Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Presentations by Igor Malashenko, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Media-Most, and Masha Lipman, former Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Itogi.
President Bush and his new foreign policy team have announced that they plan to undertake a full review of all aspects of American policy toward Russia on matters like economic assistance, NATO expansion and missile defense. There must be a new agenda, we are told, because the old approach of cooperation and engagement pursued by the Clinton administration has been ineffective.
The challenges of consolidating statehood which lie before the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus in the immediate future,are likely to be shaped by the peculiarities of the relationships of these states to Russia, and what strategic consequence this might have from the US.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War have fundamentally changed the strategic balance in the Middle East and have had a profound impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Carnegie's Shlomo Avineri argues that four facets can be discerned from current Russian attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict that inform Russian policy.
The Global Control System (GSK, from the Russian translation) demonstrated itself as a useful mechanism permitting involvement of Missile Technology Control Regime non member states in international discussions on missile proliferation and how to better resist it. Need for such a forum will continue in the future, and Moscow conferences have a reasonable chance of being supported to continue.
Russia's legal right to prosecute the war in Chechnya is incontestable. But legality and morality are not the same. And morally, the issue of Russia's latest intervention in Chechnya is not so clear.
