France's Strategy
New political leaders do not invent new national strategies. Rather, they adapt enduring national strategies to the moment. On Tuesday, Francois Hollande will be inaugurated as France's president, and soon after taking the oath of office, he will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. At this moment, the talks are expected to be about austerity and the European Union, but the underlying issue remains constant: France's struggle for a dominant role in European affairs at a time of German ascendance. READ MORE
Kazakhstan, USA Review Present State & Prospects of Strategic Partnership
A major international conference “Kazakhstan - USA: 20 Years of Partnership for Security and Development” took place at the Nazarbayev Center in Astana, the multifunctional research and educational public institution, on Friday May 18, 2012. READ MORE
Message from President Obama
US President Barack Obama welcomes NATO to Chicago, his hometown. Here he describes how important the Alliance has been for our common security, our freedom and our prosperity for the past 63 years. READ MORE
Mission impossible?
The US is a vast country, with a growing population and a myriad of cultures. Getting your message across is not always easy. NATO is no exception. So we asked five Americans how they would try to convince their compatriots of the value of NATO. READ MORE
Britain's Strategy
Britain controlled about one-fourth of the Earth's land surface and one-fifth of the world's population in 1939. Fifty years later, its holdings outside the British Isles had become trivial, and it even faced an insurgency in Northern Ireland. READ MORE
Uzbekistan: Will Karimov Get Blown Off in Windy City?
It appears that Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s efforts to obtain a one-on-one meeting with US President Barack Obama are coming up short, an informed source indicates. Obama's preliminary schedule for the upcoming NATO summit reportedly does not include individual meetings with any of the Central Asian leaders who are planning on attending the event. READ MORE
Obama makes surprise trip to Afghanistan to sign key pact, mark bin Laden raid
President Obama outlined his plan to end America’s longest foreign war during a visit here Tuesday colored by election-year politics and economic uncertainty, declaring that “this time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.” READ MORE
Time to get U.S. nukes out of Europe
One of the more pernicious obstacles to rational policy-making is the "ratchet effect": the tendency for policies, once adopted, to acquire a life of their own and to become resistant to change, even when they have ceased to be useful. For example, you can be confident that we will all be wasting time in airport security lines decades from now, long after Osama bin Laden's death. Existing security measures may not pass a simple cost-benefit test, but what political leader would dare relax them? READ MORE
NATO in Central Asia
The North Atlantic Alliance had engaged regional governments on defense matters since the mid-1990s, when former Soviet Central Asian republics have joined NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) and its related Partnership for Peace (PfP) program. READ MORE
