Word: bucharest
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Wednesday's NATO summit in Bucharest may be remarkable for the presence of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, leader of the power against whose precursor the alliance was originally created. Moreover, Putin will follow the summit by taking its most powerful leader, President George W. Bush, back to his vacation home at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. But the formal bonhomie won't hide the escalating tension in the relationship between Washington and Moscow. President Bush on Tuesday strongly backed NATO membership bids by the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, a move fiercely opposed by Moscow, which...
...said that the latest U.S. proposals on missile defense in Europe "do not satisfy our security requirements." That could simply be raising the ante in the bargaining process, but it also creates a fallback position should Putin fail to achieve his desired results on Georgia and Ukraine during the Bucharest summit...
Afghanistan will top the agenda when NATO member nations gather this week in Bucharest to discuss the state of the alliance. General Dan McNeil, commander of the alliance's 43,250 troops in Afghanistan, has lobbied for reinforcements to help battle the rising insurgency in the country's south. But commanders on the ground would also like a little more help from the Afghans on whose behalf they're fighting. "Frankly, defeating the Taliban is the least of our worries," says one. "They are not going to beat us. It's not them that are crippling the economy. What...
...Bucharest, the U.S., Canada and others have called on a handful of European countries to increase their troop and equipment contributions to the Afghan war. Speaking to European leaders in Germany last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that NATO "must not - cannot - become a two-tiered alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not." But according to commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, that two-tiered alliance is already here. While French President Nicolas Sarkozy is widely expected to announce at the summit that he is sending another 1,000 French troops...
Speaking to TIME, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer denies that the rift between NATO members is "a question of Europe vs. America." De Hoop Scheffer says he will ask for 10% more troops at Bucharest, and stresses that Europeans have suffered casualties. But he acknowledges that he will "keep pushing" all the allies to do more. He needs to. The U.S., its armed forces already stretched like a piano wire, is now being forced to dispatch another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan. The Canadian government of Stephen Harper took the unusual step of threatening to pull...