance in this event, and it should bring about more substance; that is, if the transition results in stability and slow but steady reform (think hundreds of years of British constitutional reform), then the king will have succeeded magnificently and his subjects will become more and more like citizens. The youth movement played an important role in provoking this change, but the older hands with a larger view of what is and is not possible in an Arab and Islamic kingdom tempered demands for change that are rightly judged too fast and too risky, for now.

President Obama has before him an opportunity to promote U.S. values and a more comprehensive policy toward Russia because of the political and economic needs of Vladimir Putin and his "court." The right action now will promote U.S. interests, arguably the interests of the Russian people, and make it possible for the United States to have a better relationship with what we hope will be a more democratic Russian government in the not too distant future.

Russia's Prime Minister and de facto power center, Putin, currently finds his position not as stable as he'd like it to be. Poll numbers for his party remain low, cynicism remains high, all around him many of the world's autocrats and corrupt regimes are collapsing or wobbling, and the Russian economy and standard of living is stagnating even in a time of high oil prices.

This perhaps explains Russia's renewed effort to gain entrance into the WTO. This is good news in and of itself as free trade is a boon to all countries, but the U.S. policy should not be simply to say "amen" and push for Russia's accession with no other considerations. Russia's desire to join the WTO is just one of several levers that the president can use as part of a strategy to support Russia's becoming a more democratic country and the delegitimization of those trying to return it to tsarism.

The strategy the president should pursue could be comprised of three parts. First, a "reset" on U.S. policy toward Russia in terms of how we react to the government's treatment of dissidents and democratic activists. This effort is actually already in motion in that the president plans to nominate Michael McFaul to be the next ambassador to the Russian Federation. Dr. McFaul is a well-known and respected expert on Russia; but more importantly, he is an expert on democratic development and a firm supporter of same. His nomination alone sends a strong signal that the Obama administration is serious about its concerns regarding Russian politics. McFaul should go to Moscow with the full backing of the president to be an influential voice for democratic governance; he should be instructed to meet with dissidents and democratic activists. The timing is excellent: some of the best known democratic leaders in Russia have formed a new party and petitioned the government to allow it to participate officially. The U.S. position should be clear that such a party should be welcomed. Perhaps Putin will grasp that doing this makes Russia look good for WTO purposes if he needs a reason beyond just doing the right thing.

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