The Obama administration quietly convened its first meeting with 10 key allies this week to try to build consensus on new economic sanctions aimed at punishing Iran for its nuclear program.

The grouping -- which participants have informally dubbed "the coalition of the like-minded nations" -- included representatives of the Group of Seven bloc of industrialized nations, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and South Korea, according to participants in the meeting.

The United States denied on Friday that it planned to station U.S. radar systems in Ukraine, after published remarks by a U.S. defense official prompted Moscow to call for clarification.

NATO urged Russia to consider sending equipment and offering training for Afghanistan’s army, to help the alliance hand over more of the war to local forces.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen used the eighth anniversary of the U.S. attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan to float ideas for greater support from Russia, which was bloodied by the Soviet Union’s failed occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Turkey has dropped a key condition to signing an agreement Saturday that would reopen its border with Armenia and establish diplomatic relations between the two nations, which have been divided for generations by a dispute over genocide.

"The agreement will be signed on Oct. 10," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told The Wall Street Journal -- provided, he said, that Armenia doesn't ask for changes to the text.

Over the next few weeks, Barack Obama must make the most difficult decision of his presidency to date: whether or not to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as his commanding general there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has reportedly proposed.

Poland and the Czech Republic are being offered roles in the Obama administration's new plan to defend Europe against Iran's development and deployment of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, senior administration officials told Congress on Thursday.

Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.

Hours after the European Union released a report on the origins of the August 2008 war in South Ossetia, Georgia challenged one of the main findings, saying a Russian invasion was already under way when Georgia attacked South Ossetia, a separatist enclave.

Now that the United States and Russia have kissed and made up over missile defence in Eastern Europe, there’s a logical next step to averting a new Cold War. Russia should join Nato.

For some armchair strategists, President Obama's decision to scrap President George W. Bush's plan to deploy ballistic-missile-defense hardware in Poland and the Czech Republic was rank appeasement that would merely sharpen the Russian bear's appetite for more unilateral concessions that could only weaken America's defense posture. That was sound Cold War thinking. For some, the Cold War's villains continue in sheep's clothing. Moscow still craves recognition as the dominant power in the former Soviet Union.