When NATO leaders meet at the Riga summit in late November 2006, they will confront a far different security landscape than the one faced by the founding fathers of the alliance. Those leaders established NATO in 1949 to defend Western Europe against the clear and present danger posed by Soviet military power. The United States, as the most powerful member of the alliance by far, came to dominate the transatlantic relationship, both politically and militarily. Despite some bumps along the road, notable among them French withdrawal from the integrated military structure and the U.S.-Soviet Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty controversy, NATO managed to maintain its cohesion and solidarity through the darkest days of the Cold War. Yet, when the Soviet Union unexpectedly collapsed, NATO did not follow its old nemesis into the ash heap of history. The instability generated in central and eastern Europe by the Soviet collapse reminded European allies of the importance of maintaining the transatlantic alliance as a hedge against an uncertain future. The United States, for its part, had no desire to abandon the primary instrument through which it exercised influence in Europe, which remained vital to its long-term security interests.

In a wide-ranging speech, de Hoop Scheffer insisted that NATO’s capabilities had to be improved, burdens shared more equitably and the focus placed on identifying NATO’s added-value. Highlighting problems, the Secretary General described current funding of the NATO Response Force (NRF) as “almost a lottery” and some Member States’ conditions as “putting caveats on NATO’s future”. He also wanted an end to the “beauty contest” between the Alliance and the EU. There had to be no duplication of efforts.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his swan song today at the Truman Presidential Library in Missouri.It was a thinly veiled parting shot at U.S. foreign policy delivered by an embittered U.N. leader seething with self-righteous indignation and resentment. Annan's Missouri speech will go down in history as one of the most blatant assaults on a U.S. administration by a serving U.N. official.

It is reasonable that honest, compassionate people seek a means for governments to air their differences. It is also reasonable that honest, compassionate people should desire some way to voluntarily pool resources to provide charitable aid to those who are starving or are victims of natural disaster. Indeed, this is the image of the United Nations that has been sold to the world since its inception. It is not, however, the reality.

In recent years, the United Nations has often gone out of its way to avoid getting involved in the world's trouble spots. It ignored genocide in Darfur. Pulled out of Iraq in 2003. Done nothing to stem Iran's nuclear ambitions. Can an organization this compromised do much to improve things?

“Recalling the Statement of its President, S/PRST/2006/15, of 29 March 2006, and its resolution 1696 (2006) of 31 July 2006, “Reaffirming its commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and recalling the right of States Party, in conformity with Articles I and II of that Treaty, to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination,

We, the Heads of State and Government of the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, reaffirm today in Riga our resolve to meet the security challenges of the 21st century and defend our populations and common values, while maintaining a strong collective defence as the core purpose of our Alliance. Our 26 nations are united in democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law, and faithful to the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter.

I have said it on many ocasions, and will say it again here today: we don't need a global NATO. That is not what our transformation is all about. The kind of NATO that we need - and that we are successfully creating- is an Alliance that defends its members against global threats: terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and failed states.

But in the months leading up to the Summit, a number of factors have intervened to lower expectations for and shift the focus of the Summit. Internally, some member states remain deeply divided over NATO’s post-Cold War purpose and the extent and nature of the Alliance’s roles and missions beyond Europe. In addition, a degree of enlargement fatigue has set in, slowing the pace at which the Alliance will absorb additional members. Externally, NATO now finds itself engaged in the most substantial and consequential military operations it has ever conducted. Current operations in Afghanistan have rightly consumed an enormous amount of the Alliance’s energy and will likely dominate much of the discussion in Riga, though improving the situation there will require more than military solutions. Indeed, NATO’s mission in Afghanistan is becoming the primary indicator of the Alliance’s ability to tackle the kind of challenges that will likely define the 21st century.

Unfortunately, Canada has failed to maintain its contributions to world peace and security at a high enough level to guarantee the nation a seat at the world table, or even at a level that permits it to wield even moderate amounts of influence on events and decisions made by other nations. The current state of decline is a direct result of the failure of Canada to invest in peace building activities, and the neglect of the prior role played by the nation in fostering world peace and security.

During my tenure as President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly – a body independent from the Alliance itself as legislative and executive bodies should be – I have worked hard in improving the Assembly’s work and in developing its reach so as to gradually transform an originally limited role as a consultative forum for national parliamentarians into a tool for “democratic control” within NATO. I believe the parliamentarians in the Assembly have a crucial role to play, as they do in the Council of Europe or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Fifteen years ago at the 1991 Rome Summit, NATO started in earnest its post-Cold War transformation with the adoption of a new Strategic Concept. Although at that time the Alliance had not yet initiated any operation, within less than a year its airborne early warning aircraft (AWACS) were patrolling the sky above Bosnia and Herzegovina and the mobile headquarters of its now defunct Northern Army Group command had been loaned to the United Nations to become the headquarters of the United Nations Protection Force.

