Asia & the Pacific

Putin and his government seek respect, stability from next U.S. administration, panel says.

As the policy community prepares to assess an agreement between the U.S. and its P5+1 partners and Iran, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker asked me to review the history of analogous agreements for lessons that illuminate the current challenge. In response to his assignment, I reviewed the seven decades of the nuclear era, during which the U.S. negotiated arms-control treaties, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968; strategic arms limitation talks and agreements from SALT to New Start; the North Korean accord of 1994; the agreements that helped eliminate nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the early 1990s; and the pact that eliminated the Libyan nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Among many lessons and clues from this instructive history, five stand out

"One of the dramas playing out this month in New York at the 2015 Review Conference for parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) concerns the future of discussions on establishing the weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East..."

The fallacy in the Bush administration's appointment of a commission to study intelligence failures is that there is almost never such a thing as a pure intelligence failure. Intelligence failure is usually linked to policy failure.

Dr. Ashton B. Carter testifies before the Robb-Silberman Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Dr. Ashton B. Carter testifies before the House Armed Services Committee.

A paper by the National Security Advisory Group

Op-Ed by Sam Nunn, William J. Perry, and Eugene Habiger in The Washington Post

The main challenge facing India's energy sector is to increase and improve the delivery of energy services to various sections of the citizenry and the economy in an environmentally and socially acceptable manner.