Greg Myre

Ever since the Cold War ended, the armies of NATO and Russia have been moving warily toward each other while their political positions keep moving further apart.

Twelve Eastern European countries have joined NATO since the Soviet breakup, and NATO is now on the verge of creating a rapid-reaction force ...

As the U.S. juggles multiple crises in the Middle East, it's a good time to look at the map.

Find Libya. Head east across North Africa through the Middle East and all the way to Pakistan in South Asia. The journey covers eight troubled lands, side by side. In seven, ...

When it comes to humanitarian rescues for persecuted minorities in northern Iraq, the U.S. military has valuable experience that may offer some lessons for the latest mission.

President Obama's call to help some 40,000 members of the Yazidi community, who are trapped on barren mountains and surrounded by ...

Ever since its sweeping victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has been regarded as the dominant military power in the Middle East. No Arab state has risked a full-fledged war in decades, and few question the conventional wisdom that Israel would swiftly defeat any national army in a ...

Israel has unleashed repeated military offensives in the Gaza Strip since 2000 and has never been able to permanently suppress Palestinian rocket fire or seal off the territory's smuggling tunnels.

So why is Israel launching another major ground incursion now, and is there any reason to think the

Ukrainian officials say pro-Russian separatists may have shot down the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed Thursday in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people onboard.

It's rare, but not unprecedented, for civilian airliners to be shot down. In fact, it's happened before in Ukraine, just 13 years ago.

Back in ...

The Islamic caliphates had a long and glorious run, but in the 21st century, they seemed consigned to history. Simply put, a caliphate is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader, and it has existed in one form or another for most of the 1,400-year history ...

This post was updated at 9:40 p.m. ET to reflect the Obama administration's pressure on the Iraqi government.

A week ago, it would have been difficult to find anyone in the U.S. arguing for renewed U.S. military action in Iraq. Now there's a furious debate about what the U.S. should, ...

As this animated map shows, the extremist Islamist group ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, has made major gains since it was created early last year with the goal of establishing an Islamic empire, or caliphate, across the Middle East with little or no regard for existing ...

Joe Cicippio was held hostage by the Islamic group Hezbollah in Lebanon for five years, often chained to a radiator in a room with blacked-out windows, cut off entirely from the outside world. Within weeks of his release in 1991, he asked if he could go back to his ...

In a wide-ranging interview with NPR, the president says U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century should focus on diplomacy and counter-terrorism rather than large-scale military operations.

Pop quiz: How many popes have visited Jerusalem over the past 2,000 years?

What papal destination could be more natural than the Holy Land, where the pontiff can walk Jerusalem's stone streets and follow the footsteps of Jesus. Popes have dispatched envoys, emissaries and even Crusader armies to claim the ...

Thailand has a beloved king. The country has had one of the more prosperous economies in Asia. It's a magnet for Western tourists. Its history is largely peaceful. By most measures, Thailand has been very successful.

So why has the country now had a dozen coups, plus many ...

Happiness, it seems, is still a controversial topic in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, offered this pronouncement years ago: "There is no fun in Islam."

In keeping with the ayatollah, police arrested six young Iranians and held them for a day after they playfully ...

Until a few months ago, the U.S. government was effectively boycotting Narendra Modi, the man who is virtually certain to be India's next prime minister following the landslide victory by his party in the country's parliamentary elections.

So will the U.S. now warm to Modi as the elected ...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s seminal ruling Brown v. Board of Education that stated separate but equal public education was unconstitutional, turns 60 on May 17.

Desegregation did not come easily to most parts of the U.S., especially in the South.

Here & Now’s Robin Young speaks to two Southern ...

Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul spent several years and all his money to make a moving documentary about an American singer, Sixto Rodriguez, who was unknown in the U.S. yet somehow became a legend in South Africa.

The strange twist was that for decades Rodriguez worked as an impoverished laborer in ...

When South Africa buried apartheid with its first all-race election in 1994, the Rev. Desmond Tutu danced with joy as he cast his ballot. He called it "a religious experience, a transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience."

As the country votes Wednesday, here's what he recently told ...

Children are abducted with depressing regularity in African conflicts, but the seizure of more than 250 schoolgirls in Nigeria is a particularly strange and baffling case.

The radical Islamist group Boko Haram has now released a video saying it seized the girls from their boarding school on April ...