Eurasia

On Thursday, the Pentagon released its long-awaited 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS), along with the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Missile Defense Review (MDR). Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the strategy’s introduction that it will shape the department’s priorities during the coming “decisive decade—from helping to protect the American …

Escalation is a cornerstone of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy in his war against Ukraine, especially as Ukrainian counter-offensives have steadily rolled back Russian gains. As his setbacks mount, it’s important to address some key questions: How can Ukraine and its partners prevent further escalation to the nuclear level while …

Biden’s Current Strategy Risks Escalation and Forever War U.S. President Joe Biden has said that the United States is committed to a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. But his administration has taken few, if any, steps to create a diplomatic process that could produce such an outcome. Buoyed …

All Economics Is Local For most of the last 40 years, U.S. policymakers acted as if the world were flat. Steeped in the dominant strain of neoliberal economic thinking, they assumed that capital, goods, and people would go wherever they would be the most productive for everyone. If companies created …

The aging brick campus of the Sharif University of Technology, Iran’s elite technical school, has long been a magnet for the nation’s brightest minds, with a record of elevating its students to the highest reaches of society. Thousands of Sharif University alumni power Iran’s most sensitive industries, including nuclear energy …

Russian soldiers pummeling a city in eastern Ukraine with artillery are slowly edging closer in their attempt to seize Bakhmut, which has remained in Ukrainian hands during the eight-month war despite Moscow’s goal of capturing the entire Donbas region bordering Russia.

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common? With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world’s democratic bloc of nations. “I told Putin… Let us …

The Logic of Escalation in an Unraveling War In the spring of 2018, four years before his second invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an unusual speech about the growing strength of the Russian military. “To those who in the past 15 years have tried to accelerate an …

Easy Money, Hard Choices Coming on the heels of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown, the inflation crisis of the past two years seemed to catch much of the world by surprise. After three decades in which prices grew slowly across the world’s advanced economies, suddenly the United Kingdom, the United States, …

What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia When it comes to international relations, 2022 has been an exceptionally dangerous year. During the first two months, Russia massed thousands of troops along Ukraine’s borders. At the end of the second one, Moscow sent them marching into Ukraine. China, …