In this episode of the National Security Podcast, Katherine Mansted speaks to Ali Wyne about why great powers compete, how China, Russia, and the United States are shaping the global system, and whether their behaviour is making the post-COVID-19 world more dangerous. Is competition between great powers destined to be fraught with the risk of [...]
Tag: Geopolitics
Armenian-Azerbaijani Border Clashes: The Russian Dimension and Beyond – Jamestown
Following the outbreak of deadly Armenian-Azerbaijani border clashes on July 12 (see EDM, July 14, 16, 20 [1][2]), Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom reported that its local natural gas pipelines in Armenia were damaged, due to the shelling (TASS, RBC, July 14). Furthermore, the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) announced a meeting, at the [...]
“Suez in Perspective” – British Propaganda Film on the Invasion of Egypt in 1956
The Renewed Dependency on Mercenary Fighters – DER SPIEGEL
Increasingly, governments that are involved in military conflicts are turning not to their own countrymen, but are instead relying on foreigners who they pay as mercenaries. Countries like Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Iran are ignoring other countries' borders and sovereignty, sending hired guns into foreign countries because they don't like the regime [...]
Putin’s Constitutional Tsarism | by Anastasia Edel | The New York Review of Books
... if history offers any lessons, this attempt at greatness will last no longer than the false covenants and official statues every autocracy erects, for they fail in their fundamental goal: improving the lives of the people. The legacy of Stalin and Lenin is not a socialist empire but the graves of millions, murdered and [...]
New survey of European public opinion signals trouble for transatlantic alliance – Responsible Statecraft
Amid the ongoing global crisis caused by COVID-19, a new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations has troubling implications for the much-vaunted transatlantic alliance. The report, released June 29, shows that the present crisis has brought European trust in the United States to an all-time low. This data caps off several years of [...]
Wilson Center Digital Archive
The Digital Archive contains once-secret documents from governments all across the globe, uncovering new sources and providing fresh insights into the history of international relations and diplomacy. The Digital Archive is overseen by the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program and focuses on the interrelated histories of the Cold War, Korea, and Nuclear Proliferation. [...]
Disentangling the security traffic jam in the Sahel: constitutive effects of contemporary interventionism | International Affairs | Oxford Academic
Despite years of ongoing interventions by multiple external and regional actors, the security situation in west Africa's Sahel region is dramatically deteriorating. In this introduction to the special section of the July 2020 issue of International Affairs, we zoom in on four major external international intervention actors (France, the United States, the European Union and [...]
History Book Club
Inventing Russia: Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethnic group, no true central identity. It has been subject to invasion by outsiders, from Vikings to Hitler’s Germans. In order to forge an identity, it has mythologized its past to unite its people and to signal strength to outsiders. In this fascinating [...]
The king of Haiti and the dilemmas of freedom in a colonised world | Aeon Essays
In the early 19th century, Haiti was the only example in the Americas of a nation populated primarily by former enslaved Africans who had become free and independent. Other nations, including Haiti’s trading partners, were determined to prevent abolition and their colonies from becoming free, so they refused to recognise Haitian sovereignty. When France finally [...]