I am pleased to present the latest product from the Stimson Center’s Future of Peace Operations program. This work, by Senior Associate William Durch and Research Associate Tobias Berkman, addresses the supply of peacekeeping forces, in a world where the demand appears to be growing. As we go to print in the summer of 2006, the international community is seized with the question of how to bring stability and peace to the border area between Israel and Lebanon. All the enduring issues are in play there: What are the political prerequisites for a workable stabilization force? Should it be run by the UN or by a group of strong countries willing to use more robust rules of engagement if need be? Which countries, regional organizations, alliances, or international institutions can muster the right forces and the political will to engage? How long will they stay engaged? When they want to leave, to whom will they hand over their tasks? The new Stimson Center study provides important context, history and analysis to address these questions.

The challenges of winning the peace, as well as winning the war, have gained increasing attention among nato members. This development reflects hard-learned lessons from Alliance experiences in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Despite attention at all levels, corresponding changes have yet to be institutionalized within nato. This resistance to change is, in part, normal bureaucratic inertia, but it also reflects a lack of consensus about the extent to which nato should be involved in establishing and sustaining a peace. Differences within the Alliance on appropriate roles for nato beyond winning wars are coming to the surface in the debate over the immediate post-war tasks of stabilisation operations and initial reconstruction efforts, which we refer to in this report by the acronym “S&R”.

The mission was designed to gather information about the human rights situation in Western Sahara and in the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. The mission was then to report to the High Commissioner about the human rights situation and make recommendations on how to assist the concerned parties to jmprove the promotion and protection of human rights of the people of Western Sahara. With a view to continuing the constructive dialogue with those concerned in implementing the recommendations of this report, this report is not a public report

For the past decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as we came to know it during the Cold War, has been transformed beyond recognition. Yet, many fear that the Alliance itself has gone astray. In Europe and in the United States citizens are ambivalent about the Alliance because they neglect what it has achieved, question what it now does, and differ over what they want out of it next.

Before I begin my remarks on NATO’s current operations in Afghanistan, I would like to highlight several major operations in which the Alliance is currently involved and in doing so, provide you with the strategic context and background against which all of our efforts in Afghanistan are balanced. Today the Alliance is engaged with some 38,000 troops deployed in missions and operations on three continents.

Le mouvement des Non-alignés (en anglais, Non-Aligned Movement) est une organisation internationale regroupant plus de 100 États (114 en 2006), qui se définissent comme des pays n´étant alignés avec, ou contre, aucune grande puissance mondiale. La Déclaration de Brioni du 19 juillet 1956, initiée par Gamal Abdel Nasser, Josip Broz Tito et Jawaharlal Nehru, marque l´origine du mouvement, qui vise à se protéger de l´influence des États-Unis et de l´URSS qui cherchaient à polariser le monde en leur faveur.

The Security Council,Reaffirming its previous resolutions on Afghanistan, in particular its resolutions 1386 (2001) of 20 December 2001, 1413 (2002) of 23 May 2002, 1444(2002) of 27 November 2002, 1510 (2003) of 13 October 2003, 1563 (2004) of 17 September 2004, 1623 (2005) of 13 September 2005 and 1659 (2006) of 15 February 2006.

According to reports, the United Nations is on course to select its next Secretary-General in October. The process gained steam this week with an informal straw poll in the Security Council. The details of the “blind” straw poll reveal very little about how much support each of the current candidates really have. Instead, it was merely a way for candidates to learn which of the 15 Security Council members “encourage” them to go on, “discourage” them, or have “no opinion.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization took command of operations in southern Afghanistan where the U.S.-led coalition and Afghan army are facing a resurgence of violence by the Taliban.

Recalling also its previous resolutions 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security, 1502 (2003) on the protection of humanitarian and United Nations personnel, 1612 (2005) on children and armed conflict, and 1674 (2006) on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, which reaffirms inter alia the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 United Nations World Summit outcome document, as well as the report of its Mission to the Sudan and Chad from 4 to 10 June 2006.

With little fanfare—and even less notice—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has gone global. Created to protect postwar Western Europe from the Soviet Union, the alliance is now seeking to bring stability to other parts of the world. In the process, it is extending both its geographic reach and the range of its operations. In recent years, it has played peacekeeper in Afghanistan, trained security forces in Iraq, and given logistical support to the African Union’s mission in Darfur. It assisted the tsunami relief eªort in Indonesia and ferried supplies to victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States and to those of a massive earthquake in Pakistan.

The other day in Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held her ground. Bravo, Condi. Her counterparts in the "international community" wanted to prevail upon her to join with them in an agreement calling upon Israel to desist from trying to extirpate from southern Lebanon Hezbollah launch sites used for the missiles that have been raining down on Northern Israel -- unprovoked.

The other day in Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held her ground. Bravo, Condi. Her counterparts in the "international community" wanted to prevail upon her to join with them in an agreement calling upon Israel to desist from trying to extirpate from southern Lebanon Hezbollah launch sites used for the missiles that have been raining down on Northern Israel -- unprovoked.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo will hold its first legitimate elections in four decades on Sunday. The United Nations peacekeeping mission there has played the role of electoral midwife, so if the vote is free and fair it will be among the global body’s greatest successes on the continent.

