Iran Nuclear file

This post lays it out very well. The tit for tat between the US and Iran may lead to a nuclear armed Iran. Iran is, has been, and continues to be ambivalent on the matter. This being the case every negative action toward Iran (at least publicly, silent conflicts do not at present seem to illicit the same) causes Iran to enhance its proliferation activities in the direction that could lead to the weaponizing threshold. Excellent post from Patrick Disney from his presentation at CSIS.

What the US can learn from Germany and India about Terrorism

Over the past year both India and Germany have been the victims of terrorist attacks. The responce to the attacks could not be a clearer indication of the maturinty of these states to that of the US hyper nutty responces.
Germanys, see FP.
Indias see DFP
No time to source all the reps but good insight compared to raging across two continents.

Nato

What is the US problem with Nato. Nato is a defense agreement not an expeditionary force agreement. Gates running around talking about it's irrelevance is a bit absurd. NATO has been less relevant since the USSR fell apart. It is still good for incorporating the states into a common military structure, getting the smaller states good training with larger member states, and if necessary acting in the common defense of Europe. There are to many states with separate national interests in NATO to be an effective expeditionary force type treaty. That is why Britain and France have teamed up to share an aircraft carrier, Germany France and Poland are creating a joint force (even though Germany's disapproval of the Libyan mission and Frances enthusiasm flies in the face of that being valuable for expeditionary missions), and Poland is now leading the mild counterbalance force against any Russian aggression. Vicegrad (good post at TRDefence) is likely created by insecurity on the part of some of the new NATO members. They worry about the alliances willingness to defend them. They still have a huge deterrence benefit of being in NATO