This week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives in Washington for a much publicized state visit. The Turkish leader won't simply be making a courtesy call, however. His U.S. mission is largely aimed at achieving one purpose: goading the Obama administration into taking greater action on Syria.

President Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, recently set a September date for bilateral discussions. The goal is to mend ties between the U.S. and Russia, badly frayed by the recent passage of tit–for–tat human rights sanctions, and attempt to put the administration's "reset" of relations with the Kremlin back on track. The White House has already suggested disarmament, Iran, North Korea and Syria as the main topics for the talks.

The civil war in Syria is over two years old with no end in sight. As matters stand, the future holds either continued bloody stalemate or a successor regime dominated by anti-Western radicals. The time has come to force a more favorable decision.

Western thinking about freedom and democracy is marked by a set of optimistic assertions, which include the following:

First, the global advance of freedom and democracy marches ever-onward. Second, economic and political freedoms in a particular nation walk hand in hand, each reinforcing the other. Third, the more a society (particularly its middle class) enjoys economic growth and the higher living standards that normally come with it, the more citizens will push for greater political freedom.

Secretary of State John Kerry made news recently by referring to the venue of the latest nuclear talks with Iran as the fictional country of "Kyrzakhstan." That off-the-cuff comment was a telling indicator of the general lack of concern for Central Asia that prevails in official Washington.

On the surface, the Cyprus crisis was about money, but actually it was the result of conflicting political cultures: European, Greek Cypriot and Russian. The fissures exposed during the March 2013 crisis will leave a legacy of mistrust and enmity far beyond the eastern Mediterranean island that staged the drama. The underlying problem was that Europe had accepted a non-European entity (Cyprus) into its institutions and then failed to enforce upon it Europe’s standards of financial governance. Russian money became fuel for the catastrophe, but was not itself the cause. Money laundering and bank insolvency are both deplorable but are not the same thing.

On December 14, Richard Baum, distinguished professor of political science at UCLA, renowned expert on Chinese politics, and adviser to presidents, died in Los Angeles. He was among the foremost in an unparalleled generation of Sinologists that was trained during the Mao Era and went on to inform countless Americans about China and its strategic intentions. Ironically, however, even as his contribution to the study of Chinese politics is eulogized around the world, the emphasis on area studies at the American universities that created Professor Baum and his cohort has withered. Today, many of America's best young Sinologists are forgoing academia and instead choosing more lucrative careers in government or the private sector—working for select audiences on specific topics.

Just what will it take to bring Iran’s nuclear ambitions to heel? The past year has seen a dramatic expansion of economic pressure against the Iranian regime by the United States and Europe, all with a single-minded purpose: to ratchet up the costs to Iran of its stubborn atomic endeavor.

In late October, speaking at the Intrepid Museum in New York, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta delivered a stark warning. The United States, Panetta said, could soon face a mass disruption event of catastrophic proportions, a "cyber Pearl Harbor" of sorts.