The USA continues to move towards the reinstatement of nuclear weapons as a fundamental element of national and international security
Experts and politicians are familiar with several variants of the 2018 NPR. The Huffington Post published a draft in mid-January. On February 2, in the run-up to the February 5 deadline to meet the central limits of the US–Russia New START treaty, the NPR was officially presented in the Pentagon by representatives of the Department of Defense, the Department of...
... into cooperation in several areas never turned into full-fledged detailed documents. The Russia–Europe summits held twice a year gradually became pompous and insignificant events. And a full-fledged security dialogue was never developed because of NATO’s reluctance to accept the new realities in Europe and the world. The American viewpoint on the need to expand NATO and turn it into a military power so that it could carry out its plans to establish a unipolar world in the Western mould under ...
... overstatement to label 2017 as
annus mirabilis
, but it was definitely not as bad as 2016, and it countered some of the most pessimistic views on the inevitability of Western decline.
It is true that after Trump became president, disputes intensified within NATO as to how the burden of defense expenses should be distributed within the Alliance. However, the May 2017 NATO summit in Brussels did not prove catastrophic, and any attempts to write NATO off appear to be very much premature. It is also true that ...
... Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) also had a major role to play. Under the treaty, the Warsaw Treaty Organization abandoned the idea of military superiority and agreed to parity by reducing its arsenals by 34,700 units, four times the number reduced by NATO (8,700 units)[
3
]. Under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I Treaty), the USSR and the United States reduced their strategic nuclear arsenals, cutting around 25% of their delivery platforms and 50% of their warheads. Furthermore, political ...
Revisiting the Harmel’s legacy
Introduction
This article revisits the origins and significance of NATO’s 1967 Harmel report and debates its relevance in the current context of relations between the Atlantic Alliance and the Russian Federation. NATO-Russia relations are today marked by confrontation and the two sides seem unable to set their relationship ...
... is that there is no system of agreements, no hot lines and no channels for consultation between the defense ministries. We have prevented a war in Europe by disrupting plans to involve Ukrain into Western alliances. If Ukraine had become a member of NATO, a war would have become unavoidable. People have become used to living without war and they think that this is how it will always be. But it may not be so all the time. There are new types of weapons that erase the watershed between nuclear and ...
... a whole recognized the independence of Croatia and Slovenia which had broken away from Yugoslavia. Such unilateral recognition was completely against international law and became one of the factors that triggered a civil war in Yugoslavia. In 1999, NATO bombed defenseless remains of the country for 78 days. The West then recognized the independence of Kosovo, which had been torn away from the country and where no one bothered even to hold a referendum on separation. In 2003, most NATO countries ...
... however, emphasized the need to more directly link the settlement of Ukraine to a way forward on European security more broadly, whether through the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) format or something else. Agreement that the NATO-Russia founding act remains in place and should continue to do so (although NATO members might argue that Russia’s actions in Ukraine violate it) is one possible starting point. So is having both officials and experts discuss how escalation dynamics ...
... Islamic State came into prominence by invading Syria and Iraq, occupying such key cities as Raqqa and Mosul, among others. The Western coalition, which decided to launch air raids against the terrorists, needed a regional air base. Turkey, an ally of NATO, has such a base. However, Ankara did not allow NATO forces to be deployed at Incirlik Air Base until July 2015, which
puzzled the United States and its allies
.
What is more, the events of 2014, when Islamic State intensified its advance and surrounded ...
... Annual Conference
in Washington on 5/6 October. The conference embraced academics, policy experts and “institutniks”, and some former politicians and diplomats from the USA, Russia and Europe, with guest appearances by Dr. Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn.
It is common ground that we are living through a very dangerous period, with “world order” under threat or illusory; that relations between Russia and the USA, and between Russia and leading European members of NATO, have reached a ...
