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 ...
There is a decided chicken-and-egg quality when trying to unravel Russian-American relations. The general pessimism and pejorative characterizations that ... ... 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...
America seems reluctant in accepting the fairly benign fact that countries do not like to be dictated to and thus misses opportunities for creating new dialogues. This is especially prominent in explaining the poor relationship at the moment with Russia. There seems to be an element of purposeful animosity in the way Russia is viewed, analyzed, and engaged, especially at the so-called expert level and most prominently within the now Republican-controlled United States Congress. Perhaps one of ...
There are 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,...
... 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....
... about how a specific conceptualization of ‘culture’ in intelligence studies, amongst scholars at first but subsequently ... ... intervention’ as it has almost unknowingly advanced in the post-Cold War era on the coattails of Security Studies but has largely ... ... micro-managed intelligence community and is almost always victim to the accusation by other nations of having no true definable culture at ... ... analyst with no choice but to begin from a foundation that assumes Russian aggression, Russian aspiration for re-establishing empire ...
The interplay between Ukraine and Russia when it comes to gas geopolitics goes far beyond economic negotiations and development. It lies at the heart of what has ... ... States sometimes seem too content with seeing Russia only as the ‘Bond villain country’ it was designated during the Cold War. How else do we account for the constant engagement by American political actors with Ukraine and the relatively limited ...
There seems to be a strong divergence in American 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 ... ... Russia? This is likely to be considerable.
The United States invests heavily in cyber security and several members of the Intelligence Community work to create cyber weapons meant to preserve US military predominance. However, there are still missed ...
... great distance just hoping an autocratic regime would fall one way or another. In the Maidan revolution this was not the case: Russia was very much interested in the long-term geostrategic consequences of regime change, and it was the blind laziness of ... ... people in the eastern half of the country.
And so here we sit. Eastern Ukraine remains unsettled. More casualties mount. Accusations fly about Russian subterfuge as authorities in Kiev violently struggle to preserve its larger territorial mass. How it ...
