

The appointment of a new mediator for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict lasting for 25 years now, is a good moment to ask whether Washington could be undertaking more to resolve the dispute.

The administration of Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan embraced a Russian takeover of the nation’s economy that left political control in Armenian hands. As Sargsyan began to have second thoughts about this bargain, he found himself short of options.

All the shadows and ghosts of the conflicts of the last three decades make it hard for any decision maker to focus on what is the best policy for Syria itself.

A generation ago, Vladimir Putin would have been a strongly patriotic Soviet leader. Now Putin has to be modest in his efforts to "re-gather" the former Soviet republics. The Customs Union is one such project. Promoting the Russian language is another.

Vladimir Putin’s one-day visit to Baku on August 13 was fertile ground for Kremlinological speculation. The formal part of the negotiations revealed very little. It is more productive to focus on who was not in Baku and what was not said.

Despite the similarity of their names, the European Union and the Eurasian Union are fundamentally different projects, one based on pooling sovereignty, the other on reasserting Moscow’s economic primacy in its neighborhood.

The new contender from the United National Movement, parliament minority leader David Bakradze has made this October’s election for president of Georgia something to watch.

Along with Kashmir’s Line of Control, North Korea and Nagorny Karabakh surely comprise the three most militarized borders in the world. All of them are disputed lines on the map that mark a truce rather than a political settlement.

Can Russia and Georgia work together to thwart any security threat? The best evidence suggests that they are each planning for a quiet trouble-free Winter Olympics—but independently of one another.

Sometimes doing nothing can look like the smartest political move. In Armenia, it seems to be the favorite political tactic of President Serzh Sargsyan.