... independent players. The United Kingdom and France, which developed their weapons in the 1950s and 1960s, have always been U.S. allies within NATO, and their weapons were always considered by Moscow to be part of the Western bloc’s combined nuclear arsenal. Cold War-era nuclear bipolarity that coincided with a similar ideological and geopolitical division (China remained largely introverted during that period) transformed into multipolarity. Strategic stability ceased being an issue for Moscow and Washington exclusively to tackle.
When India and Pakistan both acquired nuclear weapons at the turn of the ...
... power" sports diplomacy, before the concept of "hard power" was even "branded." It was the era when the calculations to develop nuclear power—and nuclear weapons—were made with slide rules, not supercomputers. During the same Cold War period, during the global polio epidemic (it was not called a pandemic), the Kremlin allowed millions of Soviet citizens to be tested with the polio vaccine developed by the American doctor, Albert Sabin. This was an amazing diplomatic and humanitarian ...
... Eurasian heartland states adequate or is a new, qualitatively more cohesive and integrated security equation, broadly along the geostrategic lines envisaged 70 years ago, an existential imperative?
The main factor which the Soviet leadership of the first Cold War decade thought would tilt the scales of the world balance of forces in its favor was the political unity of Russia and China i.e. the Eurasian heartland. The political split in that unity and the antagonism between the two Eurasian core powers was in fact the tectonic event that resulted in the “biggest geopolitical tragedy” in the 20
th
century. Today that antagonism ...
... moment”—the West’s hegemony—that followed it. While it was generally believed that Russia had lost the Cold War (although Russians never thought so, believed that they had overthrown communism themselves, and under no circumstances ... ... leader of the risen “new”—Russia, but failed again.
Many of the changes are quite objective: the rise of Asia, China and the other “new” when the “old” could no longer stop the process because of the nuclear factor....
... West can throw at it, in the way of sanctions. It had already lived through seventy years of relative isolation, through the Cold War years. It could live, again, if need be, for many more years in relative isolation. The Russian’s know how to do ... ... however, Russia also has other partners to trade with – from South America and India and to the mightiest of them all…China. However, the West, I suggest, actually needs Russia, far more than Russia needs the West, in many respects. Especially ...
... as the SCO or BRICS. In sum, the world is gradually acquiring a bipolar shape, with the traditional divisions between “us” and “them”, global “good” and global “evil”, reminiscent of the decades of the Cold War. Needless to say, the United States and China appear to be the centers of gravity for this new polarization of global politics.
One might ask the question: is there anything fundamentally wrong about a bipolar world? Was it not the Soviet-US bipolarity that served as the foundation of global ...
... concern within American corridors of power seems predicated on lazy assurance that no real rivals are emerging to learn from these ambiguities and obfuscations. The following evidence seems to indicate that might be the biggest mistaken assumption of all. China and Pakistan Most discussions of an immediate drone rival to the United States begin and usually end with China. At last count China supposedly had over 900 different types of drones, ranging from micro, blimps, unmanned combat air vehicles, and ...
... governmental perception behind Chinese and Russian command of cyberspace and their general cyber interaction with state authority. On the one hand, there is the assumption that this is a natural manifestation of the growing desire on the part of Russia and China to achieve global superpower status. On the other hand, there are the counter-arguments that emphasize China's and Russia’s own perception of inability to operate effectively against the United States in a conventional military confrontation....
While China has accepted human security as a new framework to study modern security challenges, it has been very busy trying to show how the implications of human security can be intrusive and even invasive of state sovereignty. Indicative of its confidence ...
