France conducted its first airstrike against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq Friday, destroying a logistics depot, French President Francois Hollande announced. Although some countries have contributed humanitarian aid or military equipment to the Iraqi army in its battle against the advancing jihadists, France is the first nation to join the US-led air campaign against IS.

Without question, the Obama administration has been slow in coming up with a strategy to counter the threat from ISIS terrorism. This week, Rick Stengel, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, made the case for soft power. He told a packed audience at the American Security Project his office faces challenges as momentous, but far more complex, than any the United States has seen since the fall of Soviet communism.

The Barack Obama administration is focusing its public diplomacy efforts on persuading “swing voters” in the Muslim world that the group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) is a bigger threat to them than US policies, the State Department’s top communications official says.

Mr. Obama is acting as polls show rapidly shifting public opinion, with a large majority of Americans now favoring military action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, even as they express deep misgivings about the president’s leadership, Mr. Obama is also facing difficult crosscurrents on Capitol Hill, where Republican lawmakers, initially reluctant to demand congressional authorization of military action, have begun agitating for a vote...

According to the Kremlin, Putin has had 35 phone calls with German Chancellor Angela Merkel so far this year - more than three times the number of calls he has had with President Barack Obama, and six times the number of phone conversations he’s had with UK PM David Cameron. Both Putin’s close neighbours, Nazarbayev and Lukashenko, had more phone time with the Russian president than Cameron. 

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Iranian and American people have been isolated from one another due to long-standing disputes between their governments. Routine interactions, like sporting events between national clubs, and other cultural exchanges have been few and far between. However, recently thousands of fans across Southern California were able to witness a rarity: the U.S. and Iranian national volleyball teams squaring off in friendly exhibition matches as part of a goodwill exchange between the two estranged nations.

Russian officials have responded to a mocking tweet from Canadian delegates over the escalating Ukraine crisis. Diplomatic relations between the two countries have been in the spotlight since Canadian officials posted a snarky map to help Russian soldiers who keep “getting lost in Ukraine”. Moscow officials have hit back with their own map, with the disputed Crimea region clearly marked as Russian territory.

No. 1: Will there be a deal on Ukraine? The crisis in Ukraine has been a colossal failure of analysis and of diplomacy, with plenty of blame to share on all aides. The main victims, alas, have been the unfortunate Ukrainian people. As I've written before, I think the United States and the West played a key role in causing the crisis, mostly by failing to anticipate that Russia was going to respond forcefully and vigorously to what its leaders regarded as a gradual attempt to incorporate Ukraine into the West.