A nation must think before it acts.
Russia
Blunting Moscow’s Sword of Damocles Policy in the Baltic Region
The Roman philosopher Cicero recounted how King Dionysius answered a courtier, Damocles, who thought that ruling a realm was merely pleasure and leisure. In response, King Dionysius offered Damocles to switch places. However, King Dionysius ordered that a large...
Read more »
By Love, Money, or Violence: The Struggle for Primacy in the Black Sea
Międzymorze is an interwar geopolitical vision conceptualized by the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski (and later adopted by Wladyslaw Sikorski). It is commonly rendered into Latin as Intermarium or "between the seas." The "seas" in Piłsudski's formulation are the endpoints...
Read more »
With Putin’s ASEAN Outreach, Russia Sets Sights on Southeast Asia
The third ASEAN-Russia summit, held in the Russian city of Sochi, concluded on May 20. In a beehive of diplomatic activity, Russian President Vladimir Putin held bilateral meetings with the leader of every member-state of the Association of Southeast...
Read more »
COLCHIS: Georgia and the geopolitics of resilience
Arguably, the most straightforward entree into the world of Georgian geopolitics is the West-Russia tension at the heart of its foreign policy dilemma. Georgia is a former Soviet republic with longstanding cultural, economic and political ties to Russia in...
Read more »
Russian Foreign Policy in the Putin Era: A Conference Report
On April 11, 2016, the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium, and the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia...
Read more »
Dithering, Dreaming and Speechmaking: Wilson’s Strategy During the First World War
The unpreparedness of the United States Army for war on the Western Front was directly linked to the national strategy that Woodrow Wilson charted during his presidency. The high losses of American Soldiers in the Meuse Argonne, for negligible...
Read more »The West Wants Isolation. What Now for Eastern Europe?
“NATO is very obsolete.” So said Donald Trump. While he may have been alone in putting the sentiment so bluntly (Trump will be phenomenal for isolationist rhetoric!), he is not alone in this thinking. The United Kingdom is considering...
Read more »Weakened America Reaps What it Sows
Last Tuesday, a Russian Su-24 aircraft conducted a simulated attack against a U.S. destroyer, the Donald Cook, operating in the Baltic Sea. The action violated a 1973 treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union aimed at preventing...
Read more »
Why Russia Sanctions?
The Obama administration’s current Russia policy needs a stronger dose of realpolitik. In particular Washington and its G-7 partners should re-evaluate the impact of economic sanctions, imposed on Russia in the wake of its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Plainly,...
Read more »
Resetting the Reset
In recent weeks, I have had the honor to attend different daylong seminars convened to ponder Russia’s future under Vladimir Putin and the future of U.S.-Russia relations: a “Russia Experts Meeting” hosted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York,...
Read more »