People have been praising the strategy of Russian president Vladimir Putin toward eastern Ukraine and the successes that it has brought him there. Yet the more I think about it, the more I wonder how much strategy there is behind his actions and whether Putin is beginning to have second thoughts about those successes. Both […]
As Iran and the United States, a key member of the P5+1 world powers, inch toward deicing their 35-year-old frosty and at times traumatic relations, jockeying from all sides of political spectrum target the direction of this process and whether the icy relations should ever start to melt. Regional opponents of improved ties between Iran […]
Hosted by Sarwar Kashmeri, the Foreign Policy Association’s Great Decisions podcast series will headline issues together with the leaders whose decisions today will mold the foreign policy of tomorrow. Each podcast will tackle a different Great Decisions topic in the 2014 series, a list of which can be found here. The Great Decisions podcasts can also be found […]
map: ChinaSmack Tensions escalated in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, as Ukrainian forces killed up to five pro-Moscow separatist rebels, and Russia launched army drills near the border in response, raising fears its troops would invade. The Ukrainian action took place to recapture territory from the rebels, who have seized swaths of eastern Ukraine since April […]
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an article titled “In Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin.” It caught my eye because it used the catchphrase – Cold War – that politicians as policymakers, journalists as conveyers and we as an audience have grown familiar with. Literary devices go a long way […]
The Economist released an interesting chart on global military spending this week showing the increased spending on military assets by countries that have been considered in the past to not be pro-Western or an ally of the United States or EU. The largest spending boom was made by China. China has openly shown the People’s […]
In a New York Times op-ed last month entitled “Confronting Putin’s Russia,” Michael McFaul, the recently retired U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, channeled frustration over tensions in Crimea into a call for “isolating” Russia. His case, though passionate, appears to rely on some questionable assumptions and prescribes a rather shortsighted approach. Taking Responsibility McFaul begins by arguing that, “a […]
After World War II, the theory that economic integration would reduce the possibility of open conflict between two nation states was tried and was deemed successful by history when France and West Germany signed the first accords that would grow to become the European Union. When Russia recently annexed Crimea, the first response by Western […]
There has been a lot of speculation lately about the impact of the Crimean Crisis on the situations in Syria and Iran. The current negotiations regarding these countries involve cooperation between Russia, the United States, and other countries now directly and indirectly involved on opposites sides of the Crimean question. Naturally, that bodes ill for […]
By Anna Pivovarchuk As Western media focuses on the Crimean crisis, Russia intensifies its assault on civil society. When Nikolai Gogol wrote about the winged troika in his 19th century masterpiece on provincial corruption, The Dead Souls, little did he know that he was creating a perennial image that would come to represent Russia for centuries […]
Ever since Moscow decided to up the ante and invade the Crimean peninsula, shale gas reentered journalist lingo. Many have chipped in the debate, including Speaker of the House John Boehner who has argued that American gas is the sole remedy for Russia’s dominance of the European energy market. His diagnosis was that since natural […]
If the 20th century was about an ideological fight between market-economy versus Communism, the 21st could very much be about liberal democracy versus imperialism. This could be the very lesson of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Power politics is – even though it has never disappeared – now a reality that the EU and the U.S. […]
As the Ukrainian crisis escalates, President Barack Obama has been busy making the diplomatic rounds trying to build support against the unilateral attempts by Crimea to break away from the new government in Ukraine. President Obama said the United States is examining a series of economic and diplomatic steps to “isolate Russia,” and he called […]
There is always a danger in economies that are heavily dependent on one commodity to become states where conflict and power vacuums arise due to the concentration of power in one industry, and that industry having control of a large part of a national economy. External pressures for countries that are oil producers are the […]
This past weekend, Russian marines in unmarked uniforms (or possibly, but less likely, private contractors paid by Russia) seized the airports of Crimea, allowing Russian planes to fly troops into that autonomous region of Ukraine while large-scale Russian military maneuvers to the north distracted the Ukrainian army. The quick and somewhat stealthy action permitted […]