Why the U.S. military is pouring forces into a remote West Pacific island.
Feb. 26, 2007 issue - For an out-of-the-way spit of land in the West Pacific, Guam has been getting a lot of interesting visitors recently. First came a steady stream of Pentagon bureaucrats and senior U.S. military officers. Then, a few weeks ago, [...]

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Iran’s regional foreign policy has not yet caught up with its new pre-eminence; it is making as many enemies as it is gaining friends. If Iran and the Arab countries — and alongside them the US and the international community — do not manage today’s tensions wisely, the region could enter a period of protracted [...]

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Is the era of cheap oil really at an end? Or could a glut send prices into a freefall? Should Western countries fear energy blackmail from oil- rich powers?
There’s no crystal ball to predict oil’s future, but Leonardo Maugeri believes that much can be learned by looking at the industry’s past.
Maugeri is the author of [...]

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Officials find rugged terrain makes invasion virtually impossible.
In fact, officials tell WND they have war-gamed a full-blown invasion and ruled it out because of the difficult terrain in Iran, a mountainous fortress compared to Iraq.
“It’s a non-starter,” said one official.
He explains Iran is ringed virtually 360 degrees by towering mountains, and even if they were [...]

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Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said Thursday he was in favour, under certain conditions, of Poland housing missiles for a defence shield that Washington wants to set up in central Europe. “The government and I are in favour of an agreement on the missile shield, but, naturally, only under certain conditions,” Kaczynski told a press conference.
“There [...]

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Despite all that, Putin has painted himself into a corner as he faces the end of the two terms in office that the Russian constitution allows him. This is a man who speaks the language of a modern leader trying to rebuild his country, when in fact he and his cronies have really just wanted [...]

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Mexico has reinforced security around oil installations in the three southeastern states where most of the nation´s crude is extracted and processed in light of threats by Islamic fundamentalist militants to attack infrastructure that helps supply energy to the United States.
This week a Saudi branch of Al Qaida urged its followers to attack the oil [...]

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan had three major goals. The first was to demonstrate Russia’s renewed power and influence in a region where U.S. influence is on the decline. The second was to facilitate Russian economic relations with the countries he visited. The third goal was to continue Russia’s [...]

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Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has a tough choice to make: Destroying a powerful arsenal of SA-7 missiles would appease the US and other donors, but it would also make him appear weak to his anti-American friends.
Newly elected Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega finds himself the new caretaker of a powerful arsenal of Russian SA-7 missiles from [...]

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The foreign ministers of the three countries have met four times in the past — twice on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in 2002 and 2003 and then Almaty in 2004 when they gathered for a meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA). Lavrov, Li Zhaoxing, and Natwar [...]

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A bipartisan Washington report on the US-Japan alliance has recommended that Tokyo reduce restrictions on arms exports and create a separate budget for ballistic missile defence in order to improve military co-operation between the two allies.
The report by Richard Armitage, the former Republican deputy secretary of state, and Joseph Nye, a former Clinton-era senior Pentagon [...]

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So were these America’s worst presidents? Or does this list merely prove that rankings are valuable to the extent they spark debate, unhelpful to the extent they foreclose it? A look at the rankings of several historians we approached individually yields a provocative contrast to the poll results—and suggests how some of the more interesting [...]

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London
The leaders of Europe can no longer pretend that they don’t know what Iran is up to. A leaked internal document prepared for the European Union’s foreign ministers warns that it is probably too late to prevent the Iranian government from acquiring nuclear weapons. “At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the [...]

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