Articles

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse.

After World War II, "trading states" seemed to be charting a new path forward. But small was not beautiful. Even great powers found themselves negotiating larger markets through economic associations with others. It's time the United States became such a power.

"...1989 was less of a watershed year than 1979. The reverberations of the fall of the Berlin Wall turned out to be much smaller than we had expected at the time. In essence, what happened was that we belatedly saw through the gigantic fraud of Soviet superpower. But the real trends of our time—the rise of China, the radicalization of Islam, and the rise and fall of market fundamentalism—had already been launched a decade earlier."

Despite extensive diplomatic efforts to facilitate the six-party talks, domestic policy constraints, differing priorities, and conflicting historical analogies among each of the countries have brought vastly differing perspectives to the multilateral negotiating table.

The author assesses the factors leading to Moscow’s decision in December 1994 to use military force to crush Chechnya’s resistance to the authority of the Russian leadership.

Carter, Deutch, and Zelikow addresses the threat of Catastrophic Terrorism in Foreign Affairs.

Op-ed by Dr. Ashton B. Carter and Dr. Graham T. Allison in The Washington Post

Article by Dr. Ashton B. Carter in Daedalus

A careful reader of the discussion in the Russian and American national security community could conclude that Americans are more concerned about the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack than are Russians. Specifically, American experts have described more vividly potential nuclear terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than have Russians, at least in the writings and conversations that are publicly accessible. Why this is the case is a puzzle. No one doubts that in Chechen fighters Russia faces serious, capable, determined adversaries. Moreover, if Chechnya succeeded in capturing, stealing, or buying a nuclear weapon (or material from which they could make a nuclear weapon), their first target would surely be Moscow, not New York or Washington DC.