Section: Brookings (USA)
The ulterior motive behind Russia’s partial Syria withdrawal
With great fanfare and “surprise” Russia once again seemingly out-maneuvered Western leadership in Syria. While much ink has been spilled debating whether President Vladimir Putin is executing a sound strategy—or is merely a tactical opportunist—it is clear that he has achieved his primary strategic goal: making Russia geopolitically relevant...
The Obama Doctrine and Ukraine
Editors’ Note: In his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, President Obama said Ukraine is a core interest for Moscow in a way that it is not for the United States. But the United States could have done more to help Kiev resist the Kremlin’s aggression, without engaging in war with Russia. This post originally appeared on...
More Russian nuclear saber-rattling?
Reuters and the newspaper L’Obs reported last week that the French navy in January detected a Russian ballistic missile submarine off the French Atlantic coast in the Bay of Biscay. There was no military reason for that submarine to be there. Was this Moscow’s latest attempt at nuclear intimidation? The report was sourced to an...
Glass half full? Obama’s judicious foreign policy record
Now well into the final year of his presidency, President Barack Obama recently gave a surprisingly frank and poignant review of his foreign policy record in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. There were a number of notable takeaways from their discussion, such as Obama’s critique of European allies and their lack of...
The case for Open Skies
U.S. military officials recently appeared to question American participation in the Treaty on Open Skies. At a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on February 24, Admiral Cecil D. Haney, commander of Strategic Command, testified that he was “concerned in terms of overflights of any ability of another nation to learn more about our overall...
Russian adventurism and the U.S. long game
Russia today poses a greater foreign policy and security challenge to the United States and its Western allies than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Its annexation of Crimea, war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, and military intervention in Syria have upended Western calculations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East....
Prospects for U.S.-Russian nonproliferation cooperation
Russia—An Increasingly Unreliable Nonproliferation Partner • Russia is inevitably a player in most nonproliferation issues by virtue of its many roles: as one of three NPT depositary governments, a leading member of the IAEA board, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a participant in both the Iranian-P5+1 talks and Six-Party Talks...
The future of U.S.-Russian arms control
Introduction The United States and Russia concluded the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2010. New START entered into force in 2011, and by February 2018 each side is required to reduce its strategic forces to no more than 1,550 deployed warheads on no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers. Since the conclusion of New START,...
With Russia overextended elsewhere, Arctic cooperation gets a new chance
Can the United States and Russia actually cooperate in the Arctic? It might seem like wishful thinking, given that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev asserted that there is in fact a “New Cold War” between the two countries in a speech at the Munich Security Conference. Many people—at that conference and elsewhere—see the idea as far-fetched....
Letting go, but not giving up: Implementation of Minsk II
Approaching its one-year anniversary date, the February 2015 Minsk II settlement agreement to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass is not faring well. All of its provisions were to have been implemented by Dec. 31, 2015. Few were. Still, Minsk II remains the only settlement arrangement on offer, and it continues to command at least...
