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

Trump

#Reviewing Grand Delusion: A New Book Takes Aim at American Foreign Policy in the Middle East, With Limited Results

#Reviewing Grand Delusion: A New Book Takes Aim at American Foreign Policy in the Middle East, With Limited Results

Simon reviews more than four decades of American endeavors in the region from the perspective of eight presidential administrations ranging from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden. The book’s chapters illuminate cabinet-level thinking on vexing national security issues: Iranian influence in the Levant in the 1980s, the response to the U.S. Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the unsolvable Israel-Palestine quandary, and the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein and the resultant chaos in Iraq and Syria.

America’s Conflicted Approach to the World: #Reviewing The Sovereignty Wars

America’s Conflicted Approach to the World: #Reviewing The Sovereignty Wars

Terms that endure tend to grow more capacious over time; if they do not adapt to evolving political realities, social norms, and technological forces, after all, they risk fading into obsolescence. To the extent that they become part of a widely shared vocabulary, they can facilitate communication. Unfortunately, though, they can also become victims of their own success: a term can become sufficiently elastic that its usage comes to obscure more than clarify; worse, it can be consciously misappropriated.