October 1st began what could be one of the more interesting Chairships of the United Nations Security Council, with Russia taking over and being charged with a rather delicate balancing act: between conducting the numerous affairs expected to be covered by any standard Chair of the UNSC and deftly handling the ‘special’ relationship with the United States that has recently become woefully deficient. Even more intriguing, some of the most vivid recent examples of that degrading relationship...
... 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... ... 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... ... military, foreign policy, and security establishment that chronically view Russia with Cold War attitudes, regardless of evidence.[6] • During the Crimea crisis in 2014...
... fundamental questions that the United States has been unwise to ignore and the honest answers, based on previous American drone usage, probably carry some severe repercussions for American foreign and military policies: Who is controlling the weapon system?... ... 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 ...
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...
... This perfectly matches what Stephen Cohen astutely called several years back as ‘Cold War Triumphalism.’ In basic terms, since Russia lost the Cold War it was... ... 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... ... 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...
... 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 ...
... 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... ... 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... ... relationship could change fundamentally.
So here we sit, once again looking at a Cold War-like detente between Russia and America with the latter side utterly confident...
... 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 ...
... to be the one to show restraint and diplomatic maturity! And even though the world is particularly slow to recognize this fact, truth be told, Russia has risen to the challenge and has shown restraint. Let us hope that in this particular schoolyard media showdown some of this will actually start to rub off on President Obama. For if it does, then real discussions and negotiations can begin anew and American-Russian relations can once more get serious and move beyond these lame attempts to conjure a neo-Cold War that is in the interests and objectives of no one. Well, at least, not in the interests and objectives of anyone who desires peace and tranquility between two old rivals. This playground certainly IS big enough for the two of them. Someone might ...
