Section: The American Interest (USA)
Why Tehran’s Oil Resurgence Should Terrify Moscow
Iran, it’s fair to say, is giddy at the prospect of the West’s lifting sanctions on its oil exports as part of ongoing nuclear talks. It reportedly intends to double those exports as soon as possible, a possibility the rest of the world’s oil suppliers—and especially Iran’s fellow OPEC member states—aren’t looking...
Are Ukraine’s Police Reform Efforts More than Just Hot Air?
As we’ve been saying for a while now, endemic corruption is the biggest obstacle to a truly open and westernized Ukrainian society. Yet even after the Yanukovych’s thugs martyred the “heavenly hundred” protesters and caused Ukraine’s Maidan movement to boil over into a real uprising that overthrew the dictator (and got a certain...
The Fisherman’s Other Shoe Has Dropped
Good fiction can make history come alive; conceivably, sometimes, it may cause history to happen. If the latter is indeed conceivable, then Pope Francis I may have been invented by the Australian novelist Morris West in The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963). The novel was made into an American movie in 1968. (Francis was then thirty-two years old....
Ukraine Snubs Russian Gas
Kiev turned off its Gazprom gas tap today, snubbing the Russian supplier in talks to negotiate a new contract as an interim deal expired. The two sides can’t agree on a price—Gazprom is offering $247 per thousand cubic meters, roughly a $40 discount, while Ukraine is holding out for a better bargain and more favorable terms. Reuters...
Ukraine to Creditors: Do Your Worst
Ukrainian delegates, IMF staff, and representatives of foreign creditors led by the Franklin Templeton group are to meet in Washington today. As it mulls its economic options, Kiev has clearly been listening to Bob Dylan, who wrote that “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”Ukraine will be arguing that it just doesn’t...
Weimar Russia, 1995–2015
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on March 17, 1995, I argued that Russia was “deprived of pride and self-respect. . . . The public—its pride deflated and its economic needs unmet—craves order at home and respect abroad. The authoritarian temptation is pervasive, and so is the urge to be—and to be seen—as strong once again.”In her...
Merkel: Migrants “The Biggest Challenge” in Europe
Despite talks that ran late into the night, European leaders failed to come up with a lasting framework for resettling refugees based on quotas yesterday. EU leaders instead agreed to a one-time resettlement of up to 60,000 asylum seekers who landed in Italy and Greece across the bloc over the next two years—but with special opt-out clauses for...
Binding the Bear
Russia’s annexation of Crimea violated the foundations of the post-1945 global order and shattered the fundamental consensus that has so far sustained the Euro-Atlantic balance. In the face of the new uncertainty, we must rethink all major policy options for handling the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Several options are outlined below, in hopes...
Time for Sweden to Join NATO
Last summer, during the annual political festival on the Danish island of Bornholm, Russia carried out a simulated attack against the island. This year, two U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers appeared in the sky over the festival, gliding silently at a low altitude over the city of Allinge—twice. These flybys were intended as a political...
Protests in Yerevan Have the Kremlin Spooked
Street protests in Armenia have continued for a fifth straight day in response to an electricity price hike of 16.7 percent announced on June 17 by the government in this poor landlocked nation of 3 million. The protests show no sign of easing off. The Guardian: The protests in Yerevan, which began on Friday, escalated significantly after police...
