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4361. THE LESSON OF THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS

Author:
Navin Bapat
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Political Violence @ A Glance
Abstract:
The Washington Post’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers reveals that, although the official line was that the war was turning in favor of the US and its allies in Kabul, policymakers have long been aware that the situation was bleak, deteriorating, and unlikely to produce anything resembling a “victory.” Following 9/11, the US identified failed states as a key national security risk, in that these environments enabled terrorists, rebels, warlords, and other non-state actors to plot and plan operations against the US and the international community. Given that Afghanistan seemed to represent the prototypical weak state, the solution was obvious: Afghanistan needed to be transformed into a strong state that would resist non-state actors—particularly terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. But in trying to achieve this lofty goal, the US has lost thousands of soldiers and contractors and spent several trillion dollars—and the costs will likely continue rising. The Afghans themselves have suffered even more, with over 100,000 deaths since 9/11. Despite all of this loss—and the open acknowledgment that the strategy is failing—there is little appetite among US policymakers for reversing course.
Topic:
War, Military Affairs, Afghanistan, Military Intervention, War on Terror, and Military Contractors
Political Geography:
Afghanistan and United States

4362. On the Struggle for Peace

Author:
Sergei Karaganov
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
The U.S.’S wiThdrawal from the Treaty on the elimination of intermediate- and Shorter-range Missiles (iNF) may prove useful – however, only if it gets normal people throughout the world and, most importantly, many of us russians to come out of years-long hibernation. This hibernation could be described as strategic parasitism. There has not been a large-scale war in the world for more than 70 years now. Over the past three decades, relative peace has been accom- panied by a rapid increase in living standards for billions of people. People have begun to think that this state of peace is not only normal but will also stay with us forever. Meanwhile, 95% of it is the result not of our responsibility and peacefulness, but the fear of a nuclear apocalypse and hope for mutual nuclear deterrence. however, reliance on it is becoming increasingly fragile. in recent years, strategic stability (this term usually refers to the level of the threat of nuclear war) is rapidly deteriorating. i will venture to say that the current level of threat is comparable to the time right after the Cuban missile crisis that almost led to a global catastrophe. Prior to it, in the 1950s, the situation was perhaps even worse than it is now: an uncontrolled arms race and bitter hostility. Nevertheless, the vector of development is toward the 1950s. russia’s policy needs reviewing. The struggle to avert war should become the most important vector of this policy.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Diplomacy, Military Strategy, and INF Treaty
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

4363. Back to the Russia-U.S.-China “Triangle”?

Author:
S. Trush
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
FOr SeVeral MONThS, the world expert community has been actively discussing the obvious resurgence of the russia-the U.S.-China “triangle.” This happens every time when the key, or even “sacral,” prob- lem of international interaction – the problem of security – comes to the fore. The high level of confrontation inside two of the three sides of the “triangle” – the U.S. vs. russia and China vs. the U.S. – predetermined this resurgence against the background of donald Trump’s non-orthodox and unyielding foreign policy. he brought to the white house his “no-nonsense” approach to add more prominence to the traditional efforts of american pragmatists to keep russia and China apart. his obvious preference for Moscow and his clear intention to rely on it to oppose China were defused by an unprece- dented attack launched against him by the anti-Trump opposition inside the United States. due to the internal balance of power, russia was cho- sen as the potentially most promising target with the best foreign policy dividends perfectly suited to the task of either pushing the president out of the white house or at least, narrowing down his political leeway. This attack and the fairly painful Korean issue created a pause in the america-China relations obvious in the first year of the new administra- tion that ended late in 2017 by the “tough and realistic” description in the National Security Strategy of the United States of “revisionist powers of russia and China.... that challenge american power.” This launched an aggressive trade war with China; today, it has become abundantly clear that it is part of the exacerbated systemic confrontation with China over economic, technological and military leadership.
Topic:
Security, Diplomacy, International Cooperation, and Military Strategy
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, Asia, North America, and United States of America

4364. A Frank Conversation About War and Peace

Author:
S Ryabkov
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
This interview discusses the diplomacy and military affairs between Russia and the United States.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, Military Strategy, and INF Treaty
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, North America, and United States of America

