Atlantic Council

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared Europe and North America "need to strike a new transatlantic deal" based on "people, science, and culture" in order to "make our community of values stronger, wider, and deeper."

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that NATO is "just as important in the 21st century as it was in the 20th" and warned, "We can't afford to let the greatest alliance in history slide into irrelevance."

Chevron CEO John Watson declared that American corporations "working in partnership with government" can "effect positive change throughout the world" by "promoting American values abroad."

Today, the Atlantic Council officially launches the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, which is dedicated to forging an effective Latin America-US-Europe partnership of common values and shared interests.

The real significance of Syria's likely crossing of US President Barack Obama's chemical weapons red line may be that it will focus the administration's attention on here-and-now Syria policy options as it has not been focused heretofore. As the president said in his April 30 press conference, regime culpability in using chemical weapons would force him "to rethink the range of options available to us." 

United States' intelligence agencies and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are still not certain the Syrian government of President Assad has used chemical weapons against its opposition.

According to a recent Atlantic Council-Bertelsmann Foundation study of trade experts and policymakers from the United States and Europe, there is widespread optimism that that two sides will be able to successfully negotiate a trade and investment deal.

The Rwanda genocide began in April 1994; within a few weeks, nongovernmental organizations there were estimating that 100,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been massacred. Yet two months later, Reuters correspondent Alan Elsner and State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly had an infamous exchange:

In recent years international lawyers and accountants have built a web of corporate opacity which has enabled tax avoidance and corruption on an alarming scale. Private financial wealth sitting in tax havens has grown to around $21 trillion, of which $9 trillion is from developing countries.

On Wednesday I had the privilege of providing evidence to the House of Commons Defence Select Committee at its first meeting to consider the 2015 British Strategic Security and Defence Review alongside Lord Hennessy and Major-General Mungo Melvin.  Perhaps the most important contribution I made was to suggest to collected British politicians of all shades that whatever reforms are made to Britain’s strategic security and defense structures little will change unless the political class imposes effective oversight.