Following in the footsteps of other prominent world leaders, Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev has hit the lecture circuit. It would a noble development for the “Leader of the Nation, but for the fact that his foray into academic instruction was performed at the immodestly named Nazarbayev University in Astana.
In a display of somewhat touching denial, Nazarbayev is pushing the argument that the largely inconclusive OSCE summit held in the Kazakh capital last week was nothing short of a epoch-defining moment.
State-run Kazinform news agency cites Nazarbayev as saying that the Astana summit was a landmark event not only for Kazakhstan, but the international community as a whole. The summit, which will be remembered at best as an anticlimactic disappointment, will henceforth be brandished by the country's leadership as evidence of Kazakhstan's undisputed role in global diplomacy.
Adopting the mantle of a latter-day Woodrow Wilson, Nazarbayev explains to eagerly listening students that Kazakhstan has "always" been a cradle of initiatives aimed at boosting integration, convergence, friendship and brotherhood among all the nations of the world. Warming to his theme, Nazarbayev maintains that the adoption of the Astana Declaration may come to constitute "the formation of a single undivided community of Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security," even though there is nothing in the language of the document that signals any distinctive departure from things as they currently stand -- dysfunction as the norm.
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