4365. Strategic Stability in the Early 21st Century

Author:
A. Orlov
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
one hunDReD YeaRs ago, mankind entered the 20th century as the “golden age” of realized ideals of freedom and humanism. Reality proved to be different: this was the cruelest and the bloodiest period in the histo- ry of modern civilization. The new generation of political dreamers, with anglo-saxon roots in the first place, expected the 21st century to become a period of a more or less stable development of the world led by the united states with the help of its closest satellites. In his The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who together with henry Kissinger can be described as a “classic” of the contemporary geopoliti- cal thought) wrote that since the end of the Cold War the united states “assumed the unique global security role” and “america’s global socio- cultural celebrity makes it the world’s center of attention.”1 he arrived here at a fairly debatable (as later developments showed) conclusion that “america’s role in ensuring the security of its allies ... justifies it in seek- ing more security for itself than is predictably attainable by other states.”2 This trend of military-political thinking that dominated across the ocean in the 1990s and early 2000s has not changed in fifteen years that elapsed since the time when the maître of american political science wrote the lines quoted above. Formally a Democrat and President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor in the latter half of the 1970s, he nur- tured the ideas that differ but little from those of the present master of the White house, a conservative Republican determined to “make america great again,” that is, to restore its role of the unquestioned world leader in all trends and in all hypostases. nothing what President Trump has said so far clarifies when, in his opinion, america lost its greatness. It seems that he piles the accusations on Democrat obama whom he called a “softy” and who allegedly allowed the adversaries to push america into a tight corner from which the country is scrambling out under his guid- ance. let’s go several decades back. The end of the Cold War, the victory in which Washington arrogant- ly “appropriated” and its rise, at least in its own eyes, became a watershed of sorts in american understanding of the contemporary realities and of certain basic postulates that for a long time remained the cornerstone of the perception of the world by Washington and Moscow. This relates, first and foremost, to the strategic security concept. Brzezinski admitted: “It was until the late 1950s and perhaps not even until the Cuban Missile Crisis that america was jarred into recognition that modern technology has made vulnerable a thing of the past.”3 “The intense national debate on these issues [in the united states] eventually led to a consensus that a relationship of stable deterrence with the soviet union was attainable only through mutual restraint.”4 henry Kissinger fully agrees with the above. In his World Order, he has written: “strategic stability was defined as a balance in which neither side would use its weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an unacceptable level of destruction in retalia- tion.”5 This adds special importance to what anatoly Dobrynin, soviet ambassador to the u.s., had to say in his book In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents about his talk to Robert Mcnamara, united states secretary of Defense, in april 1967: “Mcnamara explained that u.s. nuclear doctrine was grounded in the idea that the united states should be ready to absorb a surprise nuclear- missile strike while preserving its capability to hit back and cause irreparable damage to the enemy. as far as he could understand, Mcnamara said, the soviet military doctrine was based on the same prin- ciple. he was convinced that both sides possessed such capability. It was precisely this factor that in a peculiar way provided the stability and ade- quately guaranteed that neither of the two great powers would attack the other, because each well knew that an attack on the other meant suicide.”6 Colonel-general Yury Baluyevsky, a prominent soviet and Russian military theoretician who served as Chief of the general staff of the armed Forces of the Russian Federation, has pointed out the fol- lowing: “[The] term strategic stability has been used for a fairly long time to assess the situation in the world. at first it was limited to the relations between the two superpowers – the soviet union and the united states – and described them as the mutually assured destruction of the sides and the rest of the world in a global nuclear war.... This stability is a product of nuclear arms race that resulted in the parity of strategic offensive armaments of the ussR and the u.s. and the situation of the so-called nuclear stalemate.”
Topic:
Security, Diplomacy, Military Strategy, and Political stability
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, North America, and United States of America

4366. Russia and the Post-Soviet Space: Partners or Rivals?

Author:
Grigory Karasin
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
This interview discusses Russia's relationships with its neighbours.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Regional Cooperation, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and Moldavia

