Leon Panetta: “Any reductions in the Army and the Marines Corps will be based on security considerations in Iraq and Afghanistan as…”

It just -- it strikes me that what the chairman was trying to do perhaps was to try to send a wake-up call to both the Speaker and his Republican colleagues, that Russia still remains very much a threat to the United States.

Autocrats that once operated in their own spheres of influence have now joined together in an axis of mutual support and aggression.

And that is the danger here: that rather than bringing peace, it's going to bring more war.

The message that went out from this meeting to the world is that United States credibility in dealing with our allies has taken a real hit.