In four books from 1997 to 2008 Zbigniew Brzezinski outlined a comprehensive American foreign posture around the geopolitical grail of Central Asia. Since 1945 the United States has been largely defined as the first non-Eurasian thalassocracy to prevail in the Great Game, yet for how long?
Russia has made a concerted attempt to become an ‘independent regional power’ since the demise of Yeltsin, with limited results in Eastern Europe, but with greater success in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia’s behaviour has been entirely predictable. Nonetheless, as China looks set to challenge Russian power in Central Asia in the future, Russia’s response remains unclear.
The American-Russian relationship is best described as going from Cold War to Cold Peace, as articulated by the then Russian President Yeltsin. The 1990s essentially brought about a period in which the US sought to manage the uncertainties that the new world order was presenting.
Nuclear strategy developed as a means to create a rational framework of deterrence for the seemingly irrational nature of nuclear war. Rational individuals may only be so when they exist in a rational context. Once placed in an irrational situation, it is questionable as to whether a person, or on organisation could continue to act in a rational manner.
As a whole the situation in the Central Asian region is fraught with future social disturbances. They are inevitable in all countries, but the degree of violence will be different according to the achieved level of development. The bloodiest events are possible in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. In the latter country, a variant of the Libyan example is quite probable.
Within his work on Operation Barbarossa, Koch states that ‘the origins of the German invasion of Russia’ remain importantly ‘at the centre of historical debate’. A potential reason for this is the highly contentious roots of the decision to invade Russia in 1941; what exactly motivated Hitler to initiate an invasion that would inevitably result in Germany having to fight a war on two unsustainable fronts?
From the Holocaust memorial, to the deliberately unrecovered foundations of Gestapo headquarters, to rare war-era buildings bearing the scars of Red Army gunfire, links to the Nazi-era and the associated ‘historical memory’ has maintained a grip on the German psyche.
As currently configured and supported, the J-15 is no “great leap forward,” but is nevertheless triggering concern among regional nations because it indicates rapid improvement in Chinese naval aviation. The J-15’s initial role will be linked to, and limited by, its first operational platform: a “starter carrier”.
In an anarchical system, for large states, indebted to a Cold War strategic culture, nuclear armaments offer the capacity to irrationalise major inter-state war, therefore creating the foundations for great-power peace and stability. Similarly it gives small states the ultimate life insurance, allowing them to defy the preponderance of more powerful nations.
In the past 25 years 67 states have abolished capital punishment for all crimes, 5 have abolished it for ordinary crimes, and a further 35 states have become de facto abolitionists. This trend is curious because abolition has met with significant domestic resistance in a number of abolitionist states; in many the majority were against abolition. What explains the emergence of the abolitionist norm?
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