CAUCASUS
AP Photo
June 2009
"Improving Russia-U.S. Relations: The Next Steps"
Policy Memo
By Thomas M. Nichols, Research Fellow, International Security Program/Project on Managing the Atom
There is no endemic reason for Russian-U.S. relations to be as tense as they have become over the past several years. Th is situation is largely due, on one side, to mishandling of Russian affairs by both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and on the other by the obvious manipulation of anti-Americanism for domestic gain by the Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev administrations in Russia. Unfortunately, this means that only unilateral U.S. action can undermine the cynical policies of the Russian leadership and restore dynamism to the Russian-U.S. relationship.
AP Photo
January 29, 2009
"Iran's Islamic Revolution and Its Future"
Journal Article, Viewpoints, The Iranian Revolution at 30 Special Edition
By Abbas Maleki, Former Senior Research Associate, International Security Program
"Regime sustainability despite different internal crises and foreign threats underlines the fact that Iran enjoys a relatively rational decision-making process. The central slogan of the Iranian Revolution was "Independence, Freedom, and Islamic Republic." Today, Iran is an independent state, as it does not belong to an Eastern or a Western bloc. Although the country has not realized its ambition of economic independence, the revolution has provided economic welfare. Rural development has improved people's lives by providing villages with water, electricity, and infrastructure. The essence of independence also
referred to the specific relations between the Iranian monarchy and the United States. The US-sponsored 1953 coup against the popular Muhammad Mosaddeq government made Iran an American client state, leading to Iranian dependence in all aspects."
AP Photo
January 29, 2009
"The Geopolitical Factor in Iran's Foreign Policy"
Journal Article, Viewpoints, The Iranian Revolution at 30 Special Edition
By Kayhan Barzegar, Research Fellow, Project on Managing the Atom/International Security Program
"Revolutions either expand to export their ideologies or preserve themselves from the outside world. The 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran is no exception. A careful reading of Iran's actions in the region shows how and why Iran has shifted its policies to meet the latter aim. Since the revolution, Iran's leaders have faced the challenge of balancing their ideological (idealism) and geopolitical (pragmatism) approaches to foreign policy. Gradually, the Iranian leadership has come to focus on the geopolitical factor in the conduct of foreign policy; today, ideology one factor among many other sources of Iran's power, and serves the aim of preserving Iran's national security and interests...."
AP Photo
January 11, 2009
"The Dark Side of Self-Determination"
Op-Ed, Daily News Egypt
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"Self-determination has turned out to be an ambiguous moral principle. Woodrow Wilson thought it would solve problems in central Europe in 1919, but it created as many as it solved. Adolf Hitler used the principle to undermine fragile states in the 1930's. Today, with less than 10% of the world's states being homogeneous, treating self-determination as a primary moral principle could have disastrous consequences in many regions."
November 18, 2008
Securing the Bomb 2008
Book
By Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom; Co-Principal Investigator, Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment (ERD3) Policy Project
Associate Professor of Public Policy and Project on Managing the Atom Co-Principal Investigator Matthew Bunn provides a comprehensive assessment of efforts to secure and remove vulnerable nuclear stockpiles around the world, and a detailed action plan for reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism. Securing the Bomb 2008 was commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). The full report, with additional information on the threat of nuclear terrorism, is available on the NTI website.
AP Photo
September 23, 2008
"U.S., Russia Must Unite to Lessen Nuclear Dangers"
Op-Ed, Washington Times
By Martin B. Malin, Executive Director, Project on Managing the Atom
Martin Malin argues in an Op-Ed for the Washington Times, that as the presidential nominees' debate on national security issues approaches, there is one issue on which both sides agree — preventing nuclear terrorism and proliferation must be a top priority.
AP Photo
September 2008
"Russia's Recipe for Empire"
Magazine or Newspaper Article, Foreign Policy
By Monica Duffy Toft, Associate Professor of Public Policy
Russia’s recent campaign against Georgia is a textbook example of how powerful states forged empires in centuries gone by. For those who have forgotten, here’s how it’s done.
AP Photo
September 2, 2008
"Guns and Gold of August"
Op-Ed, The Korea Times
By Joseph S. Nye, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
"...Military force is obviously a source of hard power, but the same resource can sometimes contribute to soft power behavior. The impressive job by the American military in providing humanitarian relief after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the South Asian earthquake in 2005 helped restore America's attractiveness....By bombing, blockading, and occupying many parts of Georgia, delaying its withdrawal, parading blindfolded Georgian soldiers, and failing to protect Georgian citizens, Russia lost its claims to legitimacy and sowed fear and mistrust in much of the world...."
AP Photo
Summer 2008
"Identities, Interests and the Resolution of the Abkhaz Conflict"
Journal Article, Caucasian Review of International Affairs, issue 3, volume 2
By Ondrej Ditrych, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2007-2008
"The recent crisis in Abkhazia reveals a fundamental qualitative change in the conflict in which the balance among three main actors is shifting, and increasingly the conflict plays a more important role in the triangular relations between Georgia, Russia and the West. The search for a new equilibrium in the conflict, one that would be an optimal outcome for the actors involved, will require rethinking the mutually constitutive roles (identities) and interests they want to assume with respect to the conflict and the entire South Caucasus...."
Michael Bronner
August 16, 2008
"When the War Ends, Start to Worry"
Op-Ed, New York Times
"EVEN as Russia and Georgia continue their on-again, off-again struggle over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a frenzied tea-leaf reading about the war's global political ramifications has broken out across airwaves and think-tank forums. But as the situation on the ground recedes inevitably to some new form of the pernicious "frozen conflict" that has plagued the region since Georgia's civil wars of the early 1990s, few are paying attention to a less portentous but equally critical international threat: an increase in the longstanding, rampant criminality in the conflict zones that is likely to further destabilize the entire Caucasus region and at worst provide terrorist groups with the nuclear material they have long craved."
