Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The war in Ukraine has cemented the Russian-Chinese partnership for the foreseeable future. While focusing all of its efforts to the West, the last thing Russia needs is a confrontation with China.
More specifically, Washington should not let this new frame of "great power rivalry," which Middle East autocracies have heartily welcomed and exploited, distract it from scrutinizing the behavior of these regimes at home and from helping the region's citizens and societies address the socio-economic and political problems they face now and in the coming decades.
The move to block Finland’s and Sweden’s bids threatens the relationship between Ankara and the West.
What Europe’s strategy should consist of remains undefined. Macron was asking for fresh thinking not patented answers. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested recently, Europe must surely recognize its historical and politico-cultural distance from the patriotic enthusiasm so spectacularly on display in Ukraine.
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.
Ukraine traditionally was closely integrated in the Soviet economy, and then the Russian economy. The military and industrial complex of the two countries were highly integrated until just the last decade.
Ultimately the EU should consider its relationship with India in the larger Indo-Pacific context and, for the moment, place any unhappiness at India’s position on Ukraine to one side.
It is not 9/11, Americans aren't being killed, and in this case not being deployed to combat but early polls suggest that most of our fellow citizens are actually paying quite a bit of attention to Ukraine.
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.
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