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...
... Chengdu Pterodactyl 1, and Sharp Sword, have startling similarities to the American Global Hawk, Reaper and Predator, and the X-47B stealth drone respectively. This of course alludes to the apparent success China has had for several years in economic espionage, where it is believed massive amounts of confidential technical and commercial applications have been stolen from major aerospace and defense industries in America. This leads to a curious question: why are so many experts relying on the continued ...
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...
... mania that is obsessed with remaining a great Derzhava (powerful state) and will not recognize its culpability in creating its own future political cataclysm.
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 and should be treated as a de facto defeated nation. This triumphalism has arguably never left American decision-making power, given that the advent of this attitude began ...
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 the...
... traditional realist approaches and were not in fact capable of supplanting or replacing realist explanations entirely. Intelligence Studies today needs a similar ‘intellectual intervention’ as it has almost unknowingly advanced in the post-Cold War era on the coattails of Security Studies but has largely failed to apply some needed corrective measures that discipline enforced on itself when it came to cultural approaches over the past two and a half decades.
In the early literature ...
... when it should be making the picture more clear and distinct. It is true that relevant and powerful actors in the United 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 and dismissive tone taken by those same actors with Russia? Why are the facts above not entering into the discussion when ...