The U.S. military has handed over military duties in Afghanistan's unruly southern provinces to NATO, whose forces had previously been deployed only to relatively peaceful regions in the north and around the capital, Kabul. The gravity of the handover became immediately apparent, with four NATO soldiers killed and a number wounded in a series of attacks by Taliban fighters soon after the alliance assumed responsibility for security in the south (AP). Still, the increase in NATO troop strength will allow the U.S. military to shift more of its forces to the violence-plagued Afghan-Pakistani border region, as this new Backgrounder explains.

It's not Israeli Prime Minister Olmert who should be apologizing to Kofi Annan for the death of four UN observers in Lebanon--if indeed it was the IDF that killed them--but Annan who should be apologizing to Olmert and to the Lebanese people. For years, UN observers have watched the build-up of Hizbullah’s armory and the construction of its fortified tunnels and its bunkers in the hills overlooking Israel and they have done nothing. The UN has allowed Hizbullah to move rockets into homes, schools and mosques, in the midst of heavily populated towns, and they have done nothing. The UN observers have watched Hizbullah terrorists train and be trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their doorstep and they have done nothing.

The Security Council, seriously concerned that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was still unable to provide assurances about Iran’s undeclared nuclear material and activities after more than three years, today demanded that Iran suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, and gave it one month to do so or face the possibility of economic and diplomatic sanctions to give effect to its decision.

The old UN Human Rights Commission was a body so biased and farcical that it was disbanded last year. The commission met once annually for a six-week session in Geneva, formally devoting one week of each session to condemnations of Israel along with much additional bashing of the Jewish state. Despite protests, the commission’s 2003 session was chaired by a paladin of human rights known as Libya.

Sixty years ago, the United Nations was founded to maintain international peace and security, promote self-determination and basic human rights, and protect fundamental freedoms. Sadly, weaknesses in the organization have prevented it from fully realizing these high aspirations.

In the next month the United Nations, still tottering after its annus scandalis, faces two consequential decisions that will test the organization’s ability to implement its founding purpose to protect human rights and international peace.

The idea is as logical as it is radical: The notion of Israeli membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is bubbling to the surface after recent events that have crystallized the threats to Israel and how common they are to the dangers confronting the U.S. and Europe.

The U.S. and EU should also withhold all funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and call for an immediate inquiry into how it has been spending donors’ money as well as allegations that it has hired members of terrorist organizations and stoked anti-Semitism among Palestinian refugees.

Which is all the more reason for the U.S. to promote a more serious diplomatic response suggested to us last week over lunch at the Journal by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar: Begin NATO accession talks with Israel.

The Human Rights Watch World Report 2006 contains information on human rights developments in more than 60 countries in 2005.

The final substantive report concerning the UN Oil-for-Food Programme. This report illustrates the manner in which Iraq manipulated the Programme to dispense contracts on the basis of political preferece and to derive illicit payments from companies that obtained oil and humanitarian goods contracts.

The Security Council, by its resolution 1595 of 7 April 2005, decided to establish an international independent investigation Commission based in Lebanon to assist the Lebanese authorities in their investigation of all aspects of the terrorist attack which took place on 14 February 2005 in Beirut that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and others, including to help identify its perpetrators, sponsors, organizers and accomplices.

The flagship of a transformed Alliance is the NATO Response Force – and it must be deployable, modern, and responsive. A strong and effective NRF will give this Alliance the capability and flexibility it needs to meet threats wherever and whenever they arise.

Last week, world leaders met for what Kofi Annan described as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to take bold decisions in the areas of development, security, human rights and reform of the United Nations." But a reading of the "outcome document" world leaders are signing shows it to be yet another missed opportunity for U.N. reform. John Bolton pushed hard to improbé the document and succeeded in modifying its most objectionable clauses.

Independent Inquiry Committee finds mismanagement and failure of oversight: Un Member States and Secretariat share responsibility. With respect to the Programme as a whole, the Committee’s central conclusion is that the United Nations requires stronger executive leadership, thoroughgoing administrative reform, and more reliable controls and auditing.

Reviews UN efforts to transform eight unstable countries into democratic, peaceful, and prosperous partners, and compares those missions with U.S. nation-building operations. The UN provides the most suitable institutional framework for nation-building missions that require fewer than 20,000 men — one with a comparatively low cost structure, a comparatively high success rate, and the greatest degree of international legitimacy.

Henning Riecke considers the need for change in international organisations, arguing that NATO’s transformation must be based on a firm political foundation.

This Report examines the UN’s 1998 hiring of the Swiss company Cotecna to conduct inspections of humanitarian goods entering Iraq under the Oil-for-Food Program and any potential conflict of interest involving UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose son Kojo was employed by Cotecna.

These reports are a key part of this Administration's activities to promote human rights and democracy around the world, part of President Bush's forward strategy of freedom.

Overview of investigative results and sets out the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Food Programme.