Ten days after North Korea staked its claim as a nuclear power with its first atomic test, Chinese President Hu Jintao dispatched a senior envoy to Pyongyang to defuse the escalating global crisis. North Korea had defied its closest ally, most important source of aid and biggest trading partner by conducting the nuclear explosion just [...]

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Even as the European Union reports that international sanctions will not prevent Iran from making a nuclear bomb, the West is opting for slow-moving diplomacy.
It is important to pay special attention to two factors that call for a more urgent response — the apocalyptic religious motivation of Iran’s decision makers and the proximity of Iran [...]

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PRAGUE — Iran’s influence in the Middle East is being strengthened not only because of the opportunities created by the frustration of U.S. power in Iraq, but because of the diplomatic protection it has been receiving from China, and most importantly, from Russia. With President Vladimir Putin now on a Middle East tour to flex [...]

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U.S.-Russia relations during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tenure have seesawed between mutual cooperation and confrontation. Recently tensions have escalated over American moves to establish an antimissile shield, further expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and encourage the installation of pro-Western governments across Eastern Europe, Moscow’s former sphere of influence. During a biting speech at [...]

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The Russian president should examine his own anti-democratic belligerence before beating the drum to feed his country’s Soviet nostalgia.
THE AMERICAN delegates to last weekend’s Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual transatlantic gathering of policymakers and defense experts, were not predisposed to embrace Vladimir Putin after we learned that the Russian president’s entourage had booked [...]

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — European negotiators, yielding to pressure from the United States, have agreed to widen a ban on financial transactions with Iran and the export of materials and technology that Iran could use to develop nuclear weapons.
European officials said a resolution embodying the wider ban was negotiated over the last week and should [...]

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Norwegian defense officials aren’t declaring a new Cold War with Russia, but Norway’s huge neighbour in the northeast is once again being described as a threat, also in the military sense.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been working hard to restore Russian self-confidence and build up its military.
Relations between Russia and Norway have been strained of [...]

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India, China and Russia account for 40 per cent of the world’s population, a fifth of its economy and more than half of its nuclear warheads. Now they appear to be forming a partnership to challenge the US-dominated world order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War.
Foreign ministers from the three emerging [...]

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Most speeches at diplomatic gatherings aren’t worth the time it
takes to listen to them. On rare occasion, a speech is delivered
that needs to be listened to carefully. Russian President Vladimir
Putin gave such a speech over the weekend in Munich, at a meeting
on international security. The speech did not break new ground; it
repeated things that the [...]

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Iranian president ’says he wants to die a martyr so he should be sent to heaven,’ Meir Amit says.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should “be made to disappear from the arena,” Meir Amit, a former director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, advocated in an exclusive interview with WND.
Amit, one of the most esteemed figures in the [...]

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