Nov./Dec. 2000 - The ouster of Milosevic and the disappearance of the Serbian military threat to Montenegro were greeted with relief in the republic. They signaled the end of the three-year "black and white" struggle in which the democratically elected government of Montenegro, with substantial help from its Western supporters in the U.S. and the EU, had fought for survival against a dictatorship that caused four wars in the region. Since the electoral defeat of Milosevic, the international position of Montenegro and its internal political priorities have changed drastically. more

December 2004 - The Eurasian sub-region of the Black Sea and Caspian basins has become more prominent in international business and geopolitics than at anytime since 1991, when a long ongoing process of restructuring the European political and security architecture began. more

May 2005- If the last half of the 20th century was shaped largely by east-west relations, will the first decades of the 21st century be defined along north-south lines? Europe and the United States are increasingly affected, as societies, by developments on their southern peripheries – the southern Mediterranean states of North Africa and the Middle East in the case of Europe, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean in the case of the U.S. Journalists, analysts and policymakers point to analogies between the Mediterranean and the Rio Grande, and the list of policy challenges – migration, trade and investment, transnational security issues, and questions of culture and identity – is outwardly similar. more

Nov./ Dec. 2000 - The costs of Slobodan Milosevic's rule have been enormous to American and European taxpayers. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, direct U.S. costs for fiscal years 1992 through 2000-mainly for war-waging and peacekeeping actions-have amounted to $21.2 billion. That figure exceeds the annual gross domestic product of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Kosovo, and Bosnia combined. Not that the GDP is much; Milosevic transformed his economy from a mess into a basket case. more