Earlier this month, the Department of Defense released the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, released every four years to “adapt, reshape, and rebalance [the] military to prepare for the strategic challenges and opportunities” to be faced in the coming years.

Iran and six world powers reached an agreement Sunday on how to implement a short-term deal that was struck in November and gives the parties a six-month time frame, beginning on Jan. 20, in which to conclude a long-term agreement about Iran’s nuclear program. The Islamic Republic will open its nuclear program to daily inspection by international experts, starting the clock on the six-month deadline for a final nuclear agreement.

Nearly eight months after President Hassan Rouhani's surprise election victory, in which the centrist cleric trounced influential conservative candidates, Iran's hardliners are behaving as if they never lost. Shadowy vigilantes on motorcycles have menaced the family home of a pro-Rouhani filmmaker, and reform-minded journalists are showing up on target lists.

On February 12, 2013, North Korea carried out its third nuclear test in the run-up to the inauguration of a new administration – my own – in the South. Around that time, the Presidential Transition Committee adopted the “Trust-Building Process on the Korean Peninsula” as a key policy of the new administration. Though the North’s nuclear test created pressure to revise the trust-building process, I made it clear that I would stay the course.

More than two-thirds of the Iranian parliament has signed on to a bill that would accelerate Iran’s nuclear program if Congress adopts new sanctions legislation, official news agencies said. The bill would direct Iran’s nuclear agency to enrich uranium to 60%, close to the 90% needed for the material to be used as nuclear bomb fuel. It is currently enriched to a maximum of 20%. The legislation also calls for the start-up of Iran’s partially built Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor.

The United States and its allies will have ways to reimpose sanctions on Iran if the Islamic Republic is caught making bombs after striking a deal to freeze its nuclear program, national security adviser Susan Rice said on Sunday. In an interview on the CBS news program "60 Minutes," Rice rejected the idea that, once relaxed, the economic sanctions on Tehran would be hard to reinstate.

“We are not blind, and I don’t think we are stupid,” said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in response to fierce Israeli criticism after the first round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program earlier this month failed to reach a deal. Now the deal is done, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is even harsher in his condemnation of Kerry’s handiwork.

In a room in which journalists were outnumbered by security agents and paramilitary fighters, the tall Iranian commander stood and issued his judgment. “Our ideology will not be undermined by some negotiations,” Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the hard-line head of the paramilitary Basij force, told the selected group of reporters in a gathering days before Iran signed an interim nuclear agreement with the United States and other world powers.