France is soon expected to become the first Western European NATO member to sell advanced military equipment to Russia, amid an aggressive search by Moscow for Western arms suppliers that has divided the country's elite, diplomats and defense analysts say.

The likely deal for at least one Mistral-class amphibious ship for the Russian navy is being watched closely in Washington — not only because of European willingness to arm NATO's former archenemy, but also because of Moscow's tacit acknowledgment of the poor state of its own military industry.

Russia, the world's top oil producer, is set to make deep inroads into Asian energy markets at the expense of Mideast rivals thanks to a new pipeline that pumps crude from the oil fields of Siberia to a new terminal on the Pacific Ocean.

The pipeline, a pet project of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, is key to Russia's efforts to diversify its export routes away from Europe and tap growing energy demand in Asia. It is also important to countries such as China that want to reduce their dependence on Middle East oil.

History is in the making in this Central Asian republic, the largest and the most developed of the former Soviet republics east of the Urals, as Kazakhstan assumed the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday.

This is the first time an Asian nation gets to chair the 56-member OSCE. President Nursultan Nazarbayev said Kazakhstan takes on that role during "an era complicated by the global financial crisis and tectonic shifts taking place in the global order."

Ever since President Barack Obama offered to push the "reset" button on U.S.-Russian relations, worries have mounted in Central and Eastern Europe that the White House would downgrade our security concerns. Obama's decision not to build an antimissile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic seemed to confirm those fears. Indeed, the fact that Obama's decision was announced on the 70th anniversary of Stalin's invasion of Poland incited an orgy of doubt about Washington's intentions.

But it is a mistake to invest historical coincidence with diplomatic significance. The only sensible debate about Eastern Europe's security centers on how to create a more constructive atmosphere. The question is not whether tensions between the U.S. and Russia should be defused, but how. Are they the result of misunderstandings, memory, or malice? Or do they reflect deeper causes? Part of the answer lies in our region's psychology. International relations are not governed by rationality alone. Remembering the long decades of occupation, many people in our part of the world are uneasy about the idea of the U.S. and Russia deciding their fate.

Russia and the United States are "really close" to agreement on a landmark treaty to cut their nuclear arsenals, a senior U.S. arms control official said on Wednesday.

The top U.S. negotiator was headed to Moscow for talks on a replacement for the Cold War-era START I treaty, said Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

The talks among the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members and Germany may expose differences within the group, as the United States pushes for more sanctions while China has made clear that it does not think the time was ripe.

The United States accuses Iran of using its civil nuclear program as a cover to pursue an atomic bomb and has led the push for more punitive measures within the Security Council, which has already passed three rounds of sanctions on Tehran.

The length of the NATO operation in Afghanistan will soon become comparable to that of the Soviet involvement there. But the military actions we conducted 20 years ago differed fundamentally from those of today.

We were fighting against the fathers of today’s Taliban militants face-to-face, whereas Western armies prefer to fight from the air. This allows them to save soldiers’ lives, but does not secure them from tragic mistakes that kill and wound civilians.

Resetting U.S.-Russian relations with a new tone of cooperation and trust under the personal stewardship of Presidents Obama and Medvedev has been billed by many Russian commentators as the most significant foreign policy event of 2009. But there is one issue - Iran’s nuclear program and how to deal with it - that continues to elude consensus between Russia and the United States. Has there been enough trust accumulated between Russian and American leaders to allow for a cooperative approach on Iran? Will Iran be able to exploit the differences between Russia and the United States to continue its clandestine nuclear program? Is the “reset” in jeopardy?

Last month, the West officially lost the new "Great Game." The 20-year competition for natural resources and influence in Central Asia between the United States (supported by the European Union), Russia and China has, for now, come to an end, with the outcome in favor of the latter two. Western defeat was already becoming clear with the slow progress of the Nabucco pipeline and the strategic reorientation of some Central Asian republics toward Russia and China. Two recent events, however, confirmed it.

America is going the way of ancient Rome. The past decade will be remembered as the pivotal tipping point where the United States ceased to be a superpower. Like the Roman Empire in its later stages, America's imperial grandeur masked moral rot and economic decay. The beginning of the 21st century promised continued U.S. global dominance. Our economic might seemed unrivaled; the dot-com boom had not yet gone bust. Washington was still basking in the warm glow of its victory in the Cold War. America bestrode the world like a military and economic colossus.