Poland's air force will continue policing the airspace of three Baltic countries as part of its role in a NATO mission, despite one of them — Lithuania — refusing to attend joint talks.

Today’s economic difficulties may tempt European nations to become introverted. But the need for a confident, compelling, outward-looking Europe has never been greater.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stressed the importance of Smart Defence as the answer to pressure on defence budgets in talks with Italian leaders in Rome on 27 April 2012.

Turkey warned Syria today not to repeat border violations, implying that it could use force to protect its border and call on NATO to respond to a potential Syrian attack.

The growing gulf between France and Germany was underlined as the eurozone's two biggest economies clashed over tackling the debt crisis.

Visiting Spain ahead of the Chicago Summit, Rasmussen met with President of the Spanish Government Mariano Rajoy, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo and Minister of Defence Pedro Morenes, in Madrid on 26 April 2012.

Russian warships will be equipped with NATO navigation and communications systems to improve coordination in anti-piracy missions around the world, Chief of the Russian General Staff Nikolai Makarov said on Wednesday.

If the Obama administration wants Congress to finance a new missile shield in Eastern Europe, it will have to first get NATO to agree to foot part of the bill.

Chiefs of Defence met NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Wednesday for strategic discussion on the Alliance’s priorities and challenges for the medium and longer term.

"We – secure allies in the most literal meaning of the world – have common interests as well as common challenges and we make joint efforts to resolve these challenges," said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, at the meeting of Estonian, Latvian, Polish heads of state

NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow will attend a high-level conference on missile defense in Moscow next week, a senior official for the Western military alliance said Monday.

Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to hold a referendum on Europe's fiscal pact, dealing a hammerblow to Angela Merkel's "non-negotiable" plans to impose austerity on the eurozone.

EU Council chief Herman Van Rompuy has spoken out against the "winds of populism" threatening freedom of movement in the Union - a swipe at anti-immigrant discourse in French elections and on the Dutch political scene.

Inspectors have found no weapons aboard a German-owned ship suspected earlier of carrying arms and ammunition to Syria in breach of an arms embargo, a German government source said on Wednesday.

Greece's central bank governor said his country would have to leave the eurozone if politicians do not stick to the austerity programme after elections due to take place on 6 May.

Angela Merkel launched a staunch defence of Europe's fiscal pact as politicians from the Netherlands, Spain and Greece scrambled to keep their own austerity measures on track.

Nationalist and leftist groups marched on Saturday in a central Russian city to protest a proposal by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to set up a transit hub for goods shipped to and from Afghanistan.

According to the diplomats, support for Afghan security forces would cost, at a minimum, a whopping $4.1 billion per year.

Congressional investigators said the Defense Department is committing to technologies before they are proven and that the administration is risking "performance shortfalls, unexpected cost increases, schedule delays and test problems."

EU leaders share responsibility for the rise in popularity of anti-European parties, the European Commission said Monday (23 April) but rejected the notion that austerity measures are contributing to the trend.

Key working sessions were flagged as ‘NATO Capabilities’ to ensure that “NATO is fit for the future”, Afghanistan moving towards and after the 2014 troop withdrawal and NATO-Russia relations, with Foreign Minister Lavrov in attendance.

NATO has already stressed more than once that such military response steps on the part of Russia do not help promote trust and cooperation.

Foreign ministers from NATO and ISAF partner nations and organisations discussed how they plan to back a successful transition in Afghanistan at talks at NATO headquarters on 19 April.

Although not on the official agenda of today's meeting of NATO Foreign and Defense ministers, the continuing violence in Syria forced NATO leaders to discuss the issue and its impact on the alliance.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen praised His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan for his country’s valued security partnership during talks at NATO headquarters on Tuesday, 17 April 2012.

That timetable puts Australian forces on a quicker withdrawal schedule than Prime Minister Julia Gillard had previously described.

The US is spending more on its military than EU countries, China and Russia put together. Meanwhile, as US President Barack Obama pulls troops out of Europe, the financial crisis is seeing EU capabilities erode.

But the report and more than 300 pages of supporting documents, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, offer telling new details about shortcomings in planning, staffing and conducting the combat mission, as well as how commanders improvised

Yet despite all the lip service, hardly anything is being done to pool and share. One reason is that governments are loath to weaken their control over anything that involves defense. That would entail ceding some sovereignty and losing some jobs.

A German-owned ship tried to deliver weapons from Iran to the Syrian regime. Once reports emerged, though, the Atlantic Cruiser disappeared for hours on end. The case is dubious and has alarmed politicians in many countries.

Ramms: That's how I see it. I have publicly stated time and again that these discussions about the withdrawal send a false message. It sends a false message to the soldiers, to our own populations, to the Afghan people and also to the Taliban.

The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council and the United States have tentatively agreed to build a regional ballistic missile defense system, Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed al-Khalifa said on Thursday.

The EU has welcomed Spain's plan to cut another ?10 billion off its yearly budget, but the measure failed to stop speculation the country could be next in line for a bail-out.

“Those who spread ‘the news’ about [the deployment of] ‘NATO bases in the Russian Federation’ are either provocateurs or simply idiots. You may consider it an official statement,” wrote Rogozin, Moscow’s former envoy to NATO.

