Venezuela’s Minister of Defense General-in-Chief Gustavo Rangel was even blunter about the deleterious effects of Washington’s policies. Speaking at a press conference on April 8 in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, Rangel said that the U.S. embargo introduced in May 2006 on deliveries to Venezuela of armaments, military equipment and spare parts had had a [...]

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The French president threatens nuclear retaliation against state sponsors of terror. His Russian counterpart makes thunderous vows to strike first at any threats to Russia anywhere on the planet. The Ethiopians, with Western assent, invade Somalia and avert a possible Islamic regime there. The Japanese debate whether to violently eradicate North Korea’s growing nuclear threat. [...]

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The trouble is, Baikonur is in Kazakhstan, not Russia. That didn’t matter at all in Soviet times, but since the breakup of the Soviet Union, it has meant continuing friction between the Russian space program and a host government that the Kremlin can no longer order around on a whim — not to mention that [...]

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China’s stockpile of intermediate-range ballistic missile nuclear warheads should by no means be ignored. The People’s Liberation Army’s strategy of keeping a balance between its nuclear and conventional capabilities, or focusing on nuclear capability, as a matter of fact refers to these IRBMs and some short-range ballistic missiles.
It can be generally believed that the implementation [...]

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Russia has threatened to take military and other steps along its borders if the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia join NATO. The armed forces Chief of Staff, General Yuri Baluyevsky, did not specify what those steps might be. He simply said measures would be put in place to “secure Russia’s interests”.
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A very similar situation exists in the West´s attempts to get the Islamic Republic of Iran to forgo its nuclear program. So far, five and a half years of negotiations have only permitted the Iranians to advance so much closer to their possession of a nuclear device as well as nuclear armed missiles. Three rounds [...]

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Venezuelan armed forces occupied 32 sugar plantations Thursday, the latest in a wave of takeovers that some say is a bid by President Hugo Chavez to regain political momentum and reverse his recent popularity slide.
The farms in Lara state were taken over by army units at the request of the Chavez government’s National Land Institute, [...]

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Israel wound up its largest ever civil defence exercise on Thursday with a simulation of a chemical weapons attack on a hospital and claimed the five days of drills worked well.
In the final drill a hospital in the northern city of Afula was evacuated during a simulated chemical weapons strike, a military spokesman said.
The home [...]

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However, as respected defense analyst David Crane pointed out in an important article in Defense Review in November 2006, U.S. nuclear-powered super-carriers today don’t carry anything lie that armor. They rely on their own speed, the size of their protective support groups and their ability to stay far out in the ocean, launching their aircraft [...]

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My thinking on Iran is more or less mainstream thinking in Israel, what many Israelis within the defense and foreign policy establishments feel, even if they say it in a more diplomatic way.
Today’s Iran is multi-layered. It is an imperial power, just as Persia was once an imperial power toward the Middle East and [...]

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With the Olympic torch run well on its way and the 2008 Beijing games coming close, pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters alike vamp up their own Olympics plans. Over this last weekend, Tibet supporters in London attempted to put out the torch’s flame in street-side protests meanwhile China supporters picketed outside major media centres remonstrating Western [...]

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But for the past few years democracy has been in global retreat. Notwithstanding a small occasional triumph here and there, in Latin America, Africa and in Eastern Europe, the tide has been turned.
The most significant defeat of all has been in China, where the success of limited capitalism has not been matched by political [...]

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