This wasn’t their first joint naval exercise, but it’s the largest one near American shores thus far, which makes it a milestone. Alaskan Senators were apoplectic after Russia and China just carried out a previously unreported joint naval patrol near their state’s Aleutian Islands last week. Those officials condemned what they claimed was an “incursion”,…
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), famed for its hidden agendas and its preference to operate in the shadows, has featured in a couple of recent breaking stories. On July 22nd the White House announced that CIA Director William Burns would be stepping up to cabinet level in the Joe Biden Administration. That means that beyond…
It would make a lot of sense for Biden to start talks, Martin Jay writes. Are backchannel talks going on between the Biden camp and that of Putin’s? Despite a number of articles in the U.S. press alluding to this, a number of Russian experts who follow such matters closely reject this idea. In a…
Any human rights activist or soldier can tell you why cluster bombs should be banned, as only too often they fail to hit their intended target, end up hitting civilians, or even their own soldiers, as was the case with Israeli-made cluster bombs used in the 2008 Georgian-Russian military conflict. Many of the Georgians, including…
The Middle East continues to be one of the most important strategic areas in the globe, drawing the attention of the major powers in the world due to its geographic significance and a number of internal inconsistencies. Although, of course, not all of the nations in the region have an adequate supply of these kinds…
From the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, there was a vogue for “soft power” in the Russian community of political scientists and international scholars—numerous articles on the subject were published, dissertations were defended, and representatives of a number of Russian NGOs and foundations eloquently tried to convince that it was they who were engaged in…
