Is Russia making a global comeback in spite of Western sanctions and political pressure from the United States and Europe? On the surface, it certainly seems like it.

At a summit meeting in Minsk, Belarus, on February 12, Russia and Ukraine agreed anew to a cessation of hostilities in the year-old conflict between them. On hearing the news, Washington and other Western capitals let out a collective sigh of relief. But there was good reason from the start to be skeptical that the ceasefire would hold.

Attempts to avoid touching on religious dimension of the struggle has led to several recent high-profile administration gaffes. President Obama strangely tried to deflect the issue at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5 by mentioning the Crusades as an example of Christian excess. Unfortunately, that example is also a key jihadist talking point.

President Barack Obama said a nuclear deal with Iran is possible if Tehran truly considers nuclear weapons un-Islamic. But is this true? And does it matter?

During his January trip to India, President Obama scored a small win for his legacy and a big win for the Indo-U.S. relationship. While the U.S. president performed admirably in front of the cameras, the most productive Indo-U.S. summit in a decade owes its success to someone else—India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

President Barack Obama ’s first public appearance with the Dalai Lama , the spiritual leader of Buddhists around the world, made headlines on Feb. 5. While the setting was an ostensibly religious occasion, the National Prayer Breakfast, China was quick to take offense. “This action by the U.S. to ‘drive a nail’ into the hearts of the Chinese people is harmful to the political trust between the two countries,” opined the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Denying Iran nuclear-weapons capability is not only a means of limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It is also part of a broader ideological struggle that Tehran is taking much more seriously than is the United States.

Global financial markets currently obsess about the fate of a small Balkan country’s sovereign debt and its impact on the Eurozone. However, if the burden of Greek debt were to disappear overnight, the miracle would just reveal the underlying weakness of the Greek economy and its dependency on Europe for the foreseeable future.

Listening to the President's State of the Union address last week, you might have come away convinced that, at least in the field of foreign policy, everything is coming up roses. Yet a look at the real world provides a jarring contrast to the complacency and unrealism of that speech - and of the Obama administration's policies writ large.

To hear President Obama tell it, the West is winning in Ukraine. In his State of the Union Address last week, the President sounded downright triumphant in his description of the current situation in Eastern Europe. "We're upholding the principle that bigger nations can't bully the small - by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine's democracy, and reassuring our NATO allies," he insisted publicly.

You have to feel a bit sorry for the Obama administration. The White House in December announced plans to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba, including establishing a U.S. Embassy in Havana and formally revisiting Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism. The move was a clear effort by Washington to distinguish itself in a new international theater.

The state of the union is great if you happen to be Iran.

On Tuesday, during the State of the Union address, President Barack Obama discussed his view of the continuing controversy over Iran's nuclear program. "Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran," he said, "where, for the first time in a decade, we've halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material."

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Socialist," German pastor Martin Niemoller famously observed about his nation's intellectuals during the Nazi rise to power. "Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me."

One of the first orders of business for the new Congress may be to consider a resolution authorizing the use of force resolution in Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S.-led combined joint mission against the Islamic State group. Such a move would be long overdue.

The recent resignation of Chuck Hagel as US defense secretary is a sign of the times. During his short, unglamorous tenure as the Obama administration's defense chief, Hagel had become a symbol of the White House's failed foreign and defense policies.

In the wake of the hacking of Sony, all eyes are now on North Korea's disruptive online capabilities. But the cyberwarfare potential of another rogue state — Iran — is also growing, and it could soon constitute a major threat to the United States and its allies.

Since Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine back in February, speculation has run rampant about the Russian president's objectives. While objectives change in the course of any war, Mr. Putin himself has admitted that the invasion of Crimea was a strategic decision that, therefore, had strategic objectives in mind. Those objectives also relate to the current fighting in the Donbas region (encompassing Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces). As such, Russia's conduct repudiates the speculation in Washington that Russia's Ukraine policy is something of an improvisation. Rather, U.S. policymakers would be well-served in trying to figure out the factors driving Mr. Putin's decision-making, both at home and abroad.

America's discussion about missile defense tends to be a one-sided conversation. More often than not, it revolves around what capabilities the United States has fielded to date, and what it plans to provide to its allies overseas. But in the not-too-distant future, the United States might be able to count on a new voice in the missile-defense debate, as political and intellectual shifts progressively nudge Canada into alignment on the need to defend North America against ballistic-missile attack.

This month, the OnCue Express gas station in Oklahoma City lowered its price for a gallon of regular gas to $1.99.

Nationwide, the average price is $2.41 per gallon, down from a high of $3.70 the end of April. Gas prices are the lowest they have been in five years and are expected to decline further, following the $50 collapse in oil prices since this summer.

As talks between U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran over its nuclear program resume this week in Geneva, the most welcome shift on the Iranian nuclear front may be occurring thousands of miles away in Washington.