Carol J. Williams is a retired foreign correspondent with 30 years' reporting abroad for the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press. She has reported from more than 80 countries, with a focus on USSR/Russia and Eastern Europe.
What Putin proposes to ease escalating tensions he instigated by massing Russian forces on Ukraine’s border is for the U.S. government to pledge that Ukraine will never be allowed to join the defense alliance.
The 30th anniversary of the Soviet demise on Saturday has, at least in part, inspired Putin’s provocative buildup of troops and tanks on Ukraine’s border as he threatens once again to retake parts of Russia’s lost empire by armed force.
It was a calm, slow-motion transition since Angela Merkel announced in 2018 that she would not seek a fifth term after 16 years as chancellor. She anointed her preferred candidate.
“China’s increasingly coercive approach to Taiwan puts almost daily pressure on the cross-Strait status quo and increases the potential for a military crisis.”
None of the three criteria identified by the United Nations as measures of success for the global confab were achieved in full at the conference that ran two weeks and into overtime over the weekend.
“People don't understand what this kind of brain damage can do to you. So, it's very easy for people to be dismissive and say, 'But you look fine.' But the reality is, I'm not. And I don't think very many of us are. And we just want to have our lives back.”
The diplomatic scramble to rescue the Afghan people from total economic collapse and widespread hunger rests on a theory that Western democracies can compel a more moderate Taliban rule through the provision of aid and measured collaboration with the regime when necessary.