Obama may end up having a personal connection with Medvedev, but that is not going to translate into policy change. What would be useful between now and July would be for his administration to begin to assess what Washington really wants from Russia—and what the United States is prepared to live with.

That social milieu encouraged financial decision makers to cherry-pick the theories that supported excessive risk taking. It discouraged whistle-blowing, not just by risk-management officers in large financial institutions, but also by the economists whose scholarship provided intellectual justification for the financial institutions’ decisions.

Ten years have passed since the NATO aggression against a sovereign European state. What did these years bring to those who threw bombs and those who were attacked? What goals did NATO pursue and whether it managed to cope with its tasks in the following years?

A decade after the aggression NATO continues to strengthen its positions in the Balkans while the official Belgrade makes no efforts to protect the Serbian population locked in ghettos in Kosovo.

In bypassing the United Nations, engaging in disingenuous negotiations that precluded diplomatic solutions and manipulating the public case for war, Nato's intervention over Kosovo in 1999 was an important precursor to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A nation unable to make a choice between territorial integrity and historic identity on the one side, and membership in an international association  on the other, i.e. someone who cannot choose between these two “priorities” really deserves to lose both.

The 2008 U.S. election was all about change. But that’s not what we’re going to get on foreign policy, says the longtime speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice. Instead of a radical departure from Bush, we’re likely to end up with a lot more of the same. And that may be just what we need.

Now comes our time of testing. Moments such as this one come along rarely in history. They are either seized or lost, and the effects can reach across decades. The opportunity is here.

Thus in the media what may have begun as a value-free attempt to characterize political leanings descended without any caveat to a form of vilification. “Nationalist” became denunciatory codeword.

The amateur Nobel Committee implicitly gave its Prize this year to the opposite of Nobel’s will and vision as well as the opposite of the UN Charter norm of peace by peaceful means.