It has become part of the political orthodoxy in America that former United States president Ronald Reagan's defense spending catapulted the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and collapse. As broad narratives go, this perspective certainly captures two things accurately: that the Reagan administration aggressively funded the US military and that the Soviet Union did in fact collapse. READ MORE

January visit of the People’s Republic of China Chairman Hu Jintao to the USA is compared by serious analysts with the historic trip of Deng Xiaoping, who “opened” China for America and foreign world in 1979. Then in 1970-s much was said about geopolitical triangle – an intricate complex of relations between Washington, Moscow and Beijing. Three decades after the issue of Russia is almost not mentioned within the discussion of the US-Chinese relations. Nevertheless further development of relations between China and the USA is significant for Russia. READ MORE

Chairing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2010, Kazakhstan showed that it is possible to bring a successful chairmanship to a failing organization. Prerequisites to a successful chairmanship include strong motivation as the starting point; ambition to demonstrate a young state’s national competence at the international level; and carefully calculated initiatives which, even if thwarted in the veto-bound OSCE system, become reference points in the organization’s annals as sound and creative responses to major challenges. READ MORE

Anders Fogh Rasmussen Speech at the 47th Munich Security Conference. READ MORE