... Clinton and Donald Trump, questions remain as to which candidate is favored by which foreign leaders. While mainstream American media is still basically covering the race with horrified fascination at the popularity and perseverance of the Trump campaign,... ... domestic affairs and are unfit or inexperienced to handle world affairs. In essence, Democrats always have to defend against the accusation of being foreign policy weaklings. This accusation is never leveled against Republican candidates (even when a particular ...
... finely-tuned snippets heavy on atrocities and bloodshed, is in fact a slickly produced, media-savvy inundation focused on religious epiphany, glorious sacrifice, and noble... ... beyond anything the West could ever think plausible.
Against this backdrop, it is inexcusable that American agents find themselves at a loss to understand the appeal of that... ... to them or a taunt to make them feel demeaned. One of the fundamental principles in intelligence is to gain insight into adversaries by truly understanding their worldviews...
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 ...
... 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 ... ... influence on America, it would be naïve to think that open American support and encouragement, at least through formal media declarations and diplomatic speeches, did not have an impact on increasing the intensity and duration of domestic protest....
... Russian Institute for Strategic Research is a prime example of this problem. Upon his exit early in 2015, Reshetnikov unleashed a torrent of information that, while interesting, really does not amount to more than just gossip and hearsay. Worse, American media and political analysts adopted it almost wholly as fact rather than as one perspective from a motivated source to talk badly about Russia:
“The Russian analyst’s scathing remarks about the country’s leadership and about the community ...
... 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 the fairly ...
Western media members are currently basking in what to them seems to be a story of economic ‘come-uppance.’ Saudi Arabia announced ... ... this ceiling, thus guaranteeing its 2015 economic ‘problem.’ When you look deeper into the multiple foreign-policy, intelligence, and global political layers of this decision, however, you don’t find a country in trouble or even incompetent....
... notion that the sanctions are causing a precipitous decline in the popularity of Putin. It is not uncommon today to find numerous media accounts in the West testifying to this very issue, with many supposedly Western experts on Russian politics declaring predictions ... ... 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 ...
... than the public incredulity on American torture techniques after 9/11 is the bogus semantics game being played out with the media now in the report’s aftermath. “Yes we did torture. No. Sorry. We did ‘EITs.’ Yes there were measures ... ... But they 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,...
... administration not interested in counter-arguments and alternative information. Others pointed to embedded preconceptions within the Intelligence Community itself, making it impossible to jump off the analytical train once it started rolling down the track. Both ... ...
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....
