Amid a struggle between two major clerical factions for control of Iran's influential Assembly of Experts, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to shore up his conservative base by portraying himself as a man with a direct link to god.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's tour of Japan, China and South Korea last week to rally support for tough measures against North Korea underscored Japan's growing military dependence on Washington.
Many foreign policy challenges lie ahead for Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, but his most pressing concern is much closer at hand: North Korea, especially in the wake of its declaration of a nuclear test on Oct.9.
While widely deplored by the world community, North Korea's recent nuclear test has also prompted fresh calls for the major powers to get serious about dismantling their own weapons of mass destruction.
While United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is touring North-east Asia, rallying support for tough enforcement of United Nations sanctions on North Korea, China has mounted diplomatic efforts to forestall escalation of the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear programme.
The United States and China, two veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, may be heading for a political showdown over the implementation of a resolution aimed at imposing tough economic and military sanctions on North Korea.
An announcement that the government intends to produce nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is provoking heated debate.
New evidence is emerging of cancers caused by French nuclear testing in its South Pacific islands from the 1960s.
How is North Korea's atomic explosion, signifying the latest breakout from the global nuclear restraint regime, likely to affect the preceding two breakout cases, India and Pakistan?
When U. Thant of Burma (now Myanmar) was the first - and last - Asian Secretary-General of the United Nations during 1961-1971, the former Burmese ambassador was described as modest and low-key compared with his high-profile predecessor, Sweden's Dag Hammarskjold, who died in a plane crash in Africa in 1961.
For the many, many foreign policy experts who have reached an advanced state of despair over the ever-plunging image and influence of the United States after nearly six years of the presidency of George W. Bush, the name James Baker III has an almost talismanic quality.
North Korea's underground nuclear weapons test, the first by the Stalinist state, has plunged East Asia into its worst security crisis - a situation so bad that analysts contend the fallout could be a string of difficult problems in the region.
Encouraging Japan to build nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines, and running secret sabotage operations inside North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy prescriptions pushed by prominent U.S. neo-conservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's nuclear test.
In a first reaction to North Korea conducting nuclear tests, Iran has said that the best way to stop proliferation was for the big powers to begin disarmament themselves.
In its initial reaction to Monday's North Korean nuclear test, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush indicated it will seek the strongest possible sanctions against Pyongyang at the U.N. Security Council but was not considering taking military action on its own, at least for now.
North Korea has shocked the world by detonating a nuclear explosion and making good the threat it had held out six days earlier. Pyongyang's action is one more blow to the existing global non-proliferation order and will trigger greater instability in Northeast Asia and in the Asian continent and world as a whole.
While it reproved North Korea's readiness to conduct nuclear tests China has been laying the ground for what it considers unavoidable.
President George W. Bush and his peripatetic secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, may believe that they have broken with 60 years of U.S. policy in order to "transform" the Middle East, but to long-time regional observers, their latest initiatives look painfully familiar.
The controversial United States-India "civilian nuclear cooperation" agreement met with a major setback over the weekend when the Senate formally went into recess without voting for a bill which would have granted the President George W. Bush the necessary powers to enable the deal to be implemented.
After two years of consultations with more than 400 members of the U.S. foreign policy elite, a project headed by two leading international relations academics is calling for the adoption of a new U.S. grand strategy designed to address multiple threats and strengthen Washington's commitment to a reformed and reinvigorated multilateral order.
The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) recently retired top expert on radical Islamists has strongly denounced the conduct of U.S. President George W. Bush's "global war on terrorism" and the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, which he said is "contributing to the violence".