Jump into your time machine and let me transport you back to another age. It’s May 2001 and the Atlantic Monthly has just arrived in the mail. I’m tantalized by the cover article. “Russia is finished,” the magazine announces. The subtitle minces no words: “The unstoppable descent into social catastrophe and strategic irrelevance.” Could it…
How ironic that a major upsurge in violence in Afghanistan has coincided with the death of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the viscerally anti-Russian Cold War warrior and architect of the US policy of backing jihadists in the country to ‘bleed’ the Soviet Union. On Saturday, the first day of Ramadan, 18 people were killed in a suicide…
The surge worked! That was the buzzphrase of 2008. Supposedly the 20,000 extra troops Bush ordered into Iraq for a year had calmed the situation so much the US could now proclaim victory and gradually withdraw from the country. In reality the extra troops had done nothing. What had really happened was that the US – as…
As accusations fly that Russia manipulated the 2016 American election to put Donald Trump in the White House, some Americans are remembering that the United States also fiddled with elections in numerous nations during the Cold War, including Chile, Iran and Central America. One of the most notorious examples is Italy, where the CIA mounted…
A quarter of a century ago, on the night of December 25, 1991, the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin cupola – and the USSR was no more. Arguably what President Putin later described, in 2005, as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” doubled as the most comprehensive fall of an empire…
December 24, 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the formal end of the Soviet Union as a political entity on the map of the world. A quarter of a century ago, the curtain was lowered on the 75-year experiment in “building socialism” in the country where it all began following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia,…
