WARSAW — Signing a missile-defense deal with its good friend the United States has earned Poland nothing less than the threat of nuclear attack from Russia — a threat that might not sound so empty these days, given Moscow’s bloody battle with Georgia.
That conflict has plunged Europe into serious crisis, sending waves of jitters through [...]

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By George Friedman
On Sept. 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush addressed Congress. He spoke in the wake of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the weakening of the Soviet Union, and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. He argued that a New World Order was emerging: “A hundred generations have searched [...]

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The Pentagon said on Tuesday that Iran has the ability to launch a ballistic missile capable of hitting sections of eastern and southern Europe.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the Missile Defence Agency, told reporters he believes Iran now has a missile with a range of 2,000 km, but he declined to say [...]

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The rapid increase in oil prices and the rise in metal and mineral demand worldwide have made the Russians overconfident. Their annual cash income in the last four years has grown fourfold. The economic crunch of the 1990s is behind them. Thus the Russians have become somewhat politically belligerent, visible in the opposition they have [...]

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The nuclear strike codes were kept inside a black vinyl briefcase known as “the Football.” The Football enabled the President to order the obliteration of thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Within seconds of the authentication of a presidential order, missiles would lift off from silos on the plains of [...]

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Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Friday urged fellow leaders to diversify eastern Europe’s energy supply routes away from Russia and not succumb to ‘energy blackmail.’
Speaking to six other heads of state at an energy summit in Kiev, Yushchenko said his country could play a greater role as a supply route from energy-rich Caspian Sea states [...]

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Yet, even though it has an economy comparable with America’s, it stands as a political dwarf in responding to the rapidly changing geopolitical environment. The combination of slavishly following the US lead (with the possible exception of the invasion of Iraq), its reluctance to contemplate badly needed strategic initiatives (as in the Middle East) or [...]

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In their concise and eloquent report, Nemtsov and Milov present a devastating picture of Putin’s eight years in the Kremlin. Indeed, the report’s appraisal of Putin and his administration is so damning that the Kremlin attempted, with considerable success, to block its distribution. Originally, the publisher, Novaya Gazeta (which produces the newspaper of the same [...]

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Now, a young, well-traveled, multilingual foreign-policy scholar, Parag Khanna, suggests in “The Second World” that we are on the cusp of a new new world order — “a multipolar and multicivilizational world of three distinct superpowers competing on a planet of shrinking resources.” The three are the United States, the European Union and China. The [...]

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