E-Notes

When Taiwan’s soon-to-step-down President Ma Ying-jeou made a pre-Lunar New Year’s visit to Itu Aba / Taiping Island in late January 2016, the international-lawyer-turned-president was reaffirming a long-standing claim that the Republic of China held sovereignty over the largest...

1979 was a bad year for U.S. foreign policy. At home, the country was being battered by stagflation and the second oil shock, developments that raised fundamental questions about the economic underpinnings of American power. Abroad, the United States...

​A​ growing number of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe have a North African connection — yet Washington policymakers continue to pay far less attention to the region than is warranted. ISIS and al-Qaeda, by contrast, regard...

European heads of state and government meet in Brussels 18-19 February 2016 to discuss the terms of a proposed renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU. The UK’s future hangs on these talks. Success or failure in getting a...

Gray, it seems, is the new black. The concept of “gray zone” conflict has generated significant attention and controversy recently, within both the U.S. government and the broader strategic studies community. Some analysts have identified gray zone conflict as...

When Taiwanese voters went to the polls on January 16, 2016, they did something that has become admirably routine in Taiwan’s robust democracy: mandating a change of the party in power and setting the stage for another peaceful transition...

This is the second in a series of three essays on the challenge of strategic foreign policy planning for the next administration. In Part One, I described problems with the national security decision-making process under the current president, then...

A 1994 exposé published in the Russian language newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda asked, “Will Kim Il-sung Explode Our Atomic Bomb?” Today one might substitute “Iran” for “Russia” given the Islamic Republic’s continuing aspirations in the realms of nuclear weapon and...

Photo Credit: www.kremlin.ru Relations between China and Russia became noticeably closer in the past year and, if the numerous agreements they have appended their signatures to come to fruition, they are apt to become still closer in 2016. Arms Sales...

Executive Summary It may have been William F. Buckley, Jr., who observed that Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is as oft cited as it is infrequently read. Something similar might be observed about Containment, the doctrine articulated by George F....