... increasing its Shia influence in and around Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities for the last decade. There can be no doubt that Iran will see ISIS as a risk to its foreign-policy strategy in the region but also perhaps as a direct threat to its own national security goals, given the open declarations from ISIS that it wants to create something akin to a de facto Sunni caliphate. It is doubtful there is a place of partnership in such an entity for Iranian Shiites. This is clearly why news reports in the United ...
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 been fairly inaccurate or uninformed media reporting in the West. This aspect of the conflict has been so poorly documented in the West, while being exhaustively reported in Russia, that it is time to provide some English language background to this underappreciated aspect still powering the conflict in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia...
Not that anyone would notice, but there is a disturbing and quite frankly depressing reality taking place in eastern Ukraine. While it is true the conflict that rages has been largely downplayed now and shoved off the media spotlight in the West, whatever coverage does emerge tends to be giving a relative free pass to Ukrainian police forces, special operation forces, and the military as they seek to reinstitute control over their national territory. At first glance this does not sound particularly...
... plaguing both the academic and intelligence communities that illustrate a perception challenge in the United States. Failure to overcome these problems will result in a failure to produce the necessary professionals and could compromise American national security for generations to come.
Problem 1: A Tradition of Suspicion
The relationship between academia and the intelligence community (IC) has always been problematic. This awkwardness is partly explained by a long-existing tension between traditionally ...
... chasm. The Chinese military took days to reach survivors after the devastating Sichuan earthquake in May of 2008, because it had so few helicopters and emergency vehicles.
With this state of military affairs, a Chinese and Russian perception of insecurity is not surprising. Even more logical is the Chinese and Russian resolve to evolve its asymmetric cyber capabilities: such attacks are usually inexpensive and exceedingly difficult to properly attribute. It is even more complex for states, where ...
... is a relatively constant and shared weakness across all modern great powers (whether that be the United States, China, Russia, Iran, India, Great Britain, France, etc). In other words, every state that is concerned about the cyber realm from a global security perspective is equally deficient and vulnerable to offensive attack and therefore defensive cyber systems are likely to remain relatively impotent across the board. Like the nuclear realm before it, a cyber M.A.D. doctrine (in this case, ‘mutually ...
... explanatory variable has affected not just Obama the politician but Democrats as an entire party – defending against the accusation of being foreign policy weaklings. This was arguably the biggest lesson learned from the Democratic failure of 2004, when ... ... The international community still likes President Obama. But no states, in terms of their substantive foreign policy/national security interests, have radically altered their positions just because Obama said so. How does this impact the foreign policy ...
... because the West and Kiev wants that question obliterated from the news doesn’t mean it is any less relevant to the actual 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 will all play out, for better or for worse, is beyond anyone’s guess. But in the meantime I will wonder if this Ukrainian ...
