It’s Right Outside Your Door: The Authoritarian Right’s War for History

March 23, 2023 Taking a brief pause from my research on improving U.S. security sector accountability (a new paper should be coming to these pages soon) I would like to discuss Jade McGlynn’s excellent, “Imposing the Past: Putin’s War for History,” published earlier this month in War on the Rocks. In her piece, McGlynn writes

For They Have Sown the Wind: Cause, Consequence, and the Historical Motivations of the Russian War in Ukraine

August 5, 2022 Back on June 23, John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, gave a speech at the European Union Institute, wherein he offered up an explanation for the war in Ukraine that repudiated Western governments supposed rationales for entering the war, placing the

The 2022 NATO Strategic Concept: A Troubling Lack of Specificity

July 8, 2022 With the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russia and China deepening their ties, rising nationalism and authoritarianism around the globe, and increasing incidences of extremist terrorism on the Euro-Atlantic periphery, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is facing one of the sternest tests of both its cohesion and purpose since at least the end

Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day: On the Need for a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Assistance Funding

June 3, 2022 Back on May 19, the United States Senate, by a vote of 86-11, passed a $40 billion emergency aid bill which aims to supply Ukraine with weapons and other assistance in order to help the country resist the Russian invasion. This followed a May 10 vote in the House of Representatives, when

The Long Shadow of the War in Ukraine: Managing Escalation, Reconstruction, and NATO Force Planning After the Russian Invasion

April 29, 2022 The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs this week, in their weekly Humanitarian Impact Situation Report for Ukraine, noted that, “the ongoing war continues to exacerbate a massive humanitarian crisis,” and that, “over 24 million people – more than half of Ukraine’s population – will need humanitarian assistance in

Unforced Errors: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkey’s Domestic and Foreign Policy Crises

March 25, 2022 Early last summer, Pavel Baev, writing for the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri), wrote that, “the tumultuous year 2020 tested and significantly degraded the always ambiguous Russian-Turkish partnership, which had become transactional at best and certainly not ‘strategic’”, and that, “the maturing of autocratic regimes in Russia and Turkey does not

The Russian War in Ukraine: A Truly Global Problem

March 11, 2022 In today’s globally interconnected world, war and strife in one part of the Earth can, and often does, have an enormous impact not only on the immediate region, but the rest of the planet. Indeed, the effects of the war even reach beyond the Earth, as well. While the majority of U.S.

Keyser Söze Sanctions for Russian Oligarchs

February 24, 2022 On February 22, in response to Russian recognition of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on three Russian oligarchs with close ties to Vladimir Putin: Gennady Timchenko, and brothers Igor and Boris Rotenberg. The designation of the three Russians, which accompanied similar measures against five Russian banks,

Not Because It Is Easy, But Because It Is Hard: A Call for the U.S. to Help Europe Step Up on Defense

January 21, 2022 Earlier this week, Foreign Affairs published an interesting article from Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Brands, titled, “The Overstretched Superpower: Does America Have More Rivals Than It Can Handle?” The piece posits that the United States’ defense strategy has become out of balance with the foreign policy it pledges it pursues. Brands not

Remorselessly Transactional: Offshore Balancing and the Moral Cost of Abandoning Ukraine

January 14, 2022 For the first blog post of the new year, I would like to return, once again, to a topic that I have visited several times in the past year: the situation in Ukraine. More specifically, I think that it is important to address some of the arguments made by realist international relations