In a three-hour refueling layover in Ukraine on Sunday US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson scored a little-noticed judo flip on that judo master, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Suddenly the big question is no longer last week’s worry in the…
Gunfight at the Ukraine Corral
2016 promises to be a decisive year for Ukraine. The sudden resignation on 3 February of Economics Minister Aivaras Abromavicius – and the immediate sharp fall of Ukraine’s sovereign bonds – suggest that the showdown is at hand, much sooner…
Debunking an urban myth
It’s time to debunk the lingering urban myths that Germany has resisted imposing sanctions on Russia over its undeclared war on Ukraine and might once again desert the West in a flirtation with Russia. True, Chancellor Angela Merkel favors smart…
The Waiting Game
No, the West has not (yet) lost Ukraine in Vladimir Putin’s Russian roulette, and the fragile Minsk truce and Western sanctions on Moscow over its land grab in Ukraine have not failed. A more nuanced reading of the current state…
A Farewell to Arms?
(Part 2/2) Link to Part 1: What Next for Ukraine? Four rival scenarios Analysis of the Ukraine crisis by Ukrainian-American historian Alexander Motyl and German Chancellor Angela Merkel differs sharply from that of John McCain and John Mearsheimer in that it…
What Next for Ukraine? Four rival scenarios
As the sober National Interest warns that America and Russia are “stumbling to war,” roughly four Western scenarios compete to explain where we stand in the year-old Ukraine crisis. Let’s call them the McCain, Mearsheimer, Motyl, and Merkel theses of,…
Do not arm Ukraine
Sending guns to Kyiv will only escalate the conflict Now is not the time to play to Russia’s military strength by flooding Ukraine, the world’s tenth-largest exporter of arms, with advanced Western weapons that Kiev’s armed forces have not…
Russian Escalation in Donbas
Ever since Russia snatched the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine last March and ended Europe’s seven-decade ban on coercive border change, Moscow has possessed enough raw military might to occupy mainland Ukraine as well. Throughout 2014, however, for tactical reasons, the…
Losing Afghanistan
Who lost Afghanistan? President George W. Bush, by hubris? Gen. David Petraeus, by his faith in counterinsurgency doctrine? Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose clan skimmed off fortunes from the 90 percent of the Afghan budget funded by the West? Warlord…
What the NSA Can Learn From Sweden
When Congress reconvenes in Washington after the summer break, it will try – for the first time since the 1970s – to recalibrate the proper balance between security and privacy in treatment of signals intelligence. It could learn a lot…