Shortly before Edward Snowden shared eavesdropping secrets with Wikileaks agent Glenn Greenwald the famous Harvard soft power guru and regional Trilateral Commission president Joseph Nye wrote an article in Foreign Policy stating, inter alia, that Russia doesn’t understand soft power because it is not a free society and the United States does…

“The man of logical training will only seek such a degree of certainty in each branch of study as the character of the objects studied permits.”

― Aristotle

 

In our modern world, it appears like there are as many experts as there are opinions, with many of these being driven by impulsive…

 
        The demise of the Cold War urged us to grow our brain out of the simplified friend-foe dichotomy. Reintegrating herself into an increasingly globalized world of the 21st century, Russia as well as any other country cannot think in an outdated framework of “you are either with us or against us…

 
        The returning Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have successfully regain full control over the upper and lower congresses of Japan in July 2013; now they are equipped with an ever-mightier momentum and democratic mandate to push forward agendas of the most pressing national…

The atmosphere in the press room at Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia was agitated Tuesday morning.  Journalists and camera crews were scurrying about, waiting for Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to arrive. I was there, attending the event..   The diplomats were holding a joint news conference on the status…

 
        Today’s global business faces a pressing call for incorporating social responsibility into a calculus of strategic profit making. Although good corporate citizenship has become one of universal criteria to access the overall success of any global firm, market share, along with profitability, remains as the…

 
        On July 2013, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) won general election of the upper house by landslide and achieved its full control over both the upper congress (参議院: House of Councilors) and lower congress (衆議院: House of Representatives) of Japan. After coming through a period of unpopularity…

 
      The worldwide financial meltdown of 2007 has triggered countless emotional responses at every single corner of the world. Fears marched and myths triumphed. Some claimed that all capitalist states are prone to be bankrupt (although states by definition cannot be bankrupt, strictly speaking) and others proclaimed that the…

 
        At an international summer program of MGIMO (Russian Foreign Ministry Moscow State Institute of International Relations), more than a few professors mentioned that Russia and Japan are still technically “at the state of war” since there has been no conclusive peace treaty signed after the World War II…

Before leaving to meet Pope Francis in Brazil Argentine President Cristina Kirchner told her people she wished she had a little machine to print money.   Argentina has made some problematic business decisions in the hydrocarbons arena and as a result the nation has gone from being a net exporter to a net hydrocarbons importer in less than 24…

The ongoing shift of the global geopolitics’ center of gravity toward the Asia-Pacific raises the question about the role in this region of the world’s most powerful political-military alliance  – NATO. To be more specific, this question is about the potential role for NATO’s European wing, because the United States has…

Private military and security companies have often been characterized as modern mercenaries, an accusation that merits serious consideration, as mercenarism is illegal under international law. Although they have not been officially deemed unlawful, an examination of the relevant normative context reveals substantial inconsistency between the growing…