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91. Iran's Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era

Author:
Luciano Zaccara
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
With this book, Shireen Hunter offers an exhaustive manual of the Islamic Republic's foreign policy. However, the excessive engagement in explaining each and every aspect of Iran's Foreign Policy from the Islamic Revolution until today – and not focusing only on the post-Soviet era, as the title indicates – undermines the profound analysis of the topic and period.
Political Geography:
Iran and Soviet Union

92. Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War

Author:
Daniel R. Lake
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left alone with an unusual degree of power preponderance. Such a position of preponderance could have led to a series of unilateral military interventions, but instead, the United States has intervened multilaterally more often than not. In Coalitions of Convenience , Sarah E. Kreps offers a convincing explanation for this mixture of unilateralism and multilateralism.
Topic:
Cold War
Political Geography:
United States and Soviet Union

93. Who Gives the Orders in the New Russian Military?

Author:
Keir Giles
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
NATO Defense College
Abstract:
The theory of supreme command of the Russian Armed Forces is set out in the Constitution of the Russian Federation and in published Federal Laws. Decision-making in practice involves the presidency, the government, the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the General Staff, and the Security Council of the Russian Federation. During and after Soviet times, the relationship between these bodies, and by extension how and where decisions were taken, was understood better than it is today - in general terms, the General Staff took important decisions and dealt with planning, while the MoD implemented them, for example dealing with training and logistics. But the fundamental reforms embarked upon in the Russian Armed Forces after August 2008, and changes to Federal Laws which also followed the armed conflict at that time, have shifted these relationships in ways which are not yet fully understood outside Russia, and in some cases within Russia as well. The result is that military decision-making in Russia is now less predictable.
Topic:
Military Strategy and Governance
Political Geography:
Russia and Soviet Union

94. Friendship of the enemies: Twentieth century treaties of the United Kingdom and the USSR

Author:
Evgeny Roschchin
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article focuses on the use of the concept of friendship in the treaties of friendship concluded by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. The range of reference of friendship and its usage by these two political rivals display a number of commonalities, which indicate a key role this concept plays in maintaining the existing order of interstate relations. The concept is conventionally used in the treaties marking the changes in the global or regional political settings. In the texts of these treaties appeals to friendship are made together with the expression of respect for state sovereignty, independence, borders and so on. It also appears as an exclusive and contractual relationship. These conventions in diplomatic rhetoric, meant to reassert and legitimize the particularistic sovereign order, pose a challenge to the attempts to conceive of international relations in terms of friendship as an ethical, universal and benevolent phenomenon.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
United Kingdom and Soviet Union

95. Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age

Author:
Martin Johnson
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
This ambitious book focuses on presidential activities in the contemporary political environment that Jeffrey Cohen characterizes as marked by polarized political parties in Congress and fragmented mass media. Building on his own work (for example, the recent The Presidency in the Era of 24-Hour News) and the contextual theory that Samuel Kernell develops in the classic Going Public, Cohen connects presidential behavior to the organization of Congress and the mass media. As the shift from congressional institutional pluralism(which Cohen identifies as prevailing 1953–1969 [p. 43]) to individual pluralism (1970–1988) helps explain presidentsʼ increased emphasis on public activities covered by national media, so more-recent changes in political context have affected presidentsʼ public behavior. Cohen argues that congressional polarization and media fragmentation (1989–present) help explain recent presidential efforts to more narrowly target constituencies via interest groups and local media. As an example of this tactical shift, Cohen notes President George W. Bushʼs schedule of domestic travel to circumvent his “national Pooh-Bahs” (p. 2) and build support for legislative initiatives.
Political Geography:
United States, China, Israel, Soviet Union, and Egypt

96. Understanding the Revolutions of 2011

Author:
Jack A. Goldstone
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Revolutions rarely succeed, writes one of the world's leading experts on the subject -- except for revolutions against corrupt and personalist "sultanistic" regimes. This helps explain why Tunisia's Ben Ali and Egypt's Mubarak fell -- and also why some other governments in the region will prove more resilient.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Soviet Union, Egypt, and Tunisia

97. Recalibrating Homeland Security

Author:
Stephen Flynn
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The United States has made a mess of homeland security. This is hardly surprising. The policymakers responsible for developing homeland security policy in the wake of September 11, 2001, did so under extraordinary conditions and with few guideposts. The Bush administration's emphasis on combating terrorism overseas meant that it devoted limited strategic attention to the top-down law enforcement and border-focused efforts of the federal departments and agencies assigned new homeland security responsibilities. President Barack Obama has largely continued his predecessor's policies, and congressional oversight has been haphazard. As a result, nearly a decade after al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Washington still lacks a coherent strategy for harnessing the nation's best assets for managing risks to the homeland -- civil society and the private sector. For much of its history, the United States drew on the strength of its citizens in times of crisis, with volunteers joining fire brigades and civilians enlisting or being drafted to fight the nation's wars. But during the Cold War, keeping the threat of a nuclear holocaust at bay required career military and intelligence professionals operating within a large, complex, and highly secretive national security establishment. The sheer size and lethality of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals rendered civil defense measures largely futile. By the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, two generations of Americans had grown accustomed to sitting on the sidelines and the national security community had become used to operating in a world of its own. To an extraordinary extent, this same self-contained Cold War-era national security apparatus is what Washington is using today to confront the far different challenge presented by terrorism. U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, the border agencies, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are subsumed in a world of security clearances and classified documents. Prohibited from sharing information on threats and vulnerabilities with the general public, these departments' officials have become increasingly isolated from the people that they serve.
Topic:
Cold War and Development
Political Geography:
United States, Washington, and Soviet Union

98. What is Totalitarian Art?

Author:
Kanan Makiya
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Foreign Affairs
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Igor Golomstock's encyclopedic tome on the art produced in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and communist China makes a good case that totalitarian art is a distinct cultural phenomenon. But a new postscript on art under Saddam Hussein is less compelling, writes a former Iraqi dissident.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
China, Iraq, Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy

99. "Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics"

Author:
Timothy Crawford
Publication Date:
05-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Security
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, isolating opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s and Germany's offensive efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union in 1939—help to demonstrate these arguments. By paying attention to these dynamics, international relations scholars can better understand how balancing works in specific cases, how it manifests more broadly in international politics, and why it sometimes fails in situations where it ought to work well.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Soviet Union and Germany

100. Britain, Turkey and the Soviet Union, 1940-45: Strategy, Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean

Author:
Mustafa Sitki Bilgin
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Turkey, due to its geopolitical position, was subject to political and military pressures by the Great Powers during and immediately after World War Two. During the war, the Great Powers exerted substantial pressures on Turkey to obtain its compliance in operating the Straits policy in accordance with their own strategic interests. This situation led to collaboration and competition among the Great Powers. In fact, the rivalry and collaboration of the Great Powers in the eastern Mediterranean during these periods, and the interaction of British, Soviet and American policies with those of regional states, has been examined by a number of Turkish and foreign researchers in recent years. Nicholas Tamkin is one of these authors and he has meticulously trawled through British archives and other published and unpublished sources available in Britain to elucidate Turkey's role in British strategy and diplomacy during World War Two. He makes a significant contribution on the formulation of British foreign policy and wartime strategy towards Turkey with a special emphasis given on Turkey's place in the uneven relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union.
Political Geography:
Britain, Turkey, and Soviet Union