Q & A Archive

Hillary Clinton’s inclusion of Azerbaijan in her current round of diplomatic visits, which also included stops in Poland and Georgia, reflects the need to balance the U.S.-Russia reset with symbolic reassurances to regional friends and allies. In particular, the Georgia and Azerbaijan stopovers underline the increased importance to the U.S. of good bilateral relations in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The reason? The Northern Distribution Network, the supply lifeline to U.S. and other NATO forces in Afghanistan, comprehensively covered in this CSIS report (.pdf). Azerbaijan is part of NDN South, the back-up route that starts at the Black Sea port […]

I’ve gotten a number of e-mails from regular readers wondering what happened to the Off-the-Radar news roundup we used to feature on the blog: We gave it a home of its own on a channel called Leading Indicators: Off-the-Radar News. Now, instead of a round-up, each item is its own post, to facilitate searchability and linking. You can subscribe to the RSS here. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to get all our blog content — Trend Lines and Leading Indicators — on the same page, you can do that on the Real Time channel, which simply combines the two. The RSS […]

Last month, members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) met to discuss new rules for admission to the regional security group. In an e-mail interview, head of the Asia practice group at Eurasia Group and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Evan A. Feigenbaum, discusses the evolution of the SCO. WPR: What is the significance of the SCO’s newly articulated membership procedure, and what does it reflect about the organization’s approach to future expansion? Evan Feigenbaum: At their June 11 summit in Tashkent, the six SCO heads of state approved new rules for applications and […]

“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom — their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean — the practical acknowledgment of […]

The United States and the European Union have signed a bank data-transfer agreement that will give U.S. authorities access to EU bank transfer data, under EU supervision, in an effort to combat terrorism. In an e-mail interview, Kurt Volker, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and managing director of the Center on Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, explains the importance of a U.S.-EU bank-data transfer agreement. WPR: What is the background of the current dispute? Kurt Volker: In the days and years after Sept. 11, 2001, the United States and Europe worked together to track terrorist financing, in order […]