Nato S Gamble

Selected for the 2008 Royal Air Force Reading List In this revealing work, Dag Henriksen discloses the origins and content of NATO's strategic and conceptual thinking on how the use of force was to succeed politically in altering the behavior of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The air campaign, known as Operation Allied Force, was the first war against any sovereign nation in the history of NATO and the first major combat operation conducted for humanitarian purposes against a state committing atrocities within its own borders. This book examines the key political, diplomatic, and military processes that shaped NATO and U.S. management of the Kosovo crisis and shows how air power became the main instrument in their strategy to coerce the FRY to accede to NATO's demands. The book further shows that the military leaders set to execute the campaign had no clear strategic guidance on what the operation was to achieve and that the level of uncertainty was so high that the officers selecting the bombing targets watched NATO's military spokesman on CNN for guidance in choosing their targets. Henriksen argues that structures preceding the Kosovo crisis shaped the management to a much greater degree than events taking place in Kosovo and that the air power community's largely institutionalized focus on high-intensity conflicts, like the 1991 Gulf War, hampered them from developing strategies to fit the political complexities of crises. Because fighting and wars in the lower end of the intensity spectrum are likely to surface again, study of the Kosovo crisis offers lessons for future international conflicts in which the combination of force and diplomacy will play a very significant role.

Marvin Kalb, a former journalist and Harvard professor, traces how the Crimea of Catherine the Great became a global tinder box. The world was stunned when Vladimir Putin invaded and seized Crimea in March 2014. In the weeks that followed, pro-Russian rebels staged uprisings in southeastern Ukraine. The United States and its Western allies immediately imposed strict sanctions on Russia and whenever possible tried to isolate it diplomatically. This sharp deterioration in East-West relations has raised basic questions about Putin's provocative policies and the future of Russia and Ukraine. Marvin Kalb, who wrote commentaries for Edward R. Murrow before becoming CBS News' Moscow bureau chief in the late 1950's, and who also served as a translator and junior press officer at the US Embassy in Moscow, argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Putin did not "suddenly" decide to invade Crimea. He had been waiting for the right moment ever since disgruntled Ukrainians rose in revolt against his pro-Russian regime in Kiev's Maidan Square. These demonstrations led Putin to conclude that Ukraine's opposition constituted an existential threat to Russia. Imperial Gamble examines how Putin reached that conclusion by taking a critical look at the recent political history of post-Soviet Russia. It also journeys deep into Russian and Ukrainian history to explain what keeps them together and yet at the same time drives them apart. Kalb believes that the post-cold war world hangs today on the resolution of the Ukraine crisis. So long as it is treated as a problem to be resolved by Russia, on the one side, and the United States and Europe, on the other, it will remain a danger zone with global consequences. The only sensible solution lies in both Russia and Ukraine recognizing that their futures are irrevocably linked by geography, power, politics, and the history that Kalb brings to life in Imperial Gamble.

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc presented policy makers in Washington with a temptation reminiscent of Faust's, opening up vistas of hitherto unimaginable global power; but the cold breath of Mephistopheles is already blowing across devastated communities from southeast Asia to the Balkan peninsula in the wake of America's bid for world power. In this major analysis of the new era of American domination, Peter Gowan strips away the language of humanitarian ideals that have cloaked US interventions from Baghdad to Belgrade to reveal far more cynical goals, with the real democratic hopes of the peoples of Europe, the South and East systematically trampled down in the rush to impose NATO-based US political leadership across the globe. Gowan surveys the transformation of NATO from Cold War 'security shield' for Western Europe into a global vigilante force in pursuit of US interests, with European footsoldiers under American command. He explains the projected expansion of the EU into a set of first and second class countries, incapable of any political action independent of the United States; and he analyses the catastrophic social and economic effects of the neo-liberal 'Shock Therapy' imposed on Russia and Eastern Europe, with devastating results. Far from being an unstoppable natural force against which every nation state is powerless, Gowan argues compellingly that the process of globalisation has been relentlessly driven forward by the enormous political power of the US state and business interests in a highly conscious bid to extend their strategic dominance over the world economy. He shows how the international finance system—the 'Dollar-Wall Street Regime'—created out of the ashes of Breton Woods has been exploited as a political lever to open up local economies to US products and speculative flows of 'hot' money, and demonstrates how each financial crisis over the last ten years has been used by the Washington-Wall Street axis to force through dramatic economic and social re-engineering in the targeted countries. While posing as a benign economic education for 'developing' economies, US-led rescue packages in fact leave these countries seriously weakened, destroying national industrial sectors while elevating to power such local rentier interests as the Russian mafia-capitalists and leaving the already fragile social tissue of many of these companies irreparably damaged. This masterly survey, both bold and compelling, will become a landmark in the debate on the new world order threatening the twenty-first century.

