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.
Seemingly, the group was defeated after the Anbar Awakening and second Gulf War, but the organization waited patiently in the shadows for the right opportunity to strike back and regain relevance. During the interlude following the second Gulf War and the establishment of the caliphate, the group did what it has always done well—survive.
Since Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening-Up policies, China has modernised to a startling extent. However, this growth has been uneven and has caused severe inequality across the country. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is often seen as promoting China’s influence across the world, but this is not its only purpose. This article looks at how the Belt and Road Initiative is being used as one measure to transform some of the poorest regions of China, and how despite this, China is failing to address some of the issues in its most volatile areas.
To be effective at helping partner militaries establish internal defense the U.S. must become deeply involved in the partner state’s sensitive military affairs, and the role of antagonistic external actors must be mitigated. In light of the nearly twenty-year effort to create stability in Afghanistan and the ongoing instability in Iraq, this book makes a compelling argument for what is required to build partner military capacity.
As they have since antiquity, geopolitical factors will continue to shape and constrain world affairs in our digital age. Emerging technologies will only up the ante—as underscored by global debates on Huawei’s involvement in the roll-out of 5G, and China-US trade disputes over data localization. Applying a geopolitical lens to events like these will be an essential first step to crafting good strategy to respond.
The public square is an accessible public space that serves as a locus for civic connections, and a landmark or building usually dominates it. The civic uses of the public square include public forum, meeting space, and marketplace. The symbols a community chooses to adorn their public square serve to tell a story about what they honor and who they are. The military officer or non-commissioned officer undergoes a similar decision when they decorate their office.
Taken as a whole, this work offers a critical means to analyze coup success and introduces a layer of analysis that has been greatly needed. Above all his work underscores the need for scholars to work harder at differentiating between the motivation behind a coup and the probability of its tactical success.
As the war against the self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq appears to come to a close, the greatest risk of regional conflict comes from Iran. The intervention of Iran’s forces and proxies in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq have emerged as imminent threats to Israel and Saudi Arabia that could escalate into the next major war in the Middle East. Iran may not be deterred by unilateral interventions by Israel or Saudi Arabia, so the U.S. must play a role in averting a catastrophic conflict.
Rather than pulling the cyber domain away from deterrence, current policy has brought cyber elements closer to the U.S.’s broader strategic deterrence strategy. Strategic deterrence now incorporates a well-defined role for cyber that is likely to expand in the future, and strategic deterrence has begun to play a role in cyber deterrence strategy.
Napoleon’s advantage was created by a change in the sociopolitical environment. It could be argued a similar change in the nature of society and politics has been occurring in the West in the period since World War I. The more recent sociopolitical change occurred among the Western industrial nations over the last century and involved a shift towards individualism. It allowed liberal democracy to become the standard form of Western government. It created a New World Order that allowed for organizations like the EU that would have been unheard of in nineteenth-century Europe.
Sides’ history highlights lessons from one of America’s few large-scale conventional conflicts in the post-World War II era. Sides’ story highlights the risk of miscalculating a foreign power’s intention to intervene in a conflict, the American predilection to over-rely on technology in warfare, and the enduring importance of experienced leadership in combat.
For modern readers, the fear Napoleon and his victories struck into the hearts of European monarchs and generals is inconceivable…Not everyone saw Napoleon as a military genius beyond human explanation, however. Scharnhorst admired his understanding of the social and political changes wrought by the French Revolution and his ability to apply these changes to warfare. Nonetheless, Scharnhorst believed Napoleon’s success harbored clues about his possible defeat.
China seeks nothing less than to displace the United States as the preeminent power in the Pacific, if not the world. It intends to make a new order that expands the reach of its state-driven economic model. To achieve this vision, China's leaders have characterized the first two decades of the 21st century as a "period of strategic opportunity," during which Xi Jinping's “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation can be realized.
The notion of a new era has become pervasive and nearly inescapable in both American and Chinese discourse, and the phrasing may, at first, appear entirely appropriate. After decades in which U.S. policy has been more oriented towards engagement, U.S. strategy today clearly and explicitly recognizes China as a competitor, seemingly undertaking a historic reorientation in ways that can be seen as reflecting a major discontinuity with the past. However, the typical turning to this phrasing of a new era to characterize recent trends in U.S.-China relations, while perhaps rhetorically appropriate, can obscure what is not new, emphasizing novelty at the expense of recognizing the history and relative consistency in certain aspects of U.S.-China relations.
With Taipei’s economic and diplomatic fortunes having gone south (vis-à-vis Beijing’s) in recent decades—coupled with the rising stature of the Chinese armed forces—the story of the original party-army that ruled China proper, indubitably, has been neglected by both popular media and academe alike. In this present context, The Rise and Fall of An Officer Corps is a timely contribution to our understanding of modern China and its military history.
