U.S., Russia say they are close to cooperation deal in Syrian war

Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meet in Geneva on Friday. (Martial Trezzini/AP)

The United States and Russia failed Friday to reach a final agreement on a U.S.-proposed deal to coordinate their air attacks on terrorist groups in Syria and to stop Russian and Syrian bombing of civilian and rebel-held areas, but said they were close and would continue discussions.

Kerry: Netanyahu Wrong on Iraq and Wrong on Iran

The nation’s top diplomat offered a decidedly undiplomatic take in describing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a potential nuclear deal with Iran.

“Israel is safer today with the added time we have given and the stoppage of the advances in the nuclear program than they were before we got that agreement, which by the way the prime minister opposed,” Secretary of State John Kerry said during a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing Wednesday. “He was wrong.”

Decoding China's Silk Diplomacy at Sea

China has proposed to revive the centuries-old ‘Silk Road of the Sea’ into a 21st century Maritime Silk Road (MSR). The MSR initiative has a clear strategic purpose and is a helpful channel for the Chinese grand strategy. It aims to seize the opportunity of transforming Asia and to create strategic space for China.

The success of the MSR initiative will be extremely consequential to regional stability and global peace. Today, China is in the process of remaking history at sea, and some scholars view it as ‘China’s maritime renaissance’. China’s growing merchant marine; expansion of its global shipbuilding market; increasing reach in building and managing off-shore ports and port facilities; and efforts to develop a modern blue-water navy are evident.

Managing unplanned encounters at sea

By Christian Le Mière, IISS Senior Fellow for Naval Forces and Maritime Security.

Asia-Pacific navies took a small step in confidence-building and safety at sea on 22 April 2014. At the 14^th meeting of the biennial Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS), the 21 member nations agreed to a Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), a document that outlines the methods of communication for naval vessels and aircraft that meet unplanned beyond territorial waters.

CUES has been discussed since the 7^th WPNS in 2000. At the last WPNS, in Thailand in 2012, China was the only country that rejected CUES; this was because, according to Ding Yiping – deputy commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and presiding chairman of the 14^th WPNS – the word ‘code’ suggested a legally binding agreement. CUES is specifically a non-binding agreement that lays out how navies should interact at sea.

E-diplomacy: Foreign policy in 140 characters

By Nick Bryant

The diplomatic world is considered to be one of protocol and discretion, yet an increasing number of foreign policy officials and diplomats are conducting their business in the most public way possible, on Twitter.

On the morning that Ratko Mladic appeared before the UN war crimes tribunal, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague took to Twitter to issue the kind of diplomatic broadside of which his predecessor, Viscount Palmerston, would have been proud.