Section: The American Interest (USA)
The Golden Age of Natural Gas
Jamie Horgan: I’m here with Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the new book, The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas. Agnia, thanks for taking the time to talk with me today.Agnia Grigas: Thank you, Jamie. It’s a pleasure to be here.JH: In your book, you look at the transition to a new era of gas that you...
Why Sanctions Matter
A long-debated sanctions bill in response to Russian meddling in U.S. elections was signed into the other week by President Donald Trump. The bill provides a framework for the extension of sanctions to various other sectors of Russia’s economy; but perhaps more importantly, it makes the lifting of existing sanctions a much more difficult...
Report: Ukraine Sold Rocket Technology to North Korea
The New York Times has an important story today that suggests North Korea’s surprising progress towards building their ICMBs may be due to a Ukrainian rocket plant selling technology on the black market. The story suggests that after the Russian government canceled its orders for missile parts in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the factory...
How Obama’s Weakness Encouraged Russian Election Meddling
Amid the unrelenting media din accompanying the latest twist in the White House’s ongoing personnel struggles last week, BuzzFeed News managed to cause a minor stir by publishing an update on the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death of Mikhail Lesin, the former Putin advisor instrumental in cowing Russia’s lively media in...
The Macron Factor
The rollercoaster electoral cycle that the French have endured for about a year under the scrutiny of the international media has finally come to an end, producing the swiftest and most thorough transformation of the French national political landscape since the beginning of the Fifth Republic nearly sixty years ago. It also holds the promise of...
Will Donald Trump Arm Ukraine?
The Pentagon and State Department are cooking up a proposal to give Ukraine lethal defensive weapons, according to the Wall Street Journal: American military officials and diplomats say the arms, which they characterized as defensive, are meant to deter aggressive actions by Moscow, which the U.S. and others say has provided tanks and other...
Russia’s Loss, Whose Gain?
Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet EurasiaSamuel Charap & Timothy J. ColtonRoutledge, 2017, 212 pp., $21.95 A recent book by Samuel Charap and Timothy Colton—two outstanding Russia experts of two distinctly different generations—will probably not go unnoticed given its grandly pessimistic title. Their...
All The Dots, Connected
Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with whom he met in June 2016, have tried to portray their meeting at Trump Tower as nothing more than a lobbying effort aimed at lifting a discrete set of sanctions known as the Magnitsky Act. The implication is that Veselnitskaya, as well as Rinat Akhmetshin (who was only...
Euromacht: Brussels über Alles?
While the elites of the Western world are still publicly reeling from Brexit and Trumpet (the trauma that followed the 2016 U.S. presidential election deserves its own somewhat silly appellation), some have already seized the opportunities offered by those shifts in the international order. This is particularly true for European...
The Private Putin Meeting and Trump’s Legitimacy
At a dinner at the G20 summit, President Trump got up and walked over to Vladimir Putin for a one-on-one conversation, with only Putin’s interpreter present, that lasted for anywhere between a few minutes (White House version) and as long as an hour (reported by Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer, citing other leaders who remarked on the...
