US President Barack Obama has called the ratification of a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia "a national security imperative", adding that the US Senate must act before a new Congress arrives.

The treaty would reduce both countries' nuclear arsenals and allow each to inspect the other's facilities.

Mr Obama has expressed confidence the measure will pass successfully.

But some Republicans have resisted the administration's push, saying it should not be voted on this year.

Senate Republicans have also claimed they need further reassurance about America's nuclear deterrent capability after Start.

The president's announcement came one day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed Congress to ratify the treaty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11792326

• Mission statement takes in nuclear weapons and Turkey
• Alliance to co-operate with Russia on missile defence

The leaders of Nato's 28 member states also pledged last night to work towards a nuclear-free world, in line with Barack Obama's announcement in Prague last year, but stressed that "as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, Nato will remain a nuclear alliance"

Russia has agreed to co-operate on Nato's programme to defend against ballistic missile attacks, Nato's chief has said.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a Nato summit in Lisbon that the two sides had agreed in writing that they no longer posed a threat to one another.

"For the first time the two sides will be co-operating to defend themselves," Mr Rasmussen said.

The Lisbon summit has been redrawing Nato's focus to face new challenges.

'Real importance'

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said of the summit: "A period of very difficult, tense relations has been overcome."

This is the first Nato summit Russia has attended since the Russia-Georgia war two years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11803931

Where's the American empire when we need it?

By Robert D. Kaplan
Friday, December 3, 2010; 8:00 PM 

Currency wars. Terrorist attacks. Military conflicts. Rogue regimes pursuing nuclear weapons. Collapsing states. And now, massive leaks of secret documents. What is the cause of such turbulence? The absence of empire.

During the Cold War, the world was divided between the Soviet and U.S. imperial systems. The Soviet imperium - heir to Kievan Rus, medieval Muscovy and the Romanov dynasty - covered Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia and propped up regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The American imperium - heir to maritime Venice and Great Britain - also propped up allies, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia. True to the garrison tradition of imperial Rome, Washington kept bases in West Germany, Turkey, South Korea and Japan, virtually surrounding the Soviet Union.

The breakup of the Soviet empire, though it caused euphoria in the West and led to freedom in Central Europe, also sparked ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. (In Tajikistan alone, more than 50,000 people were killed in a civil war that barely registered in the U.S. media in the 1990s.)

The Soviet collapse also unleashed economic and social chaos in Russia itself, as well as the further unmooring of the Middle East. It was no accident that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell, just as it is inconceivable that the United States would have invaded Iraq if the Soviet Union, a staunch patron of Baghdad, still existed in 2003. And had the Soviet empire not fallen apart or ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden never would have taken refuge there and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might not have happened. Such are the wages of imperial collapse.

Now the other pillar of the relative peace of the Cold War, the United States, is slipping, while new powers such as China and India remain unready and unwilling to fill the void. There will be no sudden breakdown on our part, as the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, is sturdily maintained by economic and political freedom. Rather, America's ability to bring a modicum of order to the world is simply fading in slow motion.

The days of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency are numbered, just as our diplomacy is hobbled by wide-ranging security leaks that are specific to an age of electronic communication, itself hostile to imperial rule.

Then there is America's military power. Armies win wars, but in an age when the theater of conflict is global, navies and air forces are more accurate registers of national might. (Any attack on Iran, for example, would be a sea and air campaign.) The U.S. Navy has gone from nearly 600 warships in the Reagan era to fewer than 300 today, while the navies of China and India grow apace. Such trends will accelerate with the defense cuts that are surely coming in order to rescue America from its fiscal crisis. The United States still dominates the seas and the air and will do so for years ahead, but the distance between it and other nations is narrowing.

Terrorist acts, ethnic atrocities, the yearning after horrible weaponry and the disclosure of secret cables are the work of individuals who cannot escape their own moral responsibility. But the headlines of our era are written in a specific context - that of one deceased empire that used to be the world's preeminent land power and of another, the world's preeminent sea power, that finds itself less able to affect events than ever before, even as it is less sure than ever of the cause toward which it struggles.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120303448_pf.html

Gus: now, does the world of humans need an empire to lead it wherever? The simple answer is NO... The complex answer is unfortunately, there are a lot of loose ends, where people are at the wrong end of faiths and extreme beliefs in our human stylistic expression. These can be contain, not so much by the stick of empire but by local lids. On top of this an empire gives the impression of something huge like a beast to slay, while we should contain the crap at local level. The problem with empire is that if often tries to tell us what we should think or do, with no recourse to reality, and with the empire hypocritically contradicting itself to achieve its aim of control — which often have nothing to do with protecting the population at large but cocoon the elite whose desires is to shine above the rest of us. 

Talks between Russia and NATO have done little to bridge differences over Libya and a missile defence shield in Europe.

At a meeting in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov pressed NATO's secretary-general over the alliance's role in Libya.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev also met South African president Jacob Zuma for separate talks on Libya.

Russia abstained from the UN Security Council vote authorising the operation, but has since argued NATO has gone far beyond the mandate to protect civilians.

"We look at Libya's future practically identically, and everyone would like Libya to be a modern state, naturally, and a sovereign and democratic state," Mr Medvedev said.

But NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended the aerial bombing operation in Libya, saying NATO and Russia had similar hopes for the African nation.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/07/05/3260963.htm?section=justin