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HEIDELBERG, Germany (AFP) - The United States is going to reduce the number of American ground soldiers stationed in Europe to 24,000 from the current 64,000 troops within the next five to 10 years, a US army spokeswoman said. The proposed troop reduction would result in only four of the 13 main operating bases remaining. The four bases would be; Wiesbaden in central Germany, which would become the European headquarters for US ground forces, and Kaiserslautern in western Germany, Grafenwoehr in southern Germany and Vicenza in northern Italy, according to the spokeswoman, Elke Herberger. The number of US army barracks...

There are two basic questions that people who write about Europe get asked more than any others. First: Is Europe still Europe? When Americans read in the papers about the wave of mosque-burnings after the murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland last November, those who sometime visit Europe will wonder whether this kind of thing goes on often, and whether it has any connection to the tranquil Europe where they vacation. Those who haven’t been to Europe lately may be thunderstruck to hear that there are mosques in the Netherlands at all. The second question is of interest to...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. President George W. Bush's "charm offensive" in Old Europe largely fizzled, but that was okay. The issues that divide the United States and the European Union are still there, and that's good. The EU still wants Washington to join the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty and the International Criminal Court, while planning to sell weapons to China and still criticizing American policy in Iraq. In opposing the EU on all these issues, the Bush administration is acting wisely in defense of U.S. national interests. An issue that was missing from the various...

Sept. 11, 2001, should have made it clear that the status quo was no longer tolerable. For the 20 years prior to that date, most of us in the West had managed to delude ourselves about the threat of Islamofascism. But after that day, no longer. The first steps towards transformation in the Muslim world were taken in Afghanistan, where we now see the beginnings of democracy. Had the Taliban not been toppled, the Afghan people would still be in a figurative prison, and Al Qaeda would still have a secure base from which to slaughter civilians. But Afghanistan was...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- The tectonic plates of geopolitics have just shifted. On an issue of major strategic concern to the United States, the European Union has decided to flout American concerns and side with China, and Britain has put its vaunted "special relationship" with the United States to one side, and has gone along with its fellow Europeans. A new world order is coming. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw heads to Beijing this week to kowtow before the Middle Kingdom, and tell his Chinese hosts that Britain's long opposition to removing the European embargo from selling arms to...

NEW DELHI: The tsunami tragedy has changed the map of the world; but phoenix-like, from the devastation, a political healing process may have begun. First the UN and the US. Relations between the superpower and the world body had turned decidedly frosty in the wake of the Iraq War. Now with the US, together with Japan, Australia and India, deciding to coordinate disaster relief to ravaged countries, there might be a thaw between the two. Significantly, the UN chief emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, has welcomed the move. In another sign the tsunami may lead to a reforging of equations,...

Agence France Presse -- English November 18, 2004 Thursday 8:59 PM GMT Chirac calls for multilateralism, fresh efforts on Middle East LONDON Nov 18 President Jacques Chirac called Thursday for a new world order based on multilateralism and he appealed to the United States and Europe to "rally together" to promote peace in the Middle East. Chirac warned that a world ruled by "the logic of power" was certain to be unstable and headed for conflict. Chirac -- in London to mark the centenary of the entente cordiale, a diplomatic agreement ending centuries of warfare -- has been an outspoken...

It was a moment of vintage Cold War defiance. Addressing the annual congress of Moscow's Red Army, the leader of the world's largest country announced the development of a secret nuclear weapon. It would give the Kremlin the edge over its rivals. It would be a weapon that "other nuclear powers do not and will not possess". Such tub-thumping boasts may have been standard fare during the nuclear arms race of the 1960s and 1970s. This announcement, however, was part of an address by Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in Moscow earlier this week. The pugnacious rhetoric comes amid signs...

The election campaign that has mesmerized America - and the world - is over. What remains are the challenges that gave rise to this occasionally frenzied battle and the responsibility of dealing with them. No president has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is not hyperbole; it is the hand history has dealt this generation. Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order to replace the traditional ones that went up in the smoke of the World Trade...

The election campaign that has mesmerized America - and the world - is over. What remains are the challenges that gave rise to this occasionally frenzied battle and the responsibility of dealing with them. . No president has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is not hyperbole; it is the hand history has dealt this generation. Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order to replace the traditional ones that went up in the smoke of the World...

Gulliver’s travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world by John O’Sullivan Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swift’s satire was, you recall, an English sea doctor who, having sunk exhausted on a foreign beach after his ship was wrecked, woke up to discover miniscule Lilliputians had tied him down with slender threads and tiny pegs. In this telling, the international community—that comfortable euphemism for the U.N., the WTO, the ICC, other U.N. agencies, and the massed ranks...

Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swift’s satire was, you recall, an English sea doctor who, having sunk exhausted on a foreign beach after his ship was wrecked, woke up to discover miniscule Lilliputians had tied him down with slender threads and tiny pegs. In this telling, the international community — that comfortable euphemism for the U.N., the WTO, the ICC, other U.N. agencies, and the massed ranks of NGOs — sought to constrain America’s freedom of...

If a new Iraq government should agree to let American forces stay on, how many bases will the US request? One, as the United States Army currently maintains in Honduras? Six, the number of installations it lists in the Netherlands. Or maybe 12? The Pentagon isn't saying. But a dozen is the number of so-called "enduring bases" located by John Pike, director of GlobalSecurities.org. His military affairs website gives their names. They include, for example, Camp Victory at the Baghdad airfield and Camp Renegade in Kirkuk. The Chicago Tribune last March said US engineers are constructing 14 "enduring bases," but...

Like old times Sunday, September 12th, 2004 Three years after 9/11, the grand, anti-fascist coalition of World War II is now falling into place. First, it was America alone. Then Great Britain threw in. Now, here comes Russia. It has taken three years because Moscow's impulse is always to cooperate with fascism. Stalin made this mistake in 1939 by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler and woke up two years later with the German Army marching through Russia. Vladimir Putin's government (and before it, Boris Yeltsin's government and successive Communist regimes) made similar miscalculations. Russia helped Iran with its nuclear...

The two sides remain entrenched, their rhetorical sallies increasing in ferocity, their claims and counterclaims ricocheting through the political landscape. Democrats and Republicans? Nope: that’s so 2000. This time the war is between the new and the old media, between established pillars of journalism and a bunch of new, ornery and sometimes reckless upstarts.It’s the subtext of the 2004 campaign and it has already begun to shape the American presidential race in ways that would have been difficult to accomplish two years ago, let alone four. There are, I think, three genuinely new power brokers in American politics in this...

Global Transaction Strategy Operation Iraqi Freedom could be a first step toward a larger goal: true globalization.By Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney Jr.Thomas P.M. Barnett is on temporary assignment from the Naval War College as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Henry H. Gaffney Jr. is a team leader with the Center for Strategic Studies, The CNA Corp., Alexandria, Va.The Bush administration's response to the terrorist attack of Sept. 11 was both swift (the global war on terrorism) and profound (the Department of Homeland Security). With last...

Top Pentagon officials are considering a new, long-term strategy that shifts spending and resources away from large-scale warfare to build more agile, specialized forces for fighting guerrilla wars, confronting terrorism and handling less conventional threats, officials said yesterday. The proposal, presented two weeks ago to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others, could carry major implications for defense spending, eventually moving some funds away from ships, tanks and planes and toward troops, elite Special Operations forces and intelligence gathering. The shift has been building for some time, but the plan circulating at the Pentagon would accelerate the changes, analysts said....

In August, U.S. President George W. Bush announced an ambitious ten-year plan for the redeployment of U.S. military forces around the world. Presented at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the announcement was clothed in an electoral appeal to veterans' interests, leaving its strategic implications in the background. The responses from the camp of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry did little to clarify strategic issues and simply affirmed the status quo. The diversionary discourse about troop redeployment policy does a disservice to its strategic importance. An integral component of the Bush administration's National Security Strategy, troop redeployment...

The Cold War has been over for more than a decade, but you wouldn't know it from the way U.S. military forces are deployed around the world. That's why President Bush's announcement last week about redeploying American troops is such good news. It is no secret that the U.S. military is stretched thin to meet the demands arising in the wake of 9/11. The redeployment plan will take some of the pressure off while making U.S. forces more flexible, responsive, and better able to contend with the "tyranny of distance." The current overseas base structure is the result of...

U.S. wants to begin moving Army corps HQ to Japan in Nov Monday, August 16, 2004 at 07:20 JST WASHINGTON — The United States has told Japan it wants to begin transferring the headquarters of the U.S. Army's I Corps from Fort Lewis, Washington, to Camp Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, in November, sources close to Japan-U.S. relations said Sunday. Tokyo appears cautious about the U.S. proposal, which involves completing the transfer by April 2006, especially as the Japanese government is already faced with strong opposition from local authorities where U.S. camps and bases involved in the global realignment plan are located....