This report will examine Russian-Japanese and Russian-South Korean energy cooperation. Neither Japan nor the Republic of Korea imposed energy sanctions on the Russian Federation, and both U.S. allies continue to expand their energy deals despite Western sanctions
In December 2018, the Russian Federation sent two Tupolov-160 supersonic bombers around the world to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. On January 23, 2019, the U.S. and a series of Latin American countries recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido.
The People’s Republic of China is actively engaging Black Sea littoral states through various initiatives to open new markets for Chinese goods, facilitate the acquisition of valuable or strategic local industries, and offer loans for large development projects
The Russian Federation’s recently provocative foreign policy results in part from structural weakness in the Russian domestic regime, a quasi-feudal system that requires certain actions abroad to maintain itself in power at home.
In the summer of 2018, Greece and Russian Federation went through one of the worst crises in their traditionally friendly relations. The falling out was triggered by allegations of Russian meddling in Greek domestic politics
This report studies the challenges of rebuilding Iraq’s public works infrastructure following the “perfect storm” of the ISIS insurgency and low oil prices. The major challenge is that the Government of Iraq’s estimate of $88 billion severely understates total
The Republic of Turkey and the Russian Federation are at odds over multiple issues, not least the Syrian Civil War, where they back warring proxies. Yet the two countries have bounced back from crises and are quickly deepening
For the vast majority of Russians, the vlast’—regime—they encounter is neither the Kremlin nor the Duma. It is considerably more local: regional governors, mayors, municipal bureaucrats, local ministry representatives, and their proxies
Fifteen years ago, Samuel P. Huntington published, first as an article
(“The Real Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993) and then as a book (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Schuster, 1996), his famous argument about the clash of civilizations. The clash that he was referring to was the clash between the West—Western civilization—and the rest. Of the rest, he considered the greatest challenges to the West would come from the Islamic civilization and the Sinic, or Confucian, civilization. These challenges would be very different because these civilizations were very different. But together they could become a dynamic duo that might raise very serious challenges to the West.