Does the United States really need Russia? According to many pundits, we need Russia more than it needs us. Russia could cause a lot of problems if we’re not careful.
I say bunk to that nonsense. It’s time to throw down the gauntlet. If Russia is going to terrorize its neighbors and exercise strategic unhelpfulness on [...]

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Editor’s Note: This week’s Terrorism Weekly is the second chapter of Fred Burton’s new book, GHOST: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent. Burton is vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security at Stratfor. He is the former deputy chief of the counterterrorism division of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service.
Chapter Two: Down the Rabbit Hole
“CT03.” [...]

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Fighting transnational terrorism often involves making unsavory choices between protecting civil rights and providing security. The following regimes have opted for the latter and are definitely not the kind of places you want to get caught if you’re plotting some terrorist mayhem.
France
Key tactics: Though many Americans view them as softies when it comes to the [...]

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The United States said Tuesday a Central Asian bloc dominated by Russia and China was unlikely to turn into a military alliance, but expressed concern over Iran’s potential membership.
The six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which comprises Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and China, seemed to have returned to its original goals of mostly improving border [...]

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Throughout the 1990s, strategic concerns over long-running conflicts in East Asia—from the division of the Korean peninsula to tensions across the Taiwan Strait to the Indian-Pakistan nuclear competition—shaped U.S. policy in the region. Although the Sino-Soviet rift during the Cold war provided a basis for U.S. relations with communist Beijing, post-Soviet Russia developed a growing [...]

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