By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 26th, 2015 (updated February 27th-28th)
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse here
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One of the sad things about looking at current commentary about Russia, America, and the state of their relationship is the lack of measured and reasoned...
- Опубликовано:
- 27.02.2015 05:12:00
There is no stronger example of the schizophrenic nature of American foreign policy toward Russia than comparing statements written in the formal National Security Strategy (NSS) of President Obama with actual testimony given by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In 2010 the NSS asserted that the U.S. would endeavor to ‘build a stable, substantive, multidimensional relationship with Russia, based on mutual interests.’ What’s more, the NSS called Russia a 21st century...
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- 23.02.2015 20:59:00
... George Will, Alexander Motyl, and Fiona Hill are quick to damn ‘Russian provocations’ as moving the country to becoming a de facto ‘fascist’ state. In reality no such explicit initiatives can be found backing up such radical accusations. More calm analyses find Russia simply not accepting being told what to do on the world stage and that general position (operating in its own interests for its own interests) is so incredibly basic and elementary for all nations it is perplexing ...
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- 14.02.2015 21:08:00
America seems reluctant in accepting the fairly benign fact that countries do not like to be dictated to and thus misses opportunities for creating new dialogues. This is especially prominent in explaining the poor relationship at the moment with Russia. There seems to be an element of purposeful animosity in the way Russia is viewed, analyzed, and engaged, especially at the so-called expert level and most prominently within the now Republican-controlled United States Congress. Perhaps one of the...
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- 07.02.2015 00:55:00
There are numerous think tanks, both in the United States and Russia, which are deeply concerned about the state of Russian-American relations. Places like the Moscow Carnegie Centre or the Brookings Institution in Washington DC are regular go-to places for the media when seeking expert opinion and analysis. However, these centers of independent knowledge production have had a decided slant in allocating blame for the poor bilateral relations to the Russian side, with the explanations ranging from...
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- 03.02.2015 00:20:00
... Israeli Jews. I will not claim here that slave-descent African Americans in America are the equivalent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But there are important similarities between the recent violence in Ferguson and current violence in Jerusalem, between historical unrest in America among blacks and historical unrest among Palestinians under Israeli control, that are worth exploring.
Black in America: A Brief History
Unless you are a more recent voluntary immigrant from Africa or ...
- Опубликовано:
- 02.02.2015 16:14:00
When It Comes to U.S. Relationships in the Middle East, Expect a Lot More Change in Coming Years and Decades.
By Brian E. Frydenborg, originally published January 5th, 2015
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2014 has certainly been a year of change. While an ostensible explanation for this would be the...
- Опубликовано:
- 19.01.2015 17:46:00
... Al-Assad, after the Arab Spring had wiped out or severely impacted many of the former governments in North Africa and the Middle East.
From page 83 it starts a fictionalized depiction of the scenario, in the form of an imaginary letter from a relative of Usama Bin Laden, who goes over a lengthy description of the events surrounding the Caliphate.
The report covers also other topics - of which I present some notable excerpts -, in a manner suggesting that the report resembles more a strategic analysis ...
- Опубликовано:
- 14.01.2015 20:42:00
... people in northern Iraqi Kurdistan had been allies with the U.S. for decades and they were under threat. And world oil markets and production were being threatened. Finally, and certainly not least among the reasons, ISIS was murdering and abusing thousands in ways that even al-Qaeda thought went too far. Christians, Yazidis, Shiites, other minorities, and even Sunnis that were not subscribing to ISIS’s rule and extreme, murderous, barbaric interpretation of Islam have been and could still be ...
- Опубликовано:
- 13.01.2015 18:52:00
Western media members are currently basking in what to them seems to be a story of economic ‘come-uppance.’ Saudi Arabia announced that its 2015 budget will suffer from a significant economic shortage, resulting in a nearly $39 billion dollar deficit. Most in the West look at this fact curiously, mainly because it seems to be that Saudi Arabia is causing its own problem, by refusing to budge off of its own insistence at maintaining an oil production level of 30 million barrels per day...
