Analysis

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have an enduring connection to their occupation by the Soviet Union — they are all still on the Soviet-era power grid, controlled today by Moscow. The project to decouple the power...

Debates about national scientific and technological power tend to center on which state first generates new-to-the-world breakthroughs (innovation capacity). This essay argues that assessments of technological leadership should give greater weight to a state’s diffusion capacity, or its ability...

In early August, the Ukrainian army broke into Russia and, virtually undeterred, rapidly advanced seizing a significant area of the borderline region of Kursk. Given that this was the first foreign invasion of Russia since World War II, Russia’s...

It was disappointing to see so little in-depth discussion among the US national security community at the recent 2024 Forum On China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) outside of the usual circles of Africanists and China specialists. The summit meeting provides a...

Apparently, the collapse of the USSR did not mean the end of the Cold War. It took less than ten years for people trained within the KGB to take over the state management of Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin...

The war in Ukraine has underscored the dangers of energy reliance on Russia for US national security. However, while much attention is directed toward Russia’s use of oil and gas as instruments of coercion on Europe, how Russia and...

With headlines dominated by geopolitical events, policymakers overlook the true threat to US success—the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. As the anchor of the global economic order, America’s command over the world-reserve currency and dollar-denominated assets is...

On July 8, a Russian Kh-101 rocket flew into a children’s hospital in the center of Kyiv. On July 9, no less a figure than Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s primary mouthpiece, took to TASS, a preferred Kremlin megaphone, to...

After a bit more than two years, Russia’s disinformation campaigns in Africa’s Sahel region look like the quickest propaganda success ever staged. The three countries in the Sahel where military powers recently seized power—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—withdrew from...

The recent election of Masoud Pezeshkian as Iran’s president has sparked speculation about the future of Iranian foreign policy, particularly as his campaign promise of “constructive engagement” with the outside world has drawn significant attention. Pezeshkian, a former health...