... progressively more strained. Georgia was a warning shot. Ukraine marked a final break with past unrealistic assumptions and dispelled unfulfilled ambitions. Western integration on terms acceptable to Russia, until now a central pillar of Russia’s post-Soviet foreign policy, came crushing down.
Ironically, the alternative to that course, re-integration of former Soviet borderlands around Russia did not survive the Ukraine crisis either. Just as Moscow could not accept U.S. tutelage, neither could its ...
Rereading my 1984 article “Misperception, Ambivalence, and Indecision in Soviet Policy-making,” for the first time in many years, most of the analysis strikes me as just as valid today as it was in 1984 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903573.
There is, however, an important blind spot in the article. I did not fully appreciate the panic of hardliners among the leaders of the Soviet Bloc concerning the Prague Spring. It was clear that the Czechoslovak reform movement...
Comment on Brian Whitmore's RFE/RL podcast, “The Daily Vertical: Return Of The Russian World> http://www.rferl.org/content/daily-vertical-return-of-russian-world/27340254.html
Not much understanding of Russkiy Mir or its role in Russian foreign policy in this podcast.
Russkiy Mir is often represented as some new, strange, perhaps threatening concept cooked up in the Russian Foreign Ministry as part of a new Russian imperial project. Not so! Russkiy Mir existed long before even...
Ukraine's Increasing Polarization and the Western Challenge, by Eugene Chausovsky 11 March 2014 http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/ukraines-increasing-polarization-and-western-challenge#axzz38mfJD9Bl
George Friedman, The United States Has Unfinished Business in Ukraine and Iraq 24 June, 2014 http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/united-states-has-unfinished-business-ukraine-and-iraq#axzz38mfJD9Bl
Friedman and Chausovsky, along with many others, force the Ukrainian crisis excessively into a geopolitical...
Disappearance of Polarity:
“Polarity” has long served as a useful explanatory framework in the study of international politics. The analogy to physical magnetism represents a system of states pulled or pushed into alliances by forces analogous to magnetic fields. Thinking in terms of polarity can be useful in explaining the dynamics of alliances and foreign policy behavior of states during periods when states are the main actors in the international arena, and when the focus of interest...
