Armen Oganesyan
Editor-in-Chief, International Affairs
Notes of a Diplomacy Professional. S. Lavrov's Perspectives on the Past and the Future
31.10.2011
Sergei Lavrov has been representing Russia as foreign minister in two dissimilar epochs, one marked by a fairly convincing growth of the world's economy, the other — by a deep global crisis which will likely continue into the foreseeable future. While those of the watchers who attempt to sound optimistic maintain that no causes for a lasting slide are inherent in the objective economic reality, it is an open secret to what extent subjectivity factors into modern history. As a result, the apprehension is running high that irrationality and chaos may easily prevail in today's world which, by the way, has never quite turned the page on its previous historical crisis triggered by the collapse of the bipolar system.
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WikiLeaks: Neither Tolerated Nor Silenced
12.12.2010
The sober remark that the atomic bomb cannot be “unborn” is attributed to M. Thatcher. At the moment, the same holds true of WikiLeaks, the internet outlet which came into being a relatively short time ago and promptly established itself as media warfare of unprecedented power. Apart from provoking fierce criticism from defenders of free speech, any attempts to put WikiLeaks under pressure now outrage much broader category of people not belonging to the realms of institutionalized politics, mass media, or human rights advocacy. Recently I overheard a conversation at a hotel counter in Paris which seemed to epitomize the public reaction no longer limited to common discontent at administrations' invasiveness. Complaining over the suspension of all payments to WikiLeaks by Visa and Mastercard, someone said literally: “They will end up seeing their networks paralyzed by hackers and create problems for just about everybody. Making lots of money on us, must they also play political games?”.
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How Long Is the War in Afghanistan Going to Last? Part II
02.12.2010
Brainstorming is a remarkable American invention, but the practice may be untimely amidst serious fighting. At the moment the war against the Talibs in Afghanistan is raging while, according to European expert estimates, the extremist groups are at the peak of power and therefore unreceptive to negotiation offers. With the Talibs entrenched in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq and Somalia, even seemingly sober plans for political reform in Afghanistan stand no chance.
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How Long Is the War in Afghanistan Going to Last? Part I
02.12.2010
Receiving the Nobel Prize in Oslo, US president B. Obama painted a grim picture of the problems the world would have to face if — not getting the due assistance from other countries — the US lost the war in Afghanistan. At the moment, it would be unfair to complain that the NATO allies, Russia, and several other countries did not help the US in the Afghan campaign. While the Talib forces in Afghanistan are no match to those of the Western coalition with the US at the helm, the key objective behind the mission — to make launching new terrorist attacks against the US or other countries from the Afghan territory impossible - remains out of reach after nine years of efforts. History routinely dispels triumphalist illusions of those who tend to rely excessively on military might.
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Who is Actually Subjecting Others to Finlandization?
03.06.2010
The future is bleak if the present is burdened with a legacy that still awaits rational analysis... Skimming through the Western media, it is hard to take seriously occasional complaints that today's Russia is subjecting its neighbors to what used to be known as Finlandization in the Cold War era. In the context, one can't but recall the aggressive Finlandization – or, in the US terms, Canadization – that Russia had to endure in the 1990ies.
As an influential US paper wrote recently, over the past two decades proponents of humanitarian interventions have remained convinced that some countries are not entitled to independent domestic policies and should face punishment for defiance. During the period of time, the concept of limited sovereignty was imposed on a number of states by external forces while others - who chose to partake in the EU - in fact adopted it freely, at least on the formal level. A Russian writer remarked ironically that freshness of foodstuffs is a condition that affords no gradation. The same should normally be true of sovereignty – the phenomenon known as limited sovereignty clearly invites a less diplomatic descriptive term.
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Twists of War
11.05.2010
In contrast to the projections of a crushing defeat of the Red Army, that were churned out on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in June, 1941 but eventually proved inaccurate, Churchill`s belief that Russia was ready to make an all-out effort to fight the war fully withstood the test of reality. The story, though, took a long time to unfold...
The British leader is portrayed in Winston`s War. Churchill, 1940-1945, a recent book by journalist and historian Max Hastings, as a true «warlord» and a man to be credited with steeliness as the prevalent personality trait. After the 1940 crisis, when the invasion of the British Islands by Nazi Germany seemed imminent but did not materialize thanks to the courage of the British pilots in the Battle of Britain, Churchill was considering various overland war theaters. The former First Lord of the Admiralty vehemently opposed the idea that the strategic objective of the Sovereign of the Seas in the global conflict could be limited to defending its own coastline and kept questioning himself what course Great Britain had to steer at the moment to deserve a positive historical verdict in the future.
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