... interfering egg coming well before the Russian self-defense chicken. It refuses to accept sole blame for all of the bombastic rhetoric. In this particular case reality better supports the Russian side: it is more accurate to describe Putin’s hostility toward America as one far more deeply rooted in frustration. But instead, America characterizes Russia as having an unstable mania that is obsessed with remaining a great Derzhava (powerful state) and will not recognize its culpability in creating its own ...
... initially placed on the so-called Obama ‘reset’ in American relations with Russia in 2008, the reality is that enthusiasm quickly faded and subsequently placed the Democratic Party as squarely pessimistic and adversarial in its attitude toward Russia as the Republicans. Indeed, in today’s environment of divided government having a problem with Russia seems to be one of the few happy consensus points in Washington. The only problem, of course, is how that consensus is built more upon ...
The events in Paris are unfortunately all too familiar in the 21st century. I think in some corners it is still perhaps a bit shocking that events like the storming of Charlie Hebdo and the killing of civilians do not actually take place more often than they do. In my line of work, this is the foundational conundrum of secret success: intelligence communities around the world actually do a stellar job of ferreting out literally hundreds, if not thousands of ideas, intentions, and full-on strategic...
Anyone who has worked through post-mortems on the Iraq war is familiar with the pitfalls associated with ‘groupthink’ and preconceptions. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the few modern examples of consensus across American partisanship. Some have argued such assumptions emerged from an administration ...
... small. Still fewer could locate it on a map. Still fewer have even an inkling of its current political issues. Reality shows that civil unrest and insurrection has been happening in the north of that country since 2004, meaning there has basically been war in Yemen as long as there has been war in Iraq. Most of the world actually didn’t pay any attention to this conflict until maybe 2011-2012, when events inside of Yemen were swept up and connected to the Arab Spring, leaving most Westerners to ...
... across major powers, giving no one state the ability to disrupt cyber equilibrium. If adopted this policy shift could ultimately hold the same potential that made nuclear M.A.D. so effective for so long without being physically challenged through global war: at first nuclear deterrence builds off of the expected second-strike capability, of being able to survive an initial strike long enough to launch an equally devastating counter-strike. But over time, as the great nuclear powers continued to build ...
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The Antithesis matrix is not a predictor of where revolutions will happen. It is a reminder that societies embedded with multiple forms of social media have the potential to facilitate protest and civil disobedience if other factors on the ground warrant such behavior. It is also a reminder that those regimes where it is likely to have those motivating factors in place should not feel too overconfident in their ability to constrain or co-opt that social media-inspired mobilization: for the matrix ...
