Section: The American Interest (USA)
The EU Can’t Fulfill Its Purpose
The EU has outlived its purpose as an ordering force in Europe. It is incapable of addressing the historical challenge facing the West: its rising geopolitical competition with revisionist powers. It failed to radiate security on its frontiers to the east and south. And it has proven too weak to keep in check the unilateral policies of its...
Shoring Up NATO Is in Europe’s Own Interest
The United States is now in the midst of a long overdue strategic redefinition aimed at shifting the country’s focus away from counterterrorism and toward great power competition. Evidence of the opening steps of this shift can be found in the December 2017 National Security Strategy and in the past year’s defense budget increase,...
Maria Butina and the Mortal Threat to Liberal Democracy
Like it or not, we are engaged in a long-term conflict with Russia. It has aptly been labeled the Hybrid War, and its principal novelty is radical asymmetry. Notwithstanding the frantic commentary one often hears on both sides, an Armageddon-like military conflagration is improbable. We are unlikely to see either a Russian blitzkrieg against the...
Georgian Dream’s Pyrrhic Victory
On Tbilisi’s central square, activists backing ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili have camped out in protest of the outcome of the recent presidential elections in Georgia. There is a strange sense of déjà vu from the time Saakashvili himself was in power, when protesters—among them Georgia’s new President, Salome Zurabishvili—blocked...
How to Make Sanctions on Russia Work
Even proponents of sanctions against Russia (and I count myself among them) have to admit that they have failed to change the Kremlin’s aggressive behavior. Russia continues to wage a brutal war in eastern Ukraine. It continues its military campaign to obliterate the opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. And it continues to subvert...
Two to Tango: Attacking the Demand Side of Bribery
“The United States will continue to target corrupt foreign officials . . . so U.S. companies can compete fairly in transparent business climates.”– National Security Strategy of the United States of America1“The U.S. Department of State has made anti-corruption a national security priority.”– “U.S. Anti-Corruption Efforts,” United States...
Time to Push Back Against the Revisionists
Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the parameters of the next round of global state-on-state security competition are now in full view. Long after history was declared to be at an end and America’s “unipolar moment” was so lyrically heralded, the world today looks nothing like such post-Cold War projections. The rules-based...
From Pole to Pole: The Rise and Fall of Liberal Poland
In June 2004, O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, spoke Polish. Or so it seemed, anyway, to me and the many other Poles there looking for a place to stay and a job—any job. I was lucky: I got one at a lunch franchise called Itsa Bagel. I wore a fully organic gray linen apron, made fancy sandwiches I couldn’t afford,...
In Ukraine It’s Not Merely About Ukraine—Which Is Why the West Must Respond
Russia’s military actions against Ukraine in and around the Azov Sea have triggered more than a week now of reaction. Both the UN Security Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission convened emergency sessions. NATO member states issued statements. President Trump blurred American condemnation by saying, “We do not like what’s happening...
Searching for Vitaly
“As good a diplomat as it gets.”Only twice in history did a Soviet official testify before the United States Congress. The second of those occasions was May Day of 1986, when the USSR’s embassy in Washington dispatched its 34-year-old second secretary on an hour’s notice to speak about the recent nuclear reactor explosion at...
