Sadly it seems like the Obama administration’s new standard war cry for policy is “Something is Better than Nothing!”

Speaking at the United States Institute of Peace  in Washington, DC July 26, State Department officials could hardly contain their enthusiasm for the START arms reduction treaty with Russia, saying, “the United States is better off with this Treaty than without it.”

Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, courtesy of state.gov

Strong words, Assistant Secretary Rose Gottemoeller, strong words.

She is right, of course, but considering many U.S. senators, who have yet to ratify the treaty, maintain serious doubts about it, you would expect a bit of a bolder sales pitch than “this washing machine probably won’t make your life worse.”

Nevermind that all but one commander of U.S. strategic nuclear command from 1981 to 2004 signed a letter to the Senate endorsing the treaty, Senate Republicans still love our nukes and hate the Ruskies.

Well, in this case they do actually have reason for suspicion.

According to a State Department report made public today, it’s not entirely clear Russia has complied with past arms reduction treaties.

The document says the U.S. government does not believe Russia is in compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention because it has not declared all its stockpiles nor destroyed those it has acknowledged, despite a 1997 plan to do so.

The report also says Russia may not be in compliance with the international convention banning biological weapons. Russia committed in 1992 to dismantle a secret biological weapons program it inherited from the Soviet Union. Although Russia has said it is in compliance, it has “not satisfactorily documented whether this program was terminated,” according to the report.

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Broadcasting to you at from my office at Kala cafe in the Ortachala neighborhood of Tbilisi, I formally announce that the two dark months without Three Kings Blog are officially over. I finally overcame my technical ignorance by … asking for help from the nice guys at Evolutsia.net to reboot my broken blog.

First things first! You may notice the blog looks different, and I want your imput. I figured if I was going to go through all the trouble of reinstalling stuff on the hosting site and what not I might as well go with a new look. Unfortunately the only new blog templates I liked also crashed site, so I went with a slightly different version of the previous theme.

I’m not totally happy with the new design and I will be tweaking it myself over the next week or so, so let me know what you think about it.

Keep checking in! We have a lot of catching up to do.

During my long hiatus induced by technical problems with the blog, I had one of my pieces published in Tabula Magazine’s, first English edition and I am very happy to be joining the Tabula team (pictured below).

Not pictured: me.

In this edition I finally got to do a story that I had been dying to sell to someone for a while: the genesis of the Pheasant’s Tears Winery, a great wine company started literally because of a joke. Check it out on flash version at their site (pages 63, 64) or squint at these png files below.

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Check out my latest piece in the Faster Times on how Armenian bloggers have used the long-forgotten “virtual community” Live Journal, long-forgotten in the U.S., as a new media tool to fight the power!

When the Live Journal “virtual community” first came online in 1999, it basically operated as a venue for whiny American middle-schoolers to overshare, write bad poetry and meet pedophiles. At least that’s how I saw it. I was in middle school at the time.

Ten years later, after Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and iPhones apps seemed to have successively killed off the first generation of blog platforms and social networks, I was stunned to find that not only was Live Journal not extinct, but was in fact an influential vehicle for grass roots activism, social discussion and independent news sharing in Armenia — a country lacking in all three.

Armenia is rated “partly free” on democracy and “not free” on the status of its freedom of the press by Washington-based pro-democracy NGO Freedom House. According to internetworldstats.com little over six percent of Armenia’s population uses the internet, while most turn to exclusively pro-government broadcast media for information. But for Armenians, seeing isn’t believing.

To read the rest of the article, click here!

Just two years ago, the issue of Bush-era plans to base 10 ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and a radar station in Czech Republic nearly restarted the Cold War.

In reaction to the plan, Russia suspended its participation in a Cold War deescalation treaty (which it rightly claimed the U.S. had already violated), began plans to redeploy ICBM’s to Eastern Europe and upped the rhetoric towards NATO on all fronts.

The plan to place a permanent defense that would ostensibly protect Europe from the threat of ballistic missiles from Iran and North Korea — curiously located on the border with Russia — seemed to have the potential to reignite an escalation of forces between the East and West for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The rift only deepened after the Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, after which NATO and Russia ceased all dialogue with one another, and the missile shield agreement with Poland was beefed up to include an increase of conventional NATO forces on the Polish-Russian border.

Although the Bush administration never admitted the system had anything to do with eliminating Russia’s strategic deterrence, even 2008 Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain put on his website that the the missile shield was designed to “hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors like Russia and China.” Russia was not impressed.

But that all changed with the Obama administration.

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