Afghanistan and the United States reached a deal on Sunday to curb night raids on Afghan homes, giving Kabul a veto over the operations despised by most local people and clearing the way for a wider pact securing a U.S. presence.

A Russian guided-missile destroyer that called in the Syrian port of Tartus last week left it to carry out unspecified tasks near the country’s shores, a military-diplomatic source said.

The Obama administration and its European allies plan to open new negotiations with Iran by demanding the immediate closing and ultimate dismantling of a recently completed nuclear facility deep under a mountain.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s “letter to the French”, unveiled on 5 April, contained no major new ideas on European matters, limiting itself largely to repeating already-announced proposals on Schengen and ‘reciprocity’ in trade.

Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko is to be appointed new Russian envoy to NATO. He will replace Dmitry Rogozin, who returned to Moscow in December last year, in the post.

A Russian newspaper has reported that the military has begun deploying S-400 mobile surface-to-air missiles in Kaliningrad, the Baltic exclave bordered by Poland and Lithuania.

The U.S. Trident ballistic missile program could be seriously impacted if Scotland chooses to evict British nuclear-armed submarines from its territory following a vote in favor of secession from the United Kingdom.

A pensioner committed suicide in the centre of Athens Wednesday (4 April) giving a public face to the hardship endured by many Greeks as the country slashes spending to satisfy international creditors.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined the goals of the upcoming NATO Summit during a speech in Virginia on Tuesday.

Turkey has drawn up plans for safe zones across its border in Syria to help absorb refugees and is preparing to take more aggressive steps to protect Syrian civilians, and the failure of international diplomacy to halt the violence, a senior official said

Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.) and a bipartisan group of 53 other House members called on President Obama to ensure that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invites Macedonia to the group during a planned May summit meeting in Chicago.

Next month, we will take another step in this evolution when President Obama hosts the NATO Summit in Chicago.

The missile -- designed to hit targets at distances greater than 3,100 miles -- includes components nearly as sophisticated as systems used by the United States.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen praised Georgia’s commitment to NATO and to domestic reforms on 3 April as he welcomed President Mikheil Saakashvili to the Alliance’s headquarters in Brussels.

Police in the Netherlands arrested a 60-year old employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is suspected of taking bribes and transferring classified information to Russian spies, local media reported on Monday.

Senate Resolution 395 expressing support for NATO and the upcoming summit in Chicago was adopted. The resolution had four bipartisan co-sponsors, Sen. Richard Durbin [D-IL], Sen. Mark Kirk [R-IL], Sen. Jeanne Shaheen [D-NH], and Sen. Richard Lugar [R-IN].

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave assurances to neighboring Iran that a US radar deployed in Turkey as part of a NATO missile defense system is not a threat to Tehran.

Ukraine initialled a landmark Association Agreement with the EU and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Although this is only a technical step before the official signature, the Commission said the move was important.

Europe's political centre is starting to crumble, replicating the pattern of the early 1930s as the crisis ground into its third year under a similar mix of fiscal and monetary contraction.

What is needed is a European Marshall Plan similar to that the Americans funded at the end of World War Two to rebuild Europe’s war-torn economy.

Today, in the case of Syria, any military action needs to be carefully thought through, but we should not refuse to act simply because of the worst-case scenarios being raised by the Pentagon.

Leaders of NATO will meet for a summit in Chicago this May to conclude their Deterrence and Defense Posture Review, which was intended to be a vehicle for resolving key questions about the future role of nuclear weapons in NATO policy.

These three problems—lack of lack of defense spending, lack of new critical capabilities, and lack of strategic coherence—must be immediately tended to should NATO wish to remain a viable security alliance in the 21st century.

Europe will instead hurtle towards its great, final, and obliterating crisis, cursed by sheer lack of imagination. The Project will be defended by its fanatics in the bunkers.

Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's peace plan for Syria could be a step in the right direction. The plan calls for a Syrian-led political process under UN supervision to bring about a cessation of armed violence across the country.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte resigned on Monday after his coalition failed to gain support from the far-right Freedom Party for budget-cutting measures aimed at bringing the deficit down to three percent of GDP by next year.

Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy will go through to the second round of the French presidential elections following Sunday's vote which saw French voters flock to Belgian news outlets to get the news ahead of time.

The defence and foreign ministers of NATO’s 28 member states gathered at the Alliance’s headquarters in Brussels on 18 April, 2012 for two days of talks to prepare the forthcoming NATO Summit in Chicago.

Barack Obama's "shrug your shoulders" Syria policy, faithfully imitated by Britain and the rest of the do-nothing NATO crew, is no longer sustainable politically, strategically or morally.

With the ICJ ruling, the legal and political path is clear to complete Macedonia’s accession, and that would in itself place pressure on Greece to accept a compromise solution and put to rest a poisonous ethnic dispute.

The North Atlantic Treaty--the first peacetime military alliance ever concluded by the United States-was signed by the foreign ministers of the twelve signatory nations on April 4, 1949.

In just over six weeks from now, we will gather to renew the vital bond between European and North American Allies, and to strengthen the bonds with our partners across the globe.

Resolution expressing the sense of the Senate in support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the NATO summit to be held in Chicago, Illinois, from May 20 through 21, 2012.

The alliance and the leadership of the former Soviet republic are holding informal consultations regarding the issue on both political and technical levels, Koziel said.