Publications

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract Germany’s recent Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) has become a major topic in Western discussions about how to deal best with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This essay proceeds from Interdependence Theory to argue...

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract Europe’s current energy crisis underscores its failure to deal adequately with the problems posed by increasing dependence one Russian gas. Particularly in the Balkans Russia’s oligopolistic position if not monopoly in some...

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract This article examines how seven potential drivers of the Russian Federation’s military interventions played out in seven instances in which Vladimir Putin was likely to have deliberated on whether or...

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) must pivot to address a new era of persistent threats and disruptive challenges unbounded by geography. Reaffirming NATO’s cohesion as an alliance of democracies...

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract  Within a resilient transatlantic alliance, political leadership and security forces can respond successfully to any crisis imposed, but without resilience the alliance will remain vulnerable to malign influences that seek...

Access the Winter 2022 issue of Orbis here. Abstract The administration of George H. W. Bush was faced with an immediate challenge in 1989 with the success of the Polish Roundtable Accords between the independent trade union, Solidarity, and Poland’s...

Access the Winter 2022 Issue here Nils Schmid, Ph.D., is the Foreign Policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and is a member of the Bundestag, representing the constituency of Nürtingen in Baden-Württemberg. He joins Orbis editor Nikolas K. Gvosdev...

Poland’s defense budget, currently over two percent of the country’s GDP, is apparently set to grow further. In October 2021, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński announced that his government intended to raise defense spending to “significantly higher” levels....

  Introduction  On October 26, 2021, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense released video of a TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) striking a separatist D-30 howitzer in Russian-occupied Donbas. The strike was Ukraine’s first confirmed use of the now ubiquitous...

As Arab states prepare to reconvene this March for the 37th Arab League Summit in Algiers, one topic looms large over the agenda: the readmission of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, expelled in 2011. An increasing number of regional players have...