Winston Churchill was his hero and becoming British prime minister himself was Boris Johnson’s ultimate dream.[1] Yet once he became prime minister in July 2019, Johnson’s performance was rather disappointing. Relations with the European Union (EU) over Brexit became ever more poisonous and Johnson’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic was highly inept, eventually leading to…
Tag: Ukraine
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary II-7 on the UK’s Response to Russia’s War against Ukraine
February 24th 2022 marks the beginning of a new dark era in European and international security. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the latest manifestation of Russia as a threat to both international security and the liberal word order that began with the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 and continued with Russia’s annexation of Crimea…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Commentary II-6 on Belarus in the UK’s Policy on the War in Ukraine
Although the political crisis in Belarus dominated global media headlines for much of 2020 and continued to attract international attention intermittently in 2021, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has pushed Belarus further down the priority list of Western policymakers, including those in the United Kingdom. Certainly, Belarus’ authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko has been condemned as…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Conference Report on “The Failure of the Post-Cold War Global Order?”
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum Conference Report on “The Failure of the Post-Cold War Global Order?” 31 May–3 June 2023, in Mainz Organizers: Andreas Rödder, chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-3: Ukraine and Nuclear Weapons
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Ukraine’s remarkable resistance to Russian aggression have triggered reams of analysis.[1] Perhaps no aspect of the war in Ukraine has sparked more discussion—particularly among American observers and analysts—than the nuclear dimension of the conflict and the extent to which Russian and American nuclear weapons are affecting…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable II-5: The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship
At the tail end of the Cold War, the journal International Security published a brilliant article by historian Marc Trachtenberg demolishing the widely held “idea that the First World War came about because statesmen were overwhelmed by military imperatives and thus ‘lost control’ of the situation.”[1] Quite to the contrary, he wrote, “The most remarkable…
Roundtable 9-12 on Return to Cold War
As President Donald Trump’s administration begins, relations between the United States and Russia make the headlines almost every day. No one seems able to agree on what Russian President Vladimir Putin did or did not do to try to influence the 2016 U.S. elections, much less on what his ultimate aims are. Trump’s own cabinet…
Forum 4 on “An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks”
From the very beginning of the nation’s history, intelligence has been set aside as a conspicuous exception to James Madison’s advocacy of checks-and-balances, spelled out in his Federalist Paper No. 51. The ‘auxiliary precautions’ that this key participant at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (and later America’s fourth President) — the safeguards he had helped…