Section: The American Interest (USA)
Fake Words
We hear a lot about Fake News. Fake Words have been around even longer, but are less publicly celebrated. Yet they matter at least as much as “Alternative Facts”—or maybe more, as they are often written or said unconsciously. A set of them is regularly used in and about Russia.The experienced Australian analyst John Besemeres has described a...
Russians in Nicaragua
With the world focused on Syria, North Korea, Ukraine, and other pressing hotspots, the Russians have expanded their presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that the Russians erected a mysterious satellite-tracking compound in Managua that may double as an electronic intelligence-gathering base. This...
When Rex Met Sergey
Yesterday’s summit between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was judged to have ended in failure before it even began. Before the two had even met, the New York Times ran a piece criticizing the Trump Administration for having failed to pull off a quick rapprochement with Russia. The...
The Sadness of Princes
Through this work hardly appears in the most recent bibliographies, I believe that the following work by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke is still a very important study of a concept that has dominated political thinking for many years—The Idea of State Reason (German original 1957, common English version titled Machiavellianism). The...
Khan Sheikhoun, Shayrat Air Base, and Now What?
I wrote my first response to the U.S. cruise missile attack on Shayrat Air Base on April 7, 2017, at 2:30 p.m. EDT—in other words, about 18 hours after the attack. A great deal more has happened since, and it is in the nature of a crisis that this be so. One of the characteristics that make a crisis a crisis is that decision-makers on all sides...
Nuclear Deterrence: Still the Bedrock of US Security
Nuclear deterrence and the mission of those who work on the nuclear enterprise have never been far from my mind since I first worked in the Pentagon in 1981. In those Cold War days, when nuclear weapons and the need for deterrence often made newspapers headlines here and abroad, one of my first defense-related jobs was working as a physicist on...
A Soviet Man
News of the passing of Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, probably the best-known Soviet poet among those who managed to outlive their native country, resonated deeply in both the literary community and the ordinary public across Russia. Much will be said as we near the day of his funeral in the iconic village of Peredelkino, close to Moscow, on April 12—at...
Russia and Belarus Patch Things Up
Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko yesterday agreed to a comprehensive deal on energy and debt that will put a lid on talk of Belarus’s Westward drift. Reuters: At a meeting in St Petersburg, held while the Russian city was reeling from a deadly bombing on a metro train, Russia agreed to refinance Belarus’ debt while Belarus will...
Belarus and the Failure of the Russian World
In April 2014, a month after annexing Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared himself the defender of the Russkiy Mir—a “Russian world” dominated by ethnic Russians and encompassing most of the territory of the former Soviet Union. Observers in Russia and abroad had long interpreted the Kremlin’s interest in Eurasian integration...
The Kremlin Intrigue Behind the Anti-Corruption Protests
All across Russia this weekend, people took to the streets in a protest against corruption. The predominantly young crowd was spurred into action by opposition internet activist and aspiring politician Alexey Navalny, whose most recent slickly-produced video exposé of high-level government corruption—this time targeting Prime Minister Dmitry...
