Category: Blogs

The Presidential Debates: Here’s What We Would Like to Know

By Ashish Kumar Sen

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican challenger, Donald Trump, took part in their first presidential debate in New York on September 26. The debate was the first of three. Here are some questions the Atlantic Council’s experts would like to pose to the candidates.

The Audacity of Nadiya Savchenko

By Melinda Haring

“Russian propaganda made the mistake of using me as an example, and I just became too expensive for them. I am a person who never gives up,” said Nadiya Savchenko, a former prisoner of war, current member of Ukraine’s parliament, and one of the country’s most popular politicians, on September 22. Three days earlier, the […]

Can Vladimir Putin Make the Twenty-First Century a Russian Century?

By Anders Åslund

The role Russia is playing in Donald Trump’s election campaign is quite extraordinary. The candidate’s son has acknowledged that Trump’s companies have received large Russian investments. His former campaign manager Paul Manafort worked for Ukraine’s disgraced pro-Moscow authoritarian president for almost a decade. Two of his foreign policy advisers, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Carter […]

Arctic Science Moves to Center Stage

By Lester L. Lyles, Sherri Goodman, and Robert E. Hunter

Nothing that happens in the Arctic stays in the Arctic. As a consequence of global warming, this is not a play on words but a truism. Climate change can no longer be denied; it must be addressed. Global warming is opening up an entire region, once silent and perpetually frozen, to commerce, transport, mining, and […]

Europe’s Misguided Plan for a New Joint Military Headquarters

By Jorge Benitez, National Interest

The recent campaign by Juncker, Mogherini, and the governments of France and Germany for an EU military headquarters is a regrettable step in the wrong direction.

Syria: The High Cost of Taking Russia at its Word

By Frederic C. Hof

The all-out assault on Aleppo by Russian and Assad regime aircraft, targeting as it does aid convoys, hospitals, homes, market places, and mosques, seems to have mildly surprised and deeply upset senior American officials. Saddled with a president content to look the other way while mass murder unfolds, they had persuaded themselves that Moscow’s demands […]

Wanted: Leadership

Strategic planning will play a crucial role in the next US president’s ability to mitigate an amalgamation of political, social, security, and economic threats at home and abroad, according to Mathew Burrows, director of the Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “We need leadership on a lot of different levels to get us out […]

How Ukraine Can Signal It’s Serious about Reform

By Oksana Bedratenko

Thirteen months since the last tranche, the IMF has finally allocated the third tranche of its program to Ukraine, bringing the total disbursement to $7.6 billion. Although it is less than the originally planned $1.7 billion and came with substantial delays, the receipt of the $1 billion tranche was celebrated by the Ukrainian government as […]

The MOC’s Role in the Collapse of the Southern Opposition

By Youssef Sadaki

The southern fronts in Syria have come to near standstill: the opposition’s dream to topple Damascus is unachievable, while factions in Daraa and Damascus fight amongst themselves. How did this happen when there were such high hopes of victory for factions in the south, especially after they united under an umbrella group called the Southern […]