INTERNATIONAL ISSUES

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Time to Disband NATO: A Rogue Alliance When the Cold War ended, many believed there would be a peace dividend, nuclear disarmament, and dismantling of the war machine with industrial conversion to peaceful technology. Instead, we've witnessed the aggressive expansion of NATO, to include the former Soviet Republics, right up to the Russian border, which should be a wake-up call to many living in the American Empire. Many people still labor under the apparently false impression that the US is exemplary in holding up the rule of law, the sanctity of the United Nations, and human rights. Read more...	Nukes in Europe: Coming Home Soon The last U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in Europe may be on their way home, ending more than 50 years of their deployment abroad. A new report on the future of these weapons shows that 24 NATO members seek to end deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe or will not block a NATO consensus decision to remove them. Only three countries are holding out, and only one is actively trying to break the emerging consensus. The coming months will be decisive for the future of the 200 or so U.S. nukes in Europe. Read more...
The New Face Of War The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.” Read more...	The End of Tactical Nukes in Europe? With little notice from most press outlets, NATO recently developed contingency plans to defend its Central and Eastern European member states against potential Russian aggression. This move follows the disclosure in January that the alliance would create such plans for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Read more...
Stealth Superpower The future is no longer in plastics, as the businessman in the 1967 film The Graduateinsisted. Rather, the future is in China. If a multinational corporation doesn’t shoehorn China into its business plan, it courts the ridicule of its peers and the outrage of its shareholders. The language of choice for ambitious undergraduates is Mandarin. Apocalyptic futurologists are fixated on an eventual global war between China and the United States. Read more...	China’s Navy an Emerging Global Force While still a long way off from challenging the United States as the predominant world naval power, China’s modernized People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is beginning to take a more assertive role in an expanding theater of operations. Previously content on patrolling coastal waters and preparing for an armed conflict with Taiwan, China now has a naval presence all along commercial sea routes to the Middle East and has stepped up military operations in the contested waters of the East and South China Seas. Read more...
Russian Threats, American Missiles, and Bulgaria's Choice President Barack Obama decided to cancel the plans for missile defense based in the Czech Republic and Poland this past October. Washington has since worked on an alternative that Obama calls a "stronger, smarter and swifter defense" that "best responds to the threats we face." The new system is built around sea-and-land-based SM-3 missile interceptors. Read more...	The Art Of Economic Espionage - Why China Is Crushing America's Global Supremacy Modern historiography specialists have long argued that an essential segment in the study of human evolution is inextricably tied to the basic understanding that societies generally emerge, progress and fall cyclically. Such frequency in social evolution is not just a consequence of endogenous factors, it also results from the impact of the external environment, be it close - neighboring constituencies vying for the same resources - or far - as part of a larger geographical area. Read more...