In recent decades great powers usually win the wars but lose at peace
Speech delivered at the session “Foreign Policy in Uncertain Times: Pursuing Development in a Changing World” at the 15
th
Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club
Two hundred years ago, the prominent German military ...
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Question:
Well you talk of the legitimate government that is also the government responsible for killing of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, making millions homeless. “A gas killing animal”, as President D.Trump, your ally, puts it. Do ... ... to describe some of the world leaders. It is not something done in concrete, it might change. What I want to say is: it is a war. It is the war, which was started by mistakes made on the part of everyone, including the Syrian government. I believe these ...
... Tuesday, the participants had the chance to listen to Aleksey Fenenko, a Leading Research Associate at the Institute on International Security Studies of the RAS and Ivan Timofeev, RIAC Director of Programs, who discussed the possibility of a new great war.
Aleksey Fenenko opened the event stating that our notion of war is based on the inventions of the Second Boer War and pertains to the practices of the two World Wars, which involve the first continuous fronts, the possibility to mass mobilize armies,...
... regular business, however, pales in comparison to the intrigue and drama that will undoubtedly emerge when it comes to Russia interacting with the Permanent American Envoy to the UN, Samantha Power. She has always held relatively adversarial positions toward Russia and recently made major headlines when she accused Russia of engaging in disinformation campaigns in Syria and called Moscow actions within the country as “barbaric”. Russia, never one to back down from a challenge, whether physical ...
... Heart winner, and long-time Foreign Affairs Senate stalwart John Kerry lost to Bush, who had no such international military service accolades to lean on. While in the past Democrats could always criticize Republicans for being too eager to consider war (all stick, no carrot), the reverse accusation thrown back at Democrats post-9/11 seemed more damning (all carrot, no stick). What Democrats as a party needed to ensure was that Americans could see them as not too weak or awkward when it came to handling said stick. Undoubtedly this was a ...
The book “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History” by Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel and a military historian, represents a detailed account of US overt as well as covert military involvement in the Islamic World. The author goes through 36 ...
... enclaves where ‘people stick to their own’ and the ‘well-to-do’ and newly arrived are quickly made aware of the places not to venture into and where not to congregate. Almost exclusively those areas are ‘ethnic’ bastions ... ... century, making its reach and scope far 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 small percentage willing to abandon the ...
... massive domestic problem for Pakistan. Pakistan’s request for Reaper technology from the U.S. has been long-standing. The refusal has been based on successive American presidential administrations feeling Pakistan was not ‘capable of handling such ... ... easily be sucked into regional conflicts where its interests figure prominently. It is inconceivable to think a ‘drone war’ between Iran and Saudi Arabia or Egypt would not end up being a major national security interest for the United States....
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 ...
... 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 ... ... with some validation, that it has been incredibly non-confrontational with the U.S. on many issues since the end of the Cold War that have not necessarily been aligned with its own national interests. As a result, it is not uncommon to find Russian political ...