Atlantic Council

The US administration has, at long last, crossed the Rubicon of authorizing lethal assistance to selected units of Syria's armed opposition.

The New York Times editorial board complains, "Except for a few leaders and members of the intelligence committees, most lawmakers did not know the government was collecting records on almost every phone call made in the United States or was able to collect anyone's e-mail messages and Internet chats."

Now what? The ostensible goal of the Obama-Xi “shirtsleeves summit” was to head off the trajectory of a volatile U.S.-Chinese relationship that appeared to be sliding toward confrontation—and define a new cooperative direction, new understandings and a new framework. In this respect, it was a potentially important but modest beginning.

The civil war in Syria reveals many uncomfortable truths about today’s geopolitics. One of them is that the EU has made little progress on a common foreign policy in the last two decades.

A young British soldier is mown down in a London street and then hacked to death.  Mosques and Islamic centers across England are attacked.  The liberal elite in London mouth their concerns and trot out the usual reality-defying, free speech quenching politically correct nonsense.  And then it is alleged that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are using a new computer program called PRISM to tap into emails and web-sites and that self-same elite go into over-drive.  Who is the problem here?

Glenn Greenwald, the civil-liberties columnist who broke the story about the National Security Agency's massive collection of metadata on U.S. phone and Internet usage patterns, contends that, despite its being classified Top Secret, “There’s not a single revelation that we’ve provided to the world that even remotely jeopardizes national security.”

Earlier this month, states that participated in the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty last March were allowed to sign the document.

It will be some time before the full consequences of the California summit meeting between US President Barack Obama and China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, are revealed. Nixon-Mao it was not.

Having dinner with the Lithuanian Chief of Defense Staff Lieutenant General Pocius was a moving experience. Listening to the story of his family’s struggle for freedom left with me with the profound sense that every NATO and EU leader should visit the Baltic States at least once a year to remind themselves of the importance of both the Alliance and the Union.  Therefore, I am proposing two initiatives.

Iranian elections are hardly free or fair by Western standards. But even with limited choices and a heavily securitized environment, the brief presidential campaign is providing an outlet for harsh criticism of the status quo, including topics -- such as the nuclear file -- that are usually banished from public discourse.