Energy

When and why do rising states prey upon or support declining powers? A state’s choice of policy toward a declining power depends on two factors: whether that power is useful against challengers to the rising state, and the declining state’s military strength.

Few nations elicit such fatalism among American policymakers and analysts as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For some, the country is an irredeemable pariah state, responsive only to harsh punishment and containment. Others see a wronged and resurgent great power that deserves more accommodation. Perspectives vary by the day, the issue, and the political party. Across the board, however, resignation has set in about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, and Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to change the game.

This paper responds to a topic from the Army War College’s Key Strategic Issues List, 2018-2020: Evaluate the ramifications of China’s and/or Russia’s interests in Africa for U.S. land forces and suggest options, both to compete and to cooperate, to further U.S. interests.

While U.S. land forces may benefit from competition or cooperation with Chinese elements in Africa, I judge that they possess limited agency to compete or cooperate in the context of these definitions. Therefore, I will take a whole-of-government approach to furthering U.S. interests in Africa vis-à-vis China.

On a cool day late last September, half a dozen Chinese engineers walked into a conference room in the heart of Geneva's UN district with a radical idea. They had one hour to persuade delegates from more than 40 countries of their vision: an alternative form of the internet, to replace the technological architecture that has underpinned the web for half a century. 

Whereas today's internet is owned by everyone and no one, they were in the process of building something very different - a new infrastructure that could put power back in the hands of nation states, instead of individuals.

For decades, the Munich Security Conference served as a powerful symbol of the strength of the Western alliance. The 2020 installment offered a testament to its accelerating decline.

The moral of this long, circuitous and often perplexing story is that a nation can only be effective in its foreign policy if it is grounded at home-- stable socially, self-confident and united in its foundational values.

Thirty years ago this week, on August 23, 1989, more than 2 million citizens of the Baltic republics of the U.S.S.R. engineered one of the most dramatic and successful mass protests in Soviet history.

The political scientist Karl Kaiser has warned against the blockade of a European defense policy by Germany.

I saw first-hand the value of our alliance with Europe on 9/11 when I was the new American Ambassador to the Alliance.  When we were hit hard in New York and Washington D.C., the allied Ambassadors came to me in Brussels that afternoon to pledge their support for us when we needed them most.  They pledged to invoke the alliance’s collective defense clause—Article 5 of the NATO Treaty—that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.

The policies of the Trump Administration have produced an international alignment, which never existed before: China and Europe (EU) now find themselves on the same side in a global conflict where the American president attacks multilateralism, has withdrawn from major international trade agreements, has unilaterally imposed tariffs, and questioned the validity of the WTO.