Three years before it intervened in Syria, Russia feared an Islamist takeover in Damascus would lead to widespread chaos in the region, like a new Afghanistan in the Levant, reported Joe Lauria in 2012.

Syria has fallen. It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can. Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.

The ‘Kellogg Plan’ looks totally unacceptable to Moscow in its leaked form, but it’s still good to talk

Once the Warsaw Pact closed shop there was no good or honest reason for keeping NATO going. The threat that NATO was created to deter disappeared when the Soviet Union collapsed. The European Union’s influence on the new post-Cold War order has been by trade, investment, diplomacy and political intimacy, the hallmarks of a successful union that has mastered the art of expansion and influence by clever use of the carrot, whilst America has led its quest for influence by application of the doctrine of overriding military strength. Now we see its military lead in Ukraine while leading the EU into an entanglement that most European don’t want.

The ongoing crises in the world threaten global catastrophe, and at the Verona Eurasian Economic Forum everyone agreed that diplomacy, not military reinforcement, is needed to prevent the worst-case scenario.

Nixon’s secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock debated the future of NATO and Russia during the Budapest Summit on Dec. 5, 1994. Robert MacNeil moderated the discussion.

The threat of a nuclear war between the US and Russia is real—on this point, there is rare bipartisan agreement in Congress.

Dec 5 (Reuters) – Russia is open to talks with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump but will use “any means” to prevent Washington and its allies from defeating it in Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson.

John Wight says the common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time, is Western foreign policy.

It Can’t Be Audited – Yet It Must Be Stopped