When Russians look at Iran, they see a country that has been their neighbor and rival forever. As the Russian empire advanced, it wrestled the North and South Caucasus from the shah. Peter the Great annexed, briefly, Iran's entire Caspian Sea coastline and put his forces just north of Tehran.

Those who were so proud of winning the Cold War have done only a mediocre job organizing the peace that followed. U.S. and European leaders should detect the faint scent of their own brand of Brezhnevism and amend their policies accordingly.

Russia's 2012 presidential election is already effectively over since Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has decided to reclaim his old Kremlin office. By all indications, Putin plans to stay in the Kremlin for two more presidential terms — another 12 years — as he is enabled to do by the recently amended Constitution. So who will be the country's next president is now a certainty. Less obvious is what he hopes to achieve.

Chinese leader Zhou Enlai may have been correct when he told U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1972 that it was too early to determine the impact of the French Revolution, but 20 years is usually enough to assess the importance of most historical events. Yet three days in August 1991 that changed the course of world history are still a cause of confusion and contestation in the former Soviet Union.

If Michael McFaul becomes the next U.S. ambassador to Russia, it will be another case of a scholar becoming a top diplomat, which is not uncommon in U.S. practice. Before he was appointed in 2009 as senior director at the National Security Council responsible for Russia, McFaul's entire career was in academia and think tanks.

Osama bin Laden's passing, as Shamil Basayev's before him, will not end the fight against terrorism. Yet, the war on terrorism has long ceased to be the organizing principle of international relations or even of U.S. foreign policy.

Russia's vote Thursday in the United Nations Security Council on Libya Resolution 1973 is more evidence of the changing nature of Moscow's foreign policy. The trend toward an improved relationship with the United States that has been evident since 2009 has reached a new level.

President Dmitry Medvedev has called the NATO summit in Lisbon a historic event, and the weekend's statements offer a way to continue transforming Russian-Western ties. Though neither quick nor easy, transformation from past enmity to future friendship is doable. Here's how.

Relations between Georgia and Russia have been chilled since the "little war" of August 2008, and Russian policy so far has been to let ordinary Georgians feel the pinch of bad relations.

The Georgia war of 2008, the global economic crisis, the Obama factor and China’s relentless rise all played a role in Russia's recent foreign policy shift.

The economic crisis made the country's leadership realize that Russia is losing ground in the global pecking order by falling behind in industry and technology. And the Kremlin was forced to accept that it needs Western investment and strong business partnerships with the West.

Moscow is convinced that the U.S. is determined to weaken Russia, and the West itself fears that Russia is determined to restore its empire.

Putin can sit comfortably on his high popularity rating, but this is not enough to move forward. Enter Medvedev.

In the eyes of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the “resetting” of U.S.-Russian relations became a reality only six weeks ago, when U.S. President Barack Obama announced his decision to reconfigure U.S. missile defense plans for Europe.

The Kremlin’s plan for dealing with Iran downplays sanctions and apparently assumes that the complex and controversial issue be decided on the basis of goodwill.

U.S. President Barack Obama's arrival in Moscow next week may either mark the end of the beginning of a long-term improvement in U.S.-Russian relations or the beginning of the end of their short, vaguely promising stage.

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. While Russia was determined to create a center of power in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the enlarged European Union started paying more attention not only to the ""new Eastern Europe"" (Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine), but also to the South Caucasus and Central Asia -- all areas of what is still being called, with decreasing validity, the former Soviet Union.

Treaties do not make relations but only serve to codify them. The European security treaty proposed by President Dmitry Medvedev in June would probably have to repeat most things contained in a plethora of international documents, from the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1990 Paris Charter for a New Europe to the 1999 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe charter. Medvedev's preference for a document that is signed and duly ratified is understandable. He is a trained lawyer, after all. Medvedev's goal, however, is not to add another piece of paper to the pile. What the Kremlin actually wants from Washington are formal assurances that NATO will not cross further into former Soviet republics. It also wants U.S. plans to deploy elements of a missile defense system in Central Europe to be either scrapped altogether or redesigned as part of a fully transparent, joint endeavor shared by Russia, the United States and Europe.

Dear President-elect Obama, Even though most of your foreign policy will be devoted to issues not directly related to Russia -- namely, the global economic crisis, the wars and insurgencies in the Greater Middle East from the Gaza Strip to Pakistan, terrorism and climate change -- relations with Moscow need to be high on your agenda from Day One.

Official Russian strategic policy papers have long been dismissed as bland statements of little practical value.

In the foreseeable future, for the bulk of the Georgian elite the sun will be rising in the west, rather than the north.

Sunday's parliamentary election in the self-proclaimed Transdnestr republic immediately sparked controversy. Leaders in the capital, Tiraspol, and unofficial observers from a number of countries, including Russia, concluded that the vote was free and fair. By contrast, the United States, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe dismissed the election as not just illegimitate but harmful, as it could serve to legitimize the rule of Igor Smirnov, Transdnestr's ruler since 1991.

The series of terrorist acts culminating in the gruesome massacre of hundreds of innocent children, parents and teachers in Beslan proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Russia today is the weakest link in the war on radical Islamic-inspired terrorism.

At their summit on Sea Island, Georgia, the G8 leaders are focused on the greater Middle East, with Iraq clearly dominating that part of the discussion.

The deterioration of the situation in Iraq this month raised many people's hopes that the United States would get seriously bogged down there.

It is obvious that recent events surrounding Yukos and the arrest of its former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky will have major consequences not only for Russia's image around the world but also for its relations with the West.

For Russia and the United States to achieve closer cooperation, mutual suspicion must first be overcome.

More than three weeks into the war, transatlantic divisions over Iraq continue.

The majority of commentaries on the U.S.-Russia summit have devoted most attention to arms-control issues. The signing of a treaty cutting the number of strategic nuclear warheads is portrayed as the central event of the summit.