Around the Bloc: Around the Bloc - NATO Wants to Play as Moscow Sulks
As the alliance’s largest maneuvers since the Cold War get under way, Russia has vowed to respond.
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As the alliance’s largest maneuvers since the Cold War get under way, Russia has vowed to respond.
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With prof. Seyyed Husein Nasr, one of the most renowned contemporary islamic scholars and philosophers, we discussed current problems facing the Muslim world, secterian conflicts shattering the Middle East, traditional Islam and growing xenophobia and islamophobia throughout the world. Born in 1933 in Iran, he was educated at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard University. He was a rector of Teheran University and founder of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. At present, he is professor emeritus at the George Washington University, where he has been teaching Islamic Studies since the year 1984. He is the author of 25 books and over five hundred articles. His work has been translated to numerous world languages including Bosnian language.
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Thomas Hobbes’s theory of war is currently being re-examined as part of a re-examination of realism in international relations theory which claims to be Hobbes-based. I am not alone in maintaining that Hobbes was first and foremost a peace theorist, rejecting the usual grounds for war, pretexts based on just war, infringements on property or trade, and thus trespass. But those who examine the three-fold causes of war that Hobbes gives, as “competition”, “diffidence”, and “glory”, have generally not noticed the relation between Hobbes’s theory of war and empire. While Hobbes makes remarkably few references to the colonial ventures of Great Britain, for reasons that we will consider, his theory of empire, like his theory of war, is based on classical notions of internal balance and the homeostasis of the body politic along Aristotelian lines. His treatment of the polity as a natural body is consistent with his materialist ontology and he treats war and empire in terms of both “intestine diseases” and pathologies that afflict the body politic from without. The upshot is a theory remarkably backward-looking in terms of its emphasis on the health of the body politic and the politics of balance, which forbid “vain-glorious wars” and demand that overly-powerful subjects, towns of “immoderate greatness” and grandiose enlargements of dominion be excised, like Aristotle’s “big foot” whose disproportion spoils the proportion of the body as a whole.
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The author discuses the position of the army and the commanding cadres in the countries of Eastern Europe which have been passing through radical transformation during recent years. In different countries there have been different motives for the army not to intervene into the processes of political democratization but they have all abstained from stopping those processes by force and in doing so were also encouraged by the Warsaw Pact, namely by the USSR. It is difficult to foretell the future role of the military factor in those countries as well as the transformation of the armies themselves (political orientation, composition and command, changes in strategy). To a great extent these will depend on the normalization of the processes of democratization, as well as on general global, and, in the first place, European power relationships.
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The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Nikola Pašić, was not a member of the Kingdom’s delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, which made the work of the delegation quite difficult. The main contentious issue among its members concerned the principle on which Yugoslavia's territorial claims should be based. The Serbian members and the Army representatives advocated the strategic principle, while the Croats (Trumbić) defended the ethnic principle. The conflict could not be resolved on the spot, which blocked the work of the delegation and frustrated its efforts in trying to get the most favourable frontiers for the new state.
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Faced with a growing Russian military threat in the Black Sea, Romania has decided to increase its defense spending and modernize is military capabilities. In 2017 Romania began an ambitious ten year re-armament program worth € 8.9 billion, part of the pledge made to its NATO partners to spend 2% of GDP on defense. This analysis takes a look at the naval refurbishment program that Romania will undertake in 2017-2026. It examines the components of the naval modernization program from the perspective of the capabilities they will offer to the Romanian Naval Forces and of how they compare with current and future naval threats in the Black Sea. While the level of ambition reflected in these programs varies a lot, the current acquisitions will reinforce the deterrence value of Romania’s fleet.
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The security situation to the east of NATO and EU borders remains extremely complex. Unresolved conflicts in this region are frozen or are in a desirable state of solving. In addition, Moscow adds new crises and conflicts to those in the Republic of Moldova – the Transnistrian conflict, Georgia - South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in the Azerbaijani conflict. This is the war in the East of Ukraine. All this creates new security risks and threats to the Euro-Atlantic area, starting from the eastern flank of the two organizations. Can these conflicts be resolved? Can all these turbulences be eliminated? In this general security atmosphere, can we hope in the short and even medium that the necessary conditions can be created to negotiate at least a new security system? Answers must be prudent to the questions above. However, for the time being, neither Russia nor the West appear to be able to advance and negotiate a coherent strategy of redefining a new security system in Eastern Europe and in the Wider Black Sea region.
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Lawrence Freedman – The Future of War: A History, Public Affairs, New York, 2017, 376 pages. Reviewed by Alexandra Dan.
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The relationship between NATO and European Union evolved gradually after the end of Cold War to an almost enduring Partnership formula today. After the disappearance of the old-fashioned, conventionally bipolar conflict the security landscape is confronted with a new and more complex paradigm in which the coexistence between conventional and asymmetric threats and challenges is much stronger than ever. In search of answers both organizations are striving to adapt their own tools and answers. Within this picture, it goes without saying that NATO-EU relation is one of the necessary answers. Unfortunately, the road to an articulated, common approach was more challenging, as well as longer, that it was initially expected. Nevertheless, the last decade experienced some concrete positive developments both in terms of improvement of normative basis for cooperation (e.g. signing the Berlin +) as well as in the operational domain, notably in the Balkans and Aegean Sea. Nevertheless, the longstanding obstacles to EU-NATO co-operation have not disappeared; in particular, the unresolved conflict in Cyprus still gets in the way. Today, security fluidity can only be tackled successfully by the two organisations working together. The recent developments occurred in the immediate neighborhoods, showed without any doubt that that the crises to the east and south do not fit neatly into institutional boxes. Still there are persisting challenges related to the harmonization of the defence capabilities processes which requires a strong and sound political consensus. From a prospective point of view it can be anticipated that NATO-EU cooperative dimension will be one of the main subjects of interests. The anticipated effects of BREXIT is just one of the issues surrounded by unknowns.