- Опубликовано:
- 06.01.2015 19:02:00
1. More cohesion in NATO?
According to the balance-of-threat assumption the lack of unambiguous threat decreases cohesion of military alliances, whereas the free-rider problem increases in inverse proportion. Even if one doesn't consider the geostrategical mischief of NATO eastward expansion there is nevertheless another problem. It seems to be clear that the Europeans reducing their military expenditures as well as Uncle Sam tired of his burden are not able and willing to pay for worries...
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- 28.12.2014 04:03:00
... that slow progressive countermeasures would be enacted that would see the return of a healthy ruble over the course of the next two years.
Perhaps most intriguing of all was the fact that Putin actually claimed that sanctions had only a 25 to 30% causal value in the fall of the ruble. Much more important was Russia’s continued dependence on oil and natural gas, thereby making it especially vulnerable to fluctuations in the world market. Again, most in America will laugh this off. Surely this ...
- Опубликовано:
- 22.12.2014 22:41:00
... were valuable necessities that saved lives. Well, ok, maybe they didn’t, but surely they caused the offering of intelligence that otherwise would not have been obtained. Well, alright, maybe I cannot prove that was actually the case, a direct causal link, but I am pretty sure SOME information EVENTUALLY came out because of the atmosphere created by that tor…I mean, EITs.” In another time and place this would most assuredly end up fodder for Monty Python or Saturday Night Live.
...
- Опубликовано:
- 15.12.2014 18:04:00
... conceptions of power that are so multifaceted and multidimensional that they have no operational traction must be relied upon less.
Experts, whether academic or practitioner, need to move beyond ‘factor wars’ designed to show that one favorite causal factor is more important than another, concentrating instead on the combined and interactive effects of multiple factors.
The need to avoid hubris is tantamount for it afflicts both communities equally. Jervis’ seminal work on perception ...
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- 08.12.2014 06:59:00
The OPEC refusal to decrease oil production and a subsequent price fall to a 4-year low make the future of Russian economy tenuous. Since July 2014, the Russian ruble depreciated to the U.S. dollar by 45%, and the economic growth stalled. Falling oil prices together ...
- Опубликовано:
- 29.11.2014 22:15:00
... American thinking for Russian analysts.
An emphasis on grand strategic culture will actually make for better reading, as you will inevitably be taken down a road of the most interesting and intense historical and cultural impacts, possibly going back thousands of years. Organizational cultural conditions will instead leave you diving into budget concerns, internal turf wars over specific issue-areas, and the changing dynamics of micro-subjects that might not even make the paper, let alone a history text....
- Опубликовано:
- 26.11.2014 18:37:00
... semi-knowable at best. This is of course rather whimsically ironic given that the nation most responsible for this push is the state with by far the largest, most organizationally micro-managed intelligence community and is almost always victim to the accusation by other nations of having no true definable culture at all NOT dependent upon innate business-corporate concepts.
The consequence of this is important: this semi-mystical conceptualization can actually cause scholars and practitioners to ...
- Опубликовано:
- 27.10.2014 01:40:00
The Ukrainian crisis is currently the leading factor weighing on Western international relations, with the EU being caught in an unstable position, torn between the U.S.A.'s pressure on one side, and the economic interdependency with the Russian Federation on the other. This article examines the current state of the issue from a diplomatic standpoint, and the implications concerning European strategic interests.
The discussion revolves around some main points: the drifting of the EU away...
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- 20.10.2014 23:25:00
While most international organizations and foreign states have made attempts to explicitly fuse drones and targeted killing to already established norms, ethics, and rules of war, the United States has focused more on drones being something of a semi-covert tool of political means. In other words, drone war is not necessarily the exact same thing as conventional war. Once you blur the line on this basic fundamental categorization then nearly everything else becomes open to interpretation, including...
- Опубликовано:
- 16.09.2014 06:44:00
... that is trending toward becoming popular, which means congressional support for more defense spending.
Nobody can even agree on the name of the group the United States coalition is fighting. Obama calls it “ISIL”. The New York Times and USA Today call it “ISIS.” Others just call it “IS.”
Is’s all part of what an essay by Brookings, who work in Qatar among the private citizens who fund ISIS, calls the the “new Middle East Cold War”
ISIS, ISIL,...
- Опубликовано:
- 11.09.2014 10:13:00
