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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The United States has a winning hand in Asia and needs to play it. This means more engagement at senior levels–with China, but particularly with like-minded leaders in India, Japan and Indonesia. It means completing our free-trade negotiations with Korea so that the United States sets the standard for trade liberalization in the region. Above [...]

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Sole Superpower Challenged by New Rivals
China and India are also thrusting on to the world stage, confident that the future is on their side. China already has the world’s fourth-biggest economy, ahead of the UK, and is rapidly closing in on Germany. Even Russia, whose hydrocarbon wealth may not last long into the century, is [...]

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What are officials so eager to cover up?
It began in April 1996 when a female patient with “no-name fever” entered the hospital in China’s central Henan province where Gao worked. The woman pleaded, “I don’t want to die! My husband and my child can’t live without me.”
She died 10 days later. For over a week, [...]

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North Korea’s chief arms negotiator, Kim Kye Gwan, is known as “the Smiling Assassin.” Do you suppose the North Koreans use similar grudgingly respectful terms to describe their American counterparts? Somehow I doubt it. Check out the terms of the latest agreement with North Korea. Pyongyang gets $400 million in aid, chiefly in the form [...]

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While the United States has been stealthily finessing a pretext for launching a military attack on Iran, it has also been prevailing on its close allies and friends to stay clear of bilateral political exchanges with Tehran. Isolation and containment of Iran and a “regime change” in that country have become the leitmotif of US [...]

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The State Department still insists that Taiwan be limited solely to “articles of a defensive character.”
As a result, the Pentagon has been hampered in giving their best judgment on what Taiwan “needs” to deter Chinese aggression.
The State Department fought hard against selling Taiwan the production technology for the IDF fighters in the mid-1980s, and [...]

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The “trilateral cooperation was not directed against the interests of any other country and was, on the contrary, intended to promote international harmony and understanding,” the ministers said in a joint statement issued at the end of the talks.
The India-Russia-China meetings have fueled speculation that the consultations are aimed at forming an alliance to counter [...]

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The foreign ministers of the three giants of the Asian landmass — Russia, China and India — will meet Feb. 14 in New Delhi to advance an old proposal for a Trilateral Global Alliance that would effectively exclude the West from a position of superiority in Asia, before achieving the same purpose in Africa and [...]

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Anti-Americanism has a long pedigree, but that only makes it more irrational.
Andrei S. Markovits, author of Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, is no neo-con Bush cheerleader. Markovits told The Australian he is a card-carrying progressive signing up to every seminal Left issue. But he cannot stomach the toxic anti-Americanism, a staple of his side [...]

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