"International Affairs" Journal - en.interaffairs.ru

Syria and the New Model of International Transformations

28.12.2011

Early this month, as Russia was in the process of assuming chairmanship in the UN Security Council, Moscow's envoy said Syria was not on the UN SC December agenda. Still, the theme of Syria has become the subject of permanent heated debates during unofficial consultations and surfaced in the discussions of the situations in the Middle East. Considering that US President B. Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are selling the Arab Spring as a model for new regime changes, at the moment Syria simply has to be at the focus of international politics.

The End of Reset

28.11.2011

US Department of State spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced on November 22 that the US stops supplying to Russia the data on conventional arms in Europe. Furthermore, Russian inspectors would not be admitted to US military bases in Europe. What could be the reasoning behind the radical US step which, it must be noted, fits with a wider trend in Washington's decision-making?

Imperialism for a cash-strapped era: Storms below the surface (Part II)

24.01.2012

The “color revolution” will continue to be the preferred route for the United States in effecting regime change in Central Asia. But the limits to the United States’s capacity to intervene also cannot but be noted. As a perceptive observer recently noted, the US is a “renter rather than a bona-fide landlord of Eurasian property” – and a renter can always be evicted by the landlord. Second, the Central Asian countries cannot but find odious the violent regime changes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and wouldn’t want to go through similar experience. Most important, both Russia and China are following active regional policies with regard to the Central Asian countries, which give the latter much space to withstand US pressures.

Common European Missile Defense: Cooperation or Confrontation? (Part II)

23.11.2011

The functional feature of the contemporary BMD infrastructure of the US and its key NATO allies is that their missile defense assets are never used per se or alone or separately from their strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. The BMD capabilities and nuclear arms always operate together. The exceptional case is when BMD interceptors kill a ballistic missile launched incidentally. Both the US global BMD and the European BMD, which are being put together collectively by the USA and NATO countries that will be largely run by Washington, are prompt to protect the transatlantic alliance's nations not only from hypothetical ballistic missiles strikes to be made by a group of so far unidentified countries, but the US/NATO nuclear assets from a requital or counterattack from other nuclear nations, in case the USA and its NATO allies will lust for to launch a first-strike nuclear attack.

The Kremlin Signals the Need for a Sensible Approach to the European Missile Defense and Warns that Moscow's Patience Has Its Limits

23.11.2011

On November 23, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev addressed the citizens of Russia – and also, from a broader perspective, a number of the world's countries – in connection with the alarming situation which has arisen as a result of the US and NATO efforts to build a broad missile defense system in Europe. The Russian leader announced a set of decisions made in response to the Washington-led European missile defense deployment which clearly undermines Russia's national and military-strategic interests. The process is gaining momentum, with the implementation of the program de facto underway in Poland, Romania, Turkey, and Spain and with Russia facing a fait accompli, said President Medvedev in a televised statement.

Common European Missile Defense: Cooperation or Confrontation? (Part I)

22.11.2011

The positions which Washington and the NATO headquarters in Brussels adopted at the consultations on a joint Russia-USA/NATO European ballistic missile defense (BMD) system have recently drawn a new round of criticisms from the Russian military-political leadership. Such stances on the current state of the consultations was expressed by Russia's President and Armed Forces Supreme Commander-in-Chief Dmitry Medvedev, Premier Vladimir Putin, diplomacy chief Sergei Lavrov, and defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

Arab League As An Anti-Arab Weapon

22.02.2012

Elementary arithmetic routinely holds keys to much more complex political algebra. At the moment, for example, it appears that fairly simple regards explain the bizarre conduct of the Arab League which, contrary to reasonable expectations, alligned itself with the West in destabilizing Syria and keeping B. Assad under pressure. It became clear immediately when protests erupted in Syria in March, 2011 that Washington would welcome serious arguments in favor of Assad's ouster. The unrest in the country came as a predictable – and by no means the last - phase in the sequence of revolts inspired by the US and other countries in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain with the aim of tailoring the maps of North Africa and the Middle East to the liking of global heavyweights. Later on, the slogan of regime change in the name of “democracy” similarly popped up in Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, and Oman.

Division of Kosovo: “pros” and “cons”

21.11.2011

The statement about a possible division of Kosovo made by the chairman of the Kosovo Assembly Jakup Krasniqi ahead of the resumption of talks between Belgrade and Pristine may give a new direction to the burning discussion on Kosovo issue.If earlier Kosovo’s Albanian leaders vigorously opposed the very possibility of the division of the region’s north populated with Serbs, now they are ready to consider this variant but on the condition that Kosovo will get territorial compensations. Here is how Mr. Krasniqi phrased it himself: “If Kosovo's borders are changed, Albanians will have to think about other Albanians who live beyond these borders because no one the Balkans have been so deprived of his interests as we have”.

Clashes in Kazakhstan: inspired by the Arab Spring?

19.12.2011

In the past few months Kazakhstan, once the quietest country in Central Asia, has turned into a hotbed of extremism. On December 16^th when Kazakhstan marked its Independence Day, violent clashes took place in the western town of Zhanaozen in Mangistau district.State-run media and opposition supporters offer an absolutely different coverage of the events. Kazakhstan`s General Prosecutor`s Office said that a group of 'hooligans', all identified as oil workers fired three months ago over a pay dispute with the employer, attacked citizens on central square. The oil workers themselves blamed the police for provoking violence during a rally.

Imperialism for a cash-strapped era: Storms below the surface (Part I)

18.01.2012

The United States’ defence strategy unveiled by President Barack Obama in Washington on January 5 has been occasioned by the need to slash the spending of the Pentagon by nearly half a trillion dollars over the next decade. There is undeniably some merit in the viewpoint that this is a strategy that has been driven by budget woes – although Obama and the Pentagon chief Leon Panetta have insisted that it is indeed a pure strategy.

In Obama’s own words, “The tide of war is receding but the question that this strategy answers is what kind of military will we [US] need long after the wars of the last decade are over.” But a harsh contrarian estimation has been attributed to the influential Republican chairman of the US House Armed Forces Committee Representative Buck McKeon who said, “This is a lead-from-behind strategy for a left-behind America. The president has packaged our [US’s] retreat from the world in the guise of a new strategy to mask his divestment of our military and national defence.”