Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The war of attrition in Ukraine will continue until one side or the other expresses willingness to negotiate, but there might be earlier diplomatic breakthroughs: the UN is leading negotiations on getting Ukrainian grain out of its Black Sea ports.
Over the long term, however, we must consider how to organize peace, security, and justice in a more participatory and egalitarian way, in a world that still has more than 12,000 nuclear warheads. It has been 77 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Russians have really humiliated themselves from the beginning of this fight, with the performance of their armed forces.
et, as the recent Ukraine crisis and the ongoing nuclear sagas with both North Korea and Iran have made abundantly clear, nuclear weapons have not withered away.
Deploying such weapons would undercut denuclearization efforts and likely exacerbate arms race on Korean Peninsula
This strategy stands counter to the foreign policy values that President Biden campaigned on. The agreements present an opportunity to confront China, strengthen alliances, fight climate change, correct racial injustice, and restore America’s standing in the world.
Lack of knowledge is not the primary impediment to U.S. foreign policymaking. Lack of will by competing political factions to use knowledge is the bigger problem.
In the short-term, what we are going to see happen in direct reaction to the Russian war is that there is going to be a substitution of gas from other sources from the Middle East, the United States, North Africa, and other places for Russian gas.
For 28 months afterwards, North Korea implausibly reported zero cases of COVID-19—even as the virus tore through the rest of the world. Like the Chinese Communist Party next door, the Workers’ Party of Korea opted to pursue a zero-COVID strategy premised on sealing off the country’s borders.
Looking ahead, the implications of the vicious dynamics experienced in the Russo-Ukrainian War implore us to rethink strategy for conflict. In particular, leaders must consider the likely societal reactions to rhetoric and coercion, leveraged and amplified as they are by modern instruments of popular indoctrination and mobilization.