Atlantic Council

The Spectator's Alex Massie and Reason's Matt Welch hammer President Obama for joining a long line of politicians who use the phrase "Armenian genocide" on the campaign trail and then scrupulously avoid the G-word once in office.

Some European leaders think the Obama administration pulled a bait-and-switch by appointing James Stavridis rather than James Mattis as the new Supreme Allied Commander. 

Speaking to high-level generals this week, Dmitry Medvedev vowed to move forward with controversial personnel reforms and rearmament plans for Russia's military.  He cited NATO expansion as the primary motivator for the plans, sparking concerns about a renewed arms race in the face of deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations.

Kenneth Weisbrode, a fellow at the European University Institute, argues in a U.S. News essay that the return of France to NATO's military command offers an opportunity to clarify the institution's missions but is otherwise no great panacea.

You are president of Pakistan.  Your country faces seemingly intractable and simultaneous crises. You rightly believe that an existential threat to your nation is posed by the insurgencies led by religious zealots and extremists.

Then-candidate Barack Obama avowed in the YouTube debate of July 23, 2007 that, yes, he would "be willing to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venzuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries."   While he took a lot of flak for that statement, including from his now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he's now taking steps to carry out that pledge.

It is not easy to characterize our times. But there does seem to be a discernable theme that keeps weaving its way through otherwise seemingly unconnected events. History may characterize this era as the Age of Inauthenticity, where very little is what it seems or has claimed to be.

Cartoonist Mike Lester of the Rome (Georgia - USA) News-Tribune weighs in rather late on the "Did Obama snub Gordon Brown?" and "Is the Special Relationship in Trouble?" debates that so occupied the press a couple of weeks back.

Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis argues in the April Vanity Fair that the male domination of the financial sectors in Iceland was a major contributors to the spectacular collapse of its bank

Canada has decided to bypass the normal environmental regulations in order to speed up projects aimed at stimulating the economy, drawing the ire of activist groups.