Historian Simon Schama and journalist George Packer told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that U.S. policy toward Afghanistan has drifted as the Obama administration has tried to focus on domestic priorities.

Dubai is not systemically significant. If its troubles open our eyes to the likely imminence of the start of the final leg of the journey from household default through bank default to sovereign default, it may do some systemic good, by alerting fiscal policy makers to the vulnerability of their nations' fiscal-financial positions, and by educating citizens and voters to the urgency of deep fiscal burden sharing.

The news from Afghanistan all year has been dispiriting, and the last few weeks have been especially tough in terms of the violence. Yet most foreign and Afghan officials and officers who I encountered on a recent weeklong visit sponsored by the U.S. military are guardedly optimistic about our prospects.

Nowadays it is hard to find a country that does not participate in global processes, generated in a single world space. At the same time, recent trends indicate that the economic development of these processes occur with the greatest speed. Evidence of this is the current world financial and economic crisis, which affected almost every country in the world. This crisis revealed a number of fundamental issues of sustainable economic growth for both developed and developing countries.

Since late last year, when the global economic crisis has already gained quite a strong movement, most states began to build its economic policies with a priority based on its own strength. Many countries (the largest - USA, EU, China) presented the world community its national anti-crisis programs, the thrust of which was to allocate large funds to support the troubled sector. A year later, many experts were able to analyze the main results of anti-crisis measures of individual countries, among which the most successful and proved to be indicative of China. Some analysts believe that success in this area promises to China gaining global economic leadership in the future.

The situation in Afghanistan remains one of the most pressing issues in international discussions on global stability and security.

The «soft power» concept was initially defined on scientific and theoretical levels by the American political scientist, Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, based on the United States foreign policy to maintain its positive image in the world and to promote the best features of American culture and its social achievements. The concept has demonstrated its effectiveness in theoretical and practical terms initiating much discussion around this topic, but also gave impetus to the natural process of transformation the original, which was already a classic, the understanding of «soft power».

In conditions of energy globalization and unstable situation in the world energy market, as well as the ongoing global economic crisis, leading nations of the world are forced to revise their approaches in providing energy security which becomes a basic element of their national security system. Along with measures such as diversification of sources of energy resources imports and exports, energy saving, development of alternative energy, updated the question regarding the strategic reserves of energy resources.