Foreign Relations Committee

The Foreign Relations Committee (DEİK) issued a comprehensive report on Turkey-China relations with an interesting title which goes, "The Dragon and the Crescent in the Asian Century."

This report is one of the latest links in the interest in China that has distinctly increased with the mention of Turkey's possible membership to the Shanghai Five.

The Senate confirmed on Wednesdy Eric Seth Rubin as the new US ambassador to Bulgaria.

This was announced by the US embassy in Sofia in its Facebook profile.

The hearing of the nominee before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was held on December 2., with US President Barack Obama having appointed Rubin in September.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker said lawmakers left an August 5 briefing by the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency "less assured" about the nuclear deal with Iran.

U.S. lawmakers skeptical about the nuclear deal with Iran promised to press senior Obama administration officials to make more information about it public at a Senate hearing on July 23 as Congress begins its two-month review of the agreement.

The US Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation May 7 giving Congress the right to review and perhaps even reject any nuclear deal with Iran, the culmination of weeks of wrangling over how to hold Tehran to account.

The U.S. Senate on April 28 rejected an effort to require an international nuclear agreement with Iran to be considered a treaty, which would have forced any deal to be approved by two-thirds of the Senate's 100 members before it could take effect. 

US Secretary of State John Kerry on April 15 welcomed a compromise with Congress on giving lawmakers a say on any final deal on Iran's nuclear programme.

Kerry said the measure approved April 14 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which raises the threshold for critics in Congress to block any accord with Tehran, made him "confident" ahead of a June 30 deadline.    

Worried about a draft resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives that recognizes the 1915 killings of Ottoman Armenians as genocide, a group of Turkish politicians have set out for Washington to ensure that the resolution does not pass.

Parliament Speaker Cemil Çiçek arrived in Washington and is expected to meet his counterpart at the House of Representatives on March 25.

Iran is playing a helpful role against Islamic State og Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq now, but once the extremists are vanquished, Tehran-backed militias could undermine efforts to unify the country, the top U.S. military officer said on March 11.

Questions from Senator John McCain apparently turned the June 15 testimony of John Bass, the ambassador-designate to Ankara, into a nightmare.