... Republican mindset.
That mindset sets a fairly stark characterization: Russia is an aggressive and untrustworthy dictatorship that is an innate contradiction to American values. As such it will inevitably always be a threat to U.S. interests and global security. By all indicators, Russia is a threat not just to itself and its immediate neighbors but to the entire world, masking its own domestic failings and instabilities with an aggressive foreign policy that will never acquiesce to a more peaceful and cooperative global community....
... ease the far more standard approach to foreign policy formulation is to determine a country’s own national interests and security dilemma and craft an independent position that can best achieve optimal goals for said country.
And that, not ironically,... ... ‘shift’ away from craving attention to striving to exorcise American demons. In reality there is no shift at all: Russia has always been about Russia, as it expects America to be about America, France to be about France, Nigeria to be about ...
... its firm decision, for now, to not tamper with oil production.
So what is the bigger picture? Why tap the reserves? National security, regional hegemony, and long-term economic positioning explain most of it. With this one simple move of maintaining the ... ... uniquely American Faustian bargain: the oil price slide has clearly put greater teeth into the American sanctions imposed against Russia, as it has hurt the Russian ruble significantly. Sanctions alone for the first half of 2014 basically had no real impact ...
On December 18 President Vladimir Putin gave his traditional end-of-year holiday speech. Think of it as a Russian version of the American State-of-the-Union address always given by our President. In it Putin expressed dismay and concern at the manner in which Russia’s “Western partners” were behaving, even going so far as to declare Western ...
... mentioned above are quintessentially academic and best taught by terminally-degreed, full-time faculty dedicated to promoting them.
The even bigger danger: as more schools have tried to develop degree programs focused on intelligence and national security, they have followed the military-friendly school model, poaching retired IC professionals to fill their programs with adjunct, part-time faculty without surrounding them in an academic setting. This dominance by practitioners-as-teachers has ...
... is from the ivory tower or Foggy Bottom.
“Of the organization of the Soviet and subsequent Russian state we can draw no specific indication of Byzantine bureaucratic organization, but in spirit the way the Soviets organized their government for security purposes is still quite Russian…What is being argued here is that the way the Byzantines managed their security and intelligence was a function of the political culture of the state, the same political culture that was inherited later by the Kievan and then Russian state,...
... Russian aggression, Russian aspiration for re-establishing empire (whatever that actually means is never defined of course), and Russian desire to interfere in the affairs of its neighbors. All of these approaches are overblown and sometimes purposely misconstrued ... ... community in question. Ironically, this call for a similar ‘Deschian’ intellectual intervention that took place within Security Studies more than fifteen years ago also offers Intelligence Studies a chance to properly differentiate itself as a discipline ...
... other, would lead only to the establishment of new demarcation lines in Europe which, although they might run somewhat farther from Moscow than the current Russian–Ukrainian border, would not provide a radical solution to the problem of global security for Russia. Moreover, such an approach would also substantially restrict Moscow’s opportunities to play an active role in Ukrainian internal politics in Central Ukraine.
Use of the non-aligned model should not restrict Ukrainian sovereignty. The current ...
... Worse still is how incredibly infantile and cruel this line of argument is from NATO: there is no chance, NONE, that Ukraine will be invited to join the group. While Obama says officially to the microphones that all options will remain open for global security and peace, France and Germany are both formally opposed to offering membership to Ukraine. As long as that is the case, Obama’s comments are just empty gestures, more cruelty to Ukraine than deterrent to Russia. Does anyone in their right mind think Russia worries more about microphone asides from the American President compared to official French and German policy? I have a bridge to Crimea to sell you if you believe that. Which is an interesting segue ...
Imagine you are on a gameshow, and are asked the following question: in which year did the Russian language internet -- commonly known as Runet-- begin? The answer, you could assume, is 1990, with the creation of Relcom. Unless its 1983, that is, with the San Francisco Moscow Teleport. Which would mean you aren’t accepting the 1972 Express ...