Gorbachev’s Gamble offers a new and more convincing answer to this question by providing the missing link between the internal and external aspects of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Andrei Grachev shows that the radical transformation of Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev years was an integral part of an ambitious project of internal democratic reform and of the historic opening of Soviet society to the outside world. Grachev explains the motives and the intentions of the initiators of this project and describes their hopes and their illusions. He recounts the story of the internal debates and struggles in the Kremlin and behind-the-scene decisions that led to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and eventually the demise of the Soviet Union itself. The book is based on exclusive interviews with the leaders of the Soviet Union including Gorbachev, personal notes and diaries of their assistants and advisers and transcripts of the discussions inside the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee. Together they constitute a multi-voice political confession of a whole generation of decision-makers of the Soviet Union that enables us better to understand the origin and the breathtaking trajectory of the events that led to the end of the Cold War and the unprecedented transformation of world politics in the closing decades of the 20th century.

This volume discusses the entry of Greece and Turkey to NATO in 1952 from the perspective of history and international relations. The chapters were originally collected in 2012 to mark the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the accession of the two states to NATO. The focus is not on the diplomatic/political events that led to the accession (a subject which has already been extensively discussed in the available bibliography), but expands on a reassessment of this event for the two states as well as for the Balkans, covering aspects of the wider post-war period and providing perspectives for the policies of Turkey, Greece and NATO until the present day. This book was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

From former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer comes an incisive portrait that draws on vivid personal stories to portray the forces that have shaped the Russian character for centuries-and continue to do so today. Russians explores the seeming paradoxes of life in Russia by unraveling the nature of its people: what is it in their history, their desires, and their conception of themselves that makes them baffling to the West? Using the insights of his decade as a journalist in Russia, Feifer corrects pervasive misconceptions by showing that much of what appears inexplicable about the country is logical when seen from the inside. He gets to the heart of why the world's leading energy producer continues to exasperate many in the international community. And he makes clear why President Vladimir Putin remains popular even as the gap widens between the super-rich and the great majority of poor. Traversing the world's largest country from the violent North Caucasus to Arctic Siberia, Feifer conducted hundreds of intimate conversations about everything from sex and vodka to Russia's complex relationship with the world. From fabulously wealthy oligarchs to the destitute elderly babushki who beg in Moscow's streets, he tells the story of a society bursting with vitality under a leadership rooted in tradition and often on the edge of collapse despite its authoritarian power. Feifer also draws on formative experiences in Russia's past and illustrative workings of its culture to shed much-needed light on the purposely hidden functioning of its society before, during, and after communism. Woven throughout is an intimate, first-person account of his family history, from his Russian mother's coming of age among Moscow's bohemian artistic elite to his American father's harrowing vodka-fueled run-ins with the KGB. What emerges is a rare portrait of a unique land of extremes whose forbidding geography, merciless climate, and crushing corruption has nevertheless produced some of the world's greatest art and some of its most remarkable scientific advances. Russians is an expertly observed, gripping profile of a people who will continue challenging the West for the foreseeable future.