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...
... 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 ...
... go by with so much historical change and global shifting and yet still end up basically back at the starting point of a quasi-Cold War between the United States and Russia, then please allow me to offer one slightly unique explanation as to how this has ... ... have emerged from Generation X when it comes to studying and understanding the Russian Federation. When you examine and code media sources and academic work, from which news organizations reach out to for quotes and ‘expert opinion’ about ...