Atlantic Council blogs

‘CIA and State’ prepared list of Russians for swap before FBI arrested spies in US

By the Washington Post

From the Washington Post:  President Obama’s national security team spent weeks before the arrest of 10 Russian spies preparing for their takedown and assembling a list of prisoners Moscow might be willing to trade for the agents, senior administration officials said Friday.

Ahmet Davutoglu: ‘We Are a Part of the West’

By Newsweek

Afghan mission sparks heated German parliamentary debate

By Deutsche Welle

Former top Russian spy Sergei Tretyakov dies at 53

By Brett Zongker, the AP

NATO Officials To Brief On Afghan Intelligence Shake-Up

By the Eurasia Review

From the Eurasia Review:  Some 200 senior NATO officials and commanders will meet in The Hague, Netherlands, on 15 July, to announce the next steps in a radical overhaul of the way orders, intelligence and battle reports are shared between Alliance and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Transatlantic Data Sharing: Moving Forward By Moving Backwards

By James Joyner

With a refreshing candor almost never seen from sitting officials, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and European VP for Justice Viviane Reding vowed to work together to share data on terrorism and criminal investigations while safeguarding privacy of citizens on both sides of the Atlantic.  Despite the can-do attitude, they made it clear that the U.S. […]

Germany aims to begin Afghan handover in 2011

By Reuters

From Reuters:  Germany aims to hand over responsibility for security to Afghan forces in at least one of the country’s northern provinces next year, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Friday.

NATO Strategic Concept Drivers

By Harlan Ullman

Since its creation in 1949, NATO has been at one crucial crossroads or another in which the future of the alliance seemed at stake. Today, as NATO is working on a new Strategic Concept to replace the current one approved eleven years ago in 1999, the alliance must come to grips with the challenges and […]

Do the Rest Need the West?

By Nikolas Gvosdev

Three years ago, Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner and Steven Weber sounded a warning: the rest of the world was not necessarily looking to integrate into a Euro-Atlantic hub. They noted: "The landscape of globalization now looks like this: While connectivity for the globe as a whole has increased in the last twenty years, it is […]

Obama welcomes EU renewal of terrorist finance tracking agreement

By Barack Obama, the White House

From Barack Obama, the White House:  The United States welcomes today’s decision by the European Parliament to join the Council and Commission of the European Union in approving a revised agreement between the United States and the European Union on the processing and transfer of financial messaging data for the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP).