Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev on Sunday announced Moscow’s intention to preserve geographical spheres “of privileged interest” on or near its borders as part of a five point foreign policy statement in a television interview.
The announcement, in the wake of the recent conflict in Georgia, is likely to raise the political temperature in neighbouring states, especially [...]

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Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia.
Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but [...]

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As NATO ministers gather in Brussels to discuss how tough to get with Russia after the Georgian crisis, an opinion poll shows one in two Poles fear an attack by Russia. Eastern European countries are unhappy with the response of the West. more…

The Dangerous Neighbor: Vladimir Putin Takes on a Powerless West
SPIEGEL Interview with Gerhard [...]

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European Union foreign ministers say they will not support a military strike on Iran but want more talks to try to resolve worries Tehran might be developing nuclear weapons.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband says it is now up to Iran to respond to global powers and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana after talks in [...]

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In recent years, Moscow started to think that it could most easily express its dissatisfaction with Western politics by resorting to old Cold war cliches. The Kremlin does not like that Ukraine and Georgia want to join NATO, therefore it claimed that Western military bases will inevitably be built in those countries and that they [...]

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This is brought to you by JohnMauldin@InvestorsInsight.com. John provides a free daily newsletter that you can sign up for. George Friedman is making this forecast available so that you might sign up for his service.
Read original source with maps included.
Here’s the article:
By George Friedman at Stratfor.Com.
Introduction
For the first half of 2008, Stratfor focused [...]

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In a myriad of foreign policy speeches, both Dmitry Medvedev and Sergei Lavrov have recently broached sizeable ideas on the transformation of the trans-Atlantic space, claiming that as the European civilization’s dominance in the world weakens, time has come to re-think the relationship between Russia, Europe, and the United States, and a new international architecture [...]

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PRISTINA, Kosovo | Days before the West begins one of the most ambitious nation-building experiments in modern history, profound questions remain about how the day-to-day governance of Kosovo will be handled.
Kosovo now has its own government. But the U.N. mission that effectively ruled the former province of Serbia since 1999 is still here.
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Video: Kosovo: [...]

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The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is going to be a cold-war president — but this cold war is with Iran.
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence [...]

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Diplomatic novice Dmitry Medvedev will take over next week as Russian president with a thick stack of foreign policy challenges in his in-tray.
Here are some of the international issues that will confront Medvedev when he replaces his mentor Vladimir Putin as head of state on May 7:
NATO ENLARGEMENT
The Western military alliance agreed at its summit [...]

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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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Both Russia and China have exceedingly different foreign policy aims than the United States, and domestic complexities inevitably have distanced Moscow and Beijing from Washington on a series of pressing international matters. The common aspiration to produce a multipolar world has driven Russia and China to effectively align against the United States incorporating a skilled [...]

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