MOSCOW, November 17. /TASS/. The Paris massacre with hundreds of casualties and the confirmed terrorist bomb blast that caused Russia's A321 passenger jet carrying dozens of holidaymakers back home from Egypt to fall apart over the Sinai Peninsula may prove an argument strong enough for the political elites to present a common front against terrorism. This trend unmistakably manifested itself at the G20 summit in Antalya, polled pundits have told TASS.
The director of the military-political studies centre at the institute of international relations MGIMO, Aleksey Podberyozkin, pointed to the easing of tensions in Russian-Western relations, but with certain reservations.
"Regrettably, as before the United States refuses to regard Russia as an equitable partner in ensuring the system of international security," Podberyozkin has told TASS.
At the same time he voiced the hope that the common threat which the G20 summit identified in its final statement - the Islamic State - will cause secret services around the world to cooperate in the information field in resistance to extremism on a common platform.
"Attaining victory over terrorists will require not so much air bombardments as the establishment of control of the global information space," he believes.
Plugging the loopholes being used for financing radical Islamists is another major task to be resolved in fighting against the Islamic State, Podberyozkin said.
"Stripping the terrorists of support they enjoy from the big business tycoons of Saudi Arabia or Qatar would be no problem, provided the United States, which controls the main financial world flows, displays goodwill," Podberyozkin said. "To call a spade a spade, the terrorist Islamic State is a brainchild of the United States and an immediate result of the Washington-initiated Arab Spring chain of government coups in the Middle East. CIA Director John Brennan last Monday said that the Arab Spring contributed to the growth of instability in the region. A belated acknowledgement. The United States is obliged to assume far greater responsibility in the struggle against the Islamic State," Podberyozkin said.
MGIMO’s political analyst Kirill Koktysh believes that the G20 summit heralded certain shifts in realizing the common threat to the whole of humanity. "The summit’s final statement makes no distinction between "bad" and "good terrorists." At a meeting in Antalya with Russian President Vladimir Putin British Prime Minister David Cameron expressed Britain’s readiness for cooperation with Russia in the struggle against the Islamic State. President Francois Hollande, of France, who was absent from the summit, issued a call from Paris for expanding the international anti-terrorist coalition and declared his intention to fly to Moscow for consultations over what should be done together to resist radical Islamists," Koktysh told TASS.
"In Antalya, the summit’s participants walked part of the political road. A certain potential has been built up and opportunities identified for joint efforts in the war against the Islamic State. In the second phase it will be quite possible to achieve an agreement on joint military operations and exchanges of information to forestall common threats," Koktysh believes. "I would describe the main outcome of the G20 summit in this way: there has emerged a political situation in which refusal from joint struggle against terrorism dooms politicians to losing credibility with the public at large and the electorate with all the ensuing consequences."
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