Catholics worldwide held a day of fasting and prayer for peace in Syria joined by Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians, with Pope Francis set to host a mass vigil on Saturday. Francis has called for a "cry for peace" to rise up around the globe and has said he will attend the four-hour prayer session in St Peter's Square. Earlier in the week he wrote to leaders of the G20 leading world economies urging them to "lay aside the futile pursuit of a military solution".

The United States' relationship with Brazil is on the rocks after more National Security Agency revelations, this time that Washington spied on President Dilma Rousseff. She is so furious that she has threatened to cancel her trip to the US next month — the only full state visit scheduled at the White House this year and the first by a Brazilian head-of-state in two decades.

A nation's credibility is of course important in the conduct of foreign policy, but as a goal of military action, it has a troubled history. Focus on defending U.S. credibility in the mid-20th century blurred the difference between vital and non-vital interests, ultimately leading to American intervention in remote places like Korea and Vietnam.

They're involved in Algeria and Angola, Benin and Botswana, Burkina Faso and Burundi, Cameroon and the Cape Verde Islands. And that's just the ABCs of the situation. Skip to the end of the alphabet and the story remains the same: Senegal and the Seychelles, Togo and Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia. From north to south, east to west, the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, the heart of the continent to the islands off its coasts, the US military is at work.

I'm sometimes asked how, as someone who testified 42 years ago against the Vietnam War in which I had fought, I could testify in favor of action to hold the Assad regime accountable today. The answer is, I spoke my conscience in 1971 and I'm speaking my conscience now in 2013. Secretary Hagel and I support limited military action against Syrian regime targets not because we've forgotten the lessons and horrors of war -- but because we remember them.

When President Obama touched down in Sweden early Wednesday morning, he notched his 43rd foreign country visited since taking the oath of office. The president probably doesn’t need the frequent flyer miles or the sense of worldliness that comes with a well-stamped passport, but presidents are still judged on their global itinerary. Obama’s two most recent predecessors each visited 74 different nations or sovereign states during their eight years in office, according to the State Department’s history of executive travel.

In June, Michael T. Sestak, a former cop and naval officer who went on to work for the US Foreign Service in Vietnam, was brought before a judge in Washington, DC on corruption charges. Sestak was allegedly a major part of one of the most lucrative illegal visa scams in history—while he was employed at the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, he had a side business rubber-stamping fraudulent visa applications for paying clients fed to him by a Vietnamese-American family, a gig that netted nearly $10 million all together according to the Department of Justice.

In conflicts and post-conflict zones all over the globe, UN peacekeepers play an essential role supporting peace and stability. Supporting these efforts is the United States’ Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI). Vietnam has been working closely with both the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Defense to begin building its peacekeeping capabilities, and through GPOI, take its first formal steps towards contributing individuals and units to UN peacekeeping missions.