4367. U.S. Complicity in the 2014 Coup in Kiev as a Violation of International Law

Author:
A. Vyleghanin and K. Kritsky
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
Institution:
East View Information Services
Abstract:
FIVE YEARS AGO, a coup d’état took place in Kiev. Following demon- strations and arson attacks, a mob seized several government institutions, including the administration building and residence of the constitutional- ly elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich. Some members of the Ukrainian president’s security detail who were protecting his residence from illegal seizure were wounded and killed.1 Alexander Turchinov, one of the coup leaders, began serving as the president of Ukraine even though no Ukrainian presidential election had been held. The coup in Kiev led primarily to the U.S. assuming a leading role in Ukraine’s governance – something it had neither during the period of the Russian Empire nor the Soviet era. The February 2014 overthrow of the president in Kiev that took place without elections and in violation of the Ukrainian Constitution de facto divided the country into regions that recognized the new authorities in Kiev and those that opposed the coup (primarily the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine). This occurred not only because the Ukrainian presi- dent was unconstitutionally removed from power but primarily because the “installation” of the putschist government was accompanied by vio- lence, and ethnic and linguistic persecution. In March 2014, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea left the new, “post-coup” Ukraine in accordance with the provision of the UN Charter on the right of peoples to self-determination. Subsequently, following a referendum in Crimea, a treaty on Crimea’s reunification with Russia was signed. A confrontation between the new regime in Kiev* and residents of Donetsk and Lugansk Regions turned into a protracted armed conflict. The forcible replacement in Kiev of a constitutionally elected head of state (Yanukovich) with an unconstitutional leader (Turchinov) directly impacted Russia’s national interests. Russians and Ukrainians lived together within a single state, the Russian Empire, from the 17th century until 1917. During the Soviet period, the border between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic did not have international legal significance. It was an administrative bor- der. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independent UN member states (Russia and Ukraine) that replaced them continued to maintain close economic and other ties. Their continued integration, including through joint participation in the Customs Union, objectively met the strategic interests of Ukraine and Russia. A friendly Ukraine is also important to Russia from a national securi- ty standpoint, considering NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders that began in the early 1990s – i.e., NATO’s absorption of all former member states of the Warsaw Pact, including Poland and even the former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Russia’s leadership has repeatedly stressed the inadmissibility of dragging Ukraine into NATO. Words about “fraternal” relations between the peoples of Russia and Ukraine are no exaggeration: Millions of family members (both Russians and Ukrainians) live on opposite sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border,2 and at least one-third of Ukraine’s population speaks Russian as a native language. In this context, it is not surprising that Moscow considered the U.S.- orchestrated seizure of power from the head of state in Kiev an event affecting its vital interests. Something else is remarkable: The U.S. administration said that the events in Ukraine, far away from the American mainland, “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”4 Westerners promulgated a very different assessment of the forced ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014. The U.S. called it a “people’s rev- olution” and said that the mob action organized in part by the U.S. ambas- sador in Kiev (including the killing of Berkut fighters, the state guard of the Ukrainian president) was a legitimate way of expressing the will of the “Ukrainian people.”
Topic:
International Cooperation, International Law, Military Strategy, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, Middle East, South America, Syria, Venezuela, North America, and United States of America

4368. American Grand Strategy and the Rise of Offensive Realism

Author:
Ionut Popescu
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Ionut Popescu outlines the principles of a new American grand strategy grounded in an offensive realist theoretical framework. He argues that offensive realism is better suited to the new era of geopolitical competition with China and Russia.
Topic:
Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Political Science, and Strategic Competition
Political Geography:
Russia, China, North America, and United States of America

4369. The Government-Citizen Disconnect, Suzanne Mettler

Author:
Christopher Wlezien
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
Much research posits a “disconnect” between the public and government. This work focuses primarily on the behavior of politicians and the mismatch between their policy actions and citizens’ preferences. Suzanne Mettler’s book concentrates instead on the public and the degree to which people accurately perceive and appreciate what government does. This book complements her earlier work Submerged State, which delineated how many government policies, such as tax expenditures, are not visible to many citizens, which distorts their views. The Government-Citizen Disconnect, by contrast, examines how experience with government policies influences what people think.
Topic:
Government, Citizenship, Book Review, and Political Science
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

4370. Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction, David Bateman, Ira Katznelson and John S. Lapinski

Author:
Paul E. Herron
Publication Date:
09-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Political Science Quarterly
Institution:
Academy of Political Science
Abstract:
In his treatise on southern politics, V.O. Key Jr. wrote that “in state politics the Democratic party is no party at all but a multiplicity of factions struggling for office. In national politics, on the contrary, the party is the Solid South; it is, or at least has been, the instrument for the conduct of the ‘foreign relations’ of the South with the rest of the nation” (Southern Politics in State and Nation [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949], 315). In an early (and laudatory) review of that book, Richard Hofstadter suggested that Key missed an opportunity to fully consider whether the South had affected national politics in more ways than through the reliable delivery of Democrats to Washington, but he noted that this might require another book (p. 7). David Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski have written that book. Southern Nation examines how the South influenced public policy, Congress, and the development of the American state from the close of Reconstruction to the beginning of the New Deal. The authors focus on the region’s role in national politics at a critical juncture when industrialization and a rapidly changing economy required new policy solutions. They show that the white South used this opportunity to rebuild its place in the federal government, secure home rule, and shape the national agenda.
Topic:
Government, History, Book Review, Political Science, and White Supremacy
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America