Section: The American Interest (USA)
The EU May Have Just Put an End to Russia’s Pipeline Project
Amid much shock and confusion, as of last Friday the EU appears to have decisively moved to put a stop to Gazprom’s long-running pipeline gambit—a series of moves designed to gain pricing leverage over Europe’s energy market while also isolating Ukraine. The Ukrainian element was not incidental, and the strategy had three goals:...
The Unquiet American
From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s RussiaMichael McFaulHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018, 528 pp., $30 During a press conference at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport on September 19, 1952, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, remarked that his isolation in Moscow was worse than what he had endured...
Cleaning Up Ukraine’s Energy Sector
Ukrainians have suffered dearly at the Kremlin’s hand. Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to release the 24 Ukrainian sailors captured in the Kerch Strait last year, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have died in the War in the Donbass, and 2 million more live under Russian occupation in Crimea.But the threat to Ukraine also comes from...
Witnessing Putin’s Rise
After 19 years in power, Vladimir Putin’s reign can seem in retrospect an inevitability. Yet when Boris Yeltsin made his surprise announcement appointing Putin acting President on December 31, 1999, few Russians knew anything about the former KGB officer, and fewer still anticipated the scope of the crackdown to come. Ever since, debate has...
How Russia Plans to Win the “Hybrid War”
As Russia settles in for a lengthy period of tension with the United States and the West more broadly, how do Russians see the standoff shaping up? What might their long-term strategy be, and what sort of denouement might they envision, for what Russia Carnegie scholar Dmitry Trenin has dubbed the “Hybrid War?” After all, the Russians saw it...
Don’t Shoot The Messenger
The Kremlin’s trusted polling firm WCIOM, which also happens to be state-owned, has been releasing the results of its surveys faster and faster, and the news isn’t good for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The latest poll, measuring Russians’ “trust” in politicians,1 shows Putin registering only 32.8 percent support—his...
“Liberal Hegemony” Is a Straw Man
The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International RealitiesJohn MearsheimerYale University Press, 2018, 328 pp., $30 The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. PrimacyStephen WaltFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018, 400 pp., $28 Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal TraditionDavid C....
The Vices of Nationalism
One common narrative about the West’s ongoing predicament is that the current revival of nationalism is a foreseeable and potentially helpful corrective to liberalism’s overreach. Pushing the Euro, gay marriage, permissive immigration policies, and the climate change agenda down the throats of reluctant electorates was bound to...
Justice for Journalists and Russian Revanchism
Jeffrey Gedmin, the editor-in-chief of The American Interest, recently sat down with Mikhail Khodorkovsky in London to discuss his new foundation, Justice for Journalists. (Full disclosure: Jeff is a board member.) Read on to learn how three suspicious killings in the Central African Republic served as the genesis for his new foundation, why...
An Idea Whose Time Has Not Yet Come
Editor’s Note: As U.S.-Israeli negotiations intensify over a range of related issues—the implications of U.S. policy in Syria for Israeli security, the vaunted American peace plan reported to be in preparation, and other matters—history alerts us to the likelihood that a range of tradeoffs might attend resolution of any or all of these...
