... actions within the country as “barbaric”. Russia, never one to back down from a challenge, whether physical or verbal, responded rather forcefully through the personage of Maria Zakharova, the official spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some of the highlights of her comments were rich in both imagery and dismissiveness: · When Samantha Power says something, then one wants to cry out in fear for the future of the world, considering this future is subject to these ...
... 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 ... ... militaries and sought the right technical/financial budgetary investment to develop their own programs. The basic principles of foreign affairs dictate that America could easily be sucked into regional conflicts where its interests figure prominently. It ...
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...
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, 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...
Anyone who has worked through post-mortems on the Iraq war is familiar with the pitfalls associated with ‘groupthink’ and preconceptions. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the few modern examples of consensus across American partisanship. Some have argued such assumptions emerged from an 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...
... often never analyzed from a perspective that emphasizes contemporary reality, purpose-based objectives and actual organizational functionality.
Russian Federation
Despite every effort by officials within the Russian Federation since the end of the Cold War to decry a new foreign policy strategy and to instigate new relations based on ideas of multipolarity and balanced global power, most American analyses of Russia cannot seem to get past characterizing every Russian maneuver and interest in a ...
... 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 ...