Many accounts of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s decision this week to cancel next month's state visit to the U.S. put it down to simmering outrage over revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency has been tapping the communication channels of top Brazilian officials, starting with hers. In truth, the decision probably has as much to do with politics.

So is America "war-weary"? Commentators beyond counting assure us that is the case. But who is war-weary, and precisely what does that mean? A little precision in our use of words goes a long way. Let's ask that notable gentleman from Prussia, Carl von Clausewitz.

The 2008 Republican presidential nominee, criticised Mr Putin and his associates for rigging elections, imprisoning and murdering opponents, fostering corruption and "destroying" Russia's reputation on the world stage.

Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani has given an interview to NBC–his first with a US media outlet. In it, he said his country will never build nuclear weapons and added that he has full authority to negotiate with the West over the country’s nuclear program. Rouhani’s interview comes a day after Iran freed noted human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and another 10 detainees.

It has been 6 years since my Washington Ireland Program (WIP) journey began. I was standing on a hockey pitch in freezing Scotland, clambering into my not-so-flattering goalkeeper gear, when Kate Hardie-Buckley (WIP '07) came running up to me and declared that I had 'W.I.P.' written across my forehead.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be meeting with President Obama in Washington next week to discuss economic and trade cooperation between the United States and India. One of the most critical topics on the table will be immigration reform as it relates to Indian workers in the United States.

Commenting in January on his country’s blacklisting of America as a destination for Russian child adoptees, Alexey Pushkov cited the deaths of nineteen children and the U.S. legal system’s “very laxative decisions” concerning the fate of the adoptive parents. When Mr. Pushkov is not tweeting about American exceptionalism, he is on state television spreading the pro-Putin and anti-American propaganda which is the staple of his TV Tsentr program “Post Scriptum.”

The U.S. spent roughly $25 billion last year on what’s loosely known as security assistance—a term that can cover everything from training Afghan security forces to sending Egypt F-16 fighter jets to equipping Mexican port police with radiation scanners. The spending, which has soared in the past decade, can be hard to trace, funneled through dozens of sometimes overlapping programs across multiple agencies.