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It is a fact that the EU Project is going through a very complex period. Also reality is that EU has integration deficits in several areas, including the integration dimension of defense and security. In the last three years these problems have been put back on the table, particularly the need for Europe to have strong and credible foreign and security strategy and to act strategically. It has established a new and ambitious agenda for European defense and security. Moreover, now the Union has a great “Global Strategy”, has projections for a more visible and efficient Common defense and security policy – CSDP, has a concrete and comprehensive decisions of the European Parliament, European Council and Commission in order to ensure development of civilian and military capabilities, to improve integration of the European defense industry, integration of defense market, to ensure adequate financial investment for the European industrial base, for research and technology advancement. What would be the logical next steps in the area? Certainly the difficult stage of the implementations. Responding appropriately to these questions and challenges the Union may even avoid the next strategic surprises. The Union must have capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military and civilian capabilities, the capacity to decide to use them, in order to respond to external crises and conflicts. The Union’s future depends on having strong, autonomous, sustainable and convincing defense and security means and policies.
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The study proposes an analysis of the security environment of the Greater Black Sea Area in the light of the consequences of two of the major crises of area in the last decade of the XXIth century. Both of those crises – the conflict in Ukraine and the aborted military coup in Turkey – are analyzed in depth with their roots, past premises and present developments examined. For each of them, an extensive discussion is provided about the role and the impact on the balance of risks and threats on the regional and European level. A correlation and a study on the impact of those crises on the regional and European security environment ends this demarche.
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NATO summit in Wales of September 2015 played an important role in re-shaping the overall strategic configuration of the North-Atlantic Alliance so that to answer to the emerging geopolitical dynamics generated by Russia’ s revisionist policy in Eastern Europe. Two major themes dominated NATO agenda: firstly, the need to reassure the Eastern allies and strengthen the defence potential of the Central European states, and, secondly, to restructure the framework of relations with Russia. In a general perspective, Wales summit failed to became an historical moment since the outcome was rather a compromise between the need for deeper engagement towards the Eastern allies and the imperative of preserving the strategic balance in Europe, meaning to avoid a systemic rift with Moscow. The 2016 NATO summit in Warsaw will have to find an answer to this complicated and challenging compromise which is to highly define NATO future strategic posture in the 21st century.
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Over the past three decades relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China have evolved so broadly that they now encompass a full range of bilateral, regional, and global issues. The main challenge for both countries is the way in which their relationship could be managed to prevent China’s economic and military rise from generating acute competition that would lead to conflict and incalculable damage to the two nations. Statements of good intentions notwithstanding, relations remain influenced by deep mutual mistrust, and this mistrust is rooted in the opposing perceptions of the two countries. The article reviews the current status of bilateral relations to include the persistent mutual distrust; cooperation on various issues.
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This article is an in-depth assessment of the limitations of the Western counterinsurgency contemporary discourse based on readings of classical COIN theorists, but also taking into consideration the post 9/11 experience of the current COIN practitioners. The main limitation is focused on the imperative to influence the leadership of the host nation and is related to the dependence of the expeditionary COIN paradigm on a functional, reasonable effective administrative machinery/apparatus in the host nation where the intervention happens. At the same time the political will and interests of the host nation political actors is a key variable for a successful expeditionary COIN campaign. The key question becomes then to what extent are the political interests of the host nation leaders aligned with the ones of the expeditionary actor?
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This paper aims to explore the geometry of the Romanian-Israeli relations, by unveiling the responsible elements that shaped the matrix of bilateral interactions in the period 1989-2010. Moreover, the paper will focus on the conceptual overlapping between Romania’s relations with Israel and US (mostly from a NATO-related perspective) and on the transmission-belt role played by the Jewish state and by various Jewish communities in Romania’s endeavours to join the US-led ‘security umbrella’.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the violence in Southern Thailand is the product of a hybrid insurgency (a concept understood more along the lines of what research literature calls “criminal insurgency”). Today, in the aftermath of Ukraine, it is fashionable to talk about hybrid warfare. But it may be useful to understand this hybridization of conflict in the larger context of what former SACEUR, Admiral James Stavridis called convergence (and where the possibilities may be endless): ”the merger of a wide variety of globally mobile human activities, each of them individually dangerous but representing a far greater threat when they combine”. I will proceed by defining the problem and by showing why this is mainly an insurgency. In this context, it is important to understand how the Thai state handled the challenge posed by the communist insurgent groups during the Cold War, with a focus on what lessons where learned at the time, but later forgotten. The enabling factors and causes that triggered the relapse of the insurgency in 2004 and set the ground for the current violence will be assessed in the fourth part. In the final part, I will focus on explaining how the traditional insurgency evolved gradually into a criminal type insurgency and will try to suggest ways to deal with this phenomenon.
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North Korea is the last real communist state in the world, a country which preserved pure Stalinism and mixed it with Asian features, resulting in one the most oppressive and control-obsessed regimes ever created by humans. With economic and logistic help from People’s Republic of China, the communist state of Korea managed to survive, and avoid unification with South Korea or being constrained into submission by the USA. During the communist era, Romania had established close relations with Phenian and the North-Korean regime supported Bucharest in its long-lasting ideological and nationalist conflict with neighboring Hungary, also a communist state.
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