The Biden administration has created a completely unnecessary confrontation with Russia at a time when reasonable working relations with Moscow are extremely important for achieving two immediate and key administration goals: rejoining the nuclear agreement with Iran, and a peace settlement in Afghanistan facilitating U.S. military withdrawal from that country and an end to America’s...Read More

GPI Senior Fellow, Professor Anatol Lieven, has been invited to join Ambassador Jack Matlock, David Speedie, Katrina vanden Heuvel and other eminent experts and practicioners on US-Russia relations on the Board of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA), formerly the Committee for East-West Accord. Here is a conversation between James Carden and Professor Lieven...Read More

Beijing’s ambitions shouldn’t be treated as an existential threat to the United States. A central distinction in realist international relations thought is that between vital and secondary national interests. Vital interests are threats to a state’s survival, and can take the form either of conquest and subjugation from outside, or the promotion of internal subversion...Read More

After the long stand-off against communism, victory seemed as total as it was sudden. But the west has since fractured and is now losing prestige and influence—does the reversal expose a moral defeat? As the US prepares to plunge into a new cold war with China in which its chances do not look good, it’s...Read More

In recent years, the internal challenges to Western liberal democracy and the early effects of climate change have both intensified drastically. In early 2020, the impact of the coronavirus outbreak added a harsh reminder of the capacity of epidemic diseases not only to kill human beings but to cause massive economic, social and political disruption....Read More

Jared Diamond’s Upheaval shows how in times of catastrophe nation states—just like individuals—need to rely on their ego-strength to survive. “How nations cope with crisis and change” is rather a big subject, which suggests something on the scale of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. In Upheaval, Jared Diamond, the great analyst of historical ecological collapses, has...Read More

Afghanistan’s jihadi insurgents are ready to give America what it wants: defeat without humiliation. In the peace process now underway with the Afghan Taliban, one-and-a-half significant U.S. interests are at stake. The “half” is the only real hang-up to signing a deal and bringing home American troops right now. READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN FOREIGN...Read More

In their enthusiasm for a new cold war against China and Russia, the Western establishments of today are making a mistake comparable to that of their forebears of 1914. This year saw the centennial anniversary of the end of the World War I, in which some sixteen million Europeans died, two great European countries were...Read More

We need to get real about Russia and China—or risk being led into another disastrous war. Realism, as a theory of foreign policy, has been linked in the popular mind of the west both to cynical Realpolitik—in the mould of Henry Kissinger—and to a propensity to wage war. The first charge has a superficial validity....Read More

For many years, it has been a standard trope of liberal writing on hostilities between nations and ethnicities that these are not rooted either in inherited conflicts or real contemporary clashes of interest but are rather “constructed” by wicked political elites to serve their own political and economic ends. This is an argument that has...Read More