President Saakashvili said in televised remarks shortly after his joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that there had been three “very important messages” from the United States.
Late last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began her tour of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. In Scandinavia, she was to address several forums on climate change and green energy. While in Sweden, she also planned to discuss Internet freedom, Afghanistan and the Middle East. But it is in the mountains of the Caucasus and Turkey where Hillary will face the red meat of geopolitics: bloody ethnic conflicts over turf; religiously motivated massacres; and threshold nuclear states with global reach.
The fall of the Soviet Union ended the European epoch, the period in which European power dominated the world. It left the United States as the only global power, something for which it was culturally and institutionally unprepared. Since the end of World War II, the United States had defined its foreign policy in terms of its confrontation with the Soviet Union. Virtually everything it did around the world in some fashion related to this confrontation. The fall of the Soviet Union simultaneously freed the United States from a dangerous confrontation and eliminated the focus of its foreign policy.
The protests in Afghanistan over the burning of copies of the Quran confiscated from detainees at Bagram Airfield have led to more than two dozen deaths, and have severely — perhaps even permanently — undermined the United States’ determined efforts to win hearts and minds in the country. The killing of NATO troops by members of Afghanistan’s security forces, or militants in their uniforms, is a dangerous new trend, and one that severely complicates relations between international security forces and their local hosts. It may now be time to consider new strategies by which to achieve U.S. and Western goals in Afghanistan.
The Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) have entered a period of serious challenges related to the situation in Afghanistan.
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan Yerzhan Kh. Kazykhanov makes his first official visit to the USA in the end of January – beginning of February this year, reported on Mondayan official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Altaj Abibullayev.
U.S.-Russian relations seem to have been relatively quiet recently, as there are numerous contradictory views in Washington about the true nature of Russia’s current foreign policy. Doubts remain about the sincerity of the U.S. State Department’s so-called “reset” of relations with Russia — the term used in 2009 when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handed a reset button to her Russian counterpart as a symbol of a freeze on escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington. The concern is whether the “reset” is truly a shift in relations between the two former adversaries or simply a respite before relations deteriorate again.
Mutually Assured Destruction may have been a sensible policy during the Cold War. It isn’t now.
Sergei Lavrov visited Washington to sign agreements on child adoption, visas, and nuclear safety. In reality, however, what Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration are hailing as symbols of closer cooperation between the two countries are only a façade to cover up the lack of progress on the more critical issues dividing the two countries: Iran, missile defense, and human rights.
President Dalia Grybauskaite met with Unites States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, currently visiting Vilnius at her invitation, to discuss energy and regional security issues, Lithuanian-U.S. cooperation priorities, and prospects of democratic development in the neighboring countries.
