At the risk of too much Bush-blogging, one has to wonder about the irritation level in Athens as George Bush continues to make the case for Macedonia’s admission to NATO, even against the backdrop described by Doug Muir over the last week. Here he is in St Mark’s Square in Zagreb –

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Nicolas Sarkozy was in Cherbourg to name the latest French SSBN, the appropriately named Le Terrible, this week; and he had a few things to say about the circumstances under which she might be called on to fire her M51 SLBMs. The headline grabber, which everyone picked up on, was that France is going to [...]

Over at the Small Wars Journal’s blog, they’re wondering if part of the problem in dealing with failed states, the aftermath of wars, peacekeeping and the like is that it’s nobody’s job to provide a police force, and specifically a real civilian one that does things like investigating crimes.
This was, of course, a bitter problem [...]

For some reason, there is hardly ever any NATO coverage on this blog, despite the fact it’s the other pan-European institution. The Euro-Atlantic alliance is having a summit next month, to be held in Riga. Now, one of the main topics for this gathering is the long-running one of adapting NATO to challenges other than [...]