Alessandra Nisch
Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of ...

President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.

Putin’s Wars: Testing Boyd’s Strategy of Applied Friction

Diplomacy

#Reviewing Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert

#Reviewing Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert

Rupert Wieloch’s Liberating Libya: British Diplomacy and War in the Desert brings new insights to the story of British military and diplomatic involvement in Libya from the late seventeenth century to the present. The author draws mainly on a vast amount of secondary literature, supplemented with some primary material to tell the long story of British involvement in Libya. His compelling narrative is punctuated by numerous well-developed stories of personal action and sacrifice, and misfortune, which give it vivid depth and detail.

The Imperative of Middle East Regional Order and U.S. Diplomacy

The Imperative of Middle East Regional Order and U.S. Diplomacy

A foundational pillar of Middle Eastern regional stability centers on the relationship between Iran and the Arab-Israeli coalition. Establishing a regional security architecture centered on a balance of power is crucial to American interests in ensuring uninhibited movement of trade and energy resources. But the current American strategy of diplomatic disengagement coupled with unabated conventional arms buildup of Gulf Arab partners only serves to exacerbate regional tensions.

Southeast Asia is Pivotal, and U.S. Strategy Should Aim to Keep it That Way

Southeast Asia is Pivotal, and U.S. Strategy Should Aim to Keep it That Way

Southeast Asia has long been a region in policy limbo with shifting goals. Strategists who write off the region as destined to fall under a Chinese sphere of influence or, blind to history, attempt to force Southeast Asian countries to choose between the United States and China miss the mark.

Bargaining Across Levels: Divide and Conquer

Bargaining Across Levels: Divide and Conquer

It is time that the United States and its allies plan for the long haul of supporting the Government of Afghanistan instead of remaining fixated on the immediate crisis at hand. For far too long the international community has tried and repeatedly failed to create a durable peace on a Western timeline. By dividing the insurgency into smaller manageable groups, pressuring amenable Afghan leaders, and aligning the win sets across all levels, the United States may eventually help the Government of Afghanistan bargain a tenable peace and achieve an honorable exit from its longest war.

#Reviewing War by Other Means

#Reviewing War by Other Means

There isn’t much grand about America’s post-Cold War grand strategy. Such is the consensus among the academic scholars, think-tankers, pundits, and many former national security officials who have chastised U.S. foreign policymakers for lacking strategic sophistication, or worse, failing to craft a coherent grand strategy at all...In their well-crafted and important new book, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris join this discussion orthogonally, arguing that the United States has altogether abandoned the economic dimension of grand strategy.

Echoes of the Entente: Lessons in Paradigm-Changing Diplomacy

Echoes of the Entente: Lessons in Paradigm-Changing Diplomacy

On April 8, 1904, French Foreign Minister Théophile Declassé took a telephone call from Paul Cambon, his ambassador in London. “C’est signé!” Cambon roared into the phone—”It is signed!” The modern era’s most significant treaty, the Franco-British Entente Cordiale was signed. What had been one of the world’s most significant historical rivalries from shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066 up to that April day in 1904, was over. France and England reached agreement on a host of issues, specified and sorted out in painstaking detail through three treaties signed at once. The world would never be the same.

The Treaty of Paris: Negotiating from Weakness

The Treaty of Paris: Negotiating from Weakness

September 3rd will mark 232 years since the end of the American Revolutionary War, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. While this treaty was a monumental step for the new United States, it also laid the groundwork for future international strife and set the priorities for the new nation.

Stuck in the “Frenemy Zone”

Stuck in the “Frenemy Zone”

Many scholars, such as Noam Chomsky, have asserted that understanding the way we use language is important, as words shape the way we conceptualize, communicate, and act. Therefore, it is prudent to define the key term up front. After a brief search, I was very surprised to find a formal definition of frenemy in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a person with whom one is friendly, despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry; a person who combines the characteristics of a friend and an enemy.” I was also quite surprised to find that it was the journalist Walter Winchell who first coined the term in 1953 when he wrote, “Howz about calling the Russians our frenemies?”

A Millennial’s Perspective on the Legacy of Vietnam

A Millennial’s Perspective on the Legacy of Vietnam

The last American combat troops left Vietnam in 1973, twelve years before I was born and 42 years ago as I write this. No millennials, as my generation is called, lived through the Vietnam War. For most of us even the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union happened too early in our lives to resonate politically. My generation’s perspective on Vietnam is shaped entirely through textbooks and movies. Through those lenses, the Vietnam War seems to be one of the most costly political and strategic blunders in United States history.