However undiplomatic it may have been, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's reference to French and German concerns about a possible U.
On the Saturday before Christmas, I re-entered the United States and picked up the Friday issue of the Wall Street Journal, among other things, to catch up on the news on the plane from my Port of Entry back to Denver.
Pierre Hassner's "friendly questions" (In the National Interest, December 4, 2002) are indeed mostly friendly and reflect the sentiments of one of Europe's most preeminent defense intellectuals, but deserve a friendly rejoinder.
If the world did change after 9/11, the post-Soviet states of Central Asia seem to be the main beneficiaries.
With the unanimous passage by the Security Council of a tough and intrusive mechanism of inspections and failure-to-comply consequences on Baghdad, the world is poised to disarm Iraq.
This past Monday, I took part in a forum at Georgetown University, the purpose of which was to examine the implications, for both American and European security, of the enlargement of NATO.
The idea of formally integrating the world's two largest economies-Japan and the United States-has been floated every two years or so, since the 1980s.
Soon after the September 11 attacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech proclaiming Russia's readiness to become a reliable alternative for oil in case of a shortfall from an unstable Middle East.
When not publicly attacking the Bush Administration, European statesmen tend, at least on the quiet, to deprecate their American counterparts as the rude products of a "cowboy" culture.
A summit meeting between China's President Jiang Zemin and President George Bush has been scheduled for late October in Crawford, Texas.