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Apr 14, 2014

Ambassador John Herbst on Ukraine Crisis

By John E. Herbst

Atlantic Council’s New Eurasia Center Director is Former Envoy to Kyiv John Herbst, the newly appointed director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. Here, he offers an overview of the crisis in Ukraine.

Eastern Europe Russia

Article

Apr 14, 2014

Waiting for the Great Gas Cutoff

By John Roberts

Russia-Ukraine Crisis Is Now Unlikely to Let Russian Gas Keep Flowing Smoothly to Europe  European countries from Germany and Poland to Italy and Turkey now need to ensure they have emergency plans in place to deal with a possible cut-off of Russian gas supplies. At risk are the roughly one-fifth of their supplies delivered via […]

Central Europe Eastern Europe

Article

Apr 9, 2014

Why We Can Play the Long Game on Russia

By James Clad & Robert A. Manning

With the benefit of hindsight, the Russian annexation of Crimea shouldn’t have been a great surprise: it has been obvious to those who chose to look that for most of the last twenty years, that Russian president Vladimir Putin never fully accepted the USSR’s demise. Now, as the West agonizes over another possible irredentist feint—possibly […]

Russia Ukraine

Article

Apr 3, 2014

Global Responses to the Skills Gap: Emerging Lessons

By Alexei Monsarrat

The Manufacturing Institute, together with the Atlantic Council and the Alcoa Foundation, released the report, Global Responses to the Skills Gap: Emerging Lessons, which outlines four major challenges to closing the skills gap: managing demographics, building flexible skills, expanding work-based learning, and partnering to achieve scale. The report states that to address the issue of […]

Economy & Business Fiscal and Structural Reform

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Apr 1, 2014

Why the Ukraine Crisis Won’t Save NATO

By Rajan Menon

The Natocracy is fired up. The crisis in Ukraine, which climaxed with a bogus referendum, a fig leaf to legitimize a Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, has given the Atlantic alliance, strategically adrift since the end of the Cold War, a fresh and compelling reason for being. The panjandrums at NATO headquarters in Brussels […]

Ukraine

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Mar 31, 2014

How to Avoid Wars: NATO’s Article 5 and Strategic Reassurance

By Edgar Buckley and Ioan Pascu

The worst move in an international crisis is to confuse others about your resolve.  That way wars start, witness the first and second world wars when Britain failed to make clear early enough that it would fight. Might NATO be guilty of a similar lack of clarity today?   Not by measuring what it says. The […]

NATO Russia

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Mar 27, 2014

Turkey Votes on Sunday With Democracy and Stability at Stake

By Sabine Freizer

Voters in Turkey will elect mayors and local councils Sunday in an act that will resonate far beyond the local issues that typically dominate municipal elections. They will deliver a referendum on the 11-year rule of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. And the balloting will open a cycle of three elections in coming months that […]

Turkey

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Mar 19, 2014

Amid Russia’s Assault, Ukraine’s New Government Focuses on Reform

By Sabine Freizer

While Russia’s takeover of Crimea has dealt a heavy blow in Kyiv, the young Ukrainian government is nonetheless pressing to pass large-scale reforms. Late last week, deputy education minister Inna Sovsun sighed in frustration as she described layers of corruption in a school system where apparently everything had been up for sale. Under President Viktor […]

Ukraine

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Mar 19, 2014

Geopolitics 101: History Matters

By Harlan Ullman

As President Vladimir Putin moves to consolidate Russian autonomy over Crimea with a referendum, the West continues to struggle to find acceptable policies to reverse or punish this encroachment. Short of a military response that would be profoundly reckless and exceedingly dangerous, in these policy deliberations by the West led by Washington, history seems to […]

Russia Ukraine

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Mar 18, 2014

Spotlight Chile | March 18

By Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Will Chile ratify a new constitution during the second Bachelet presidency? This months’ Spotlight explores three scenarios. President Michelle Bachelet of the Socialist Party-led New Majority coalition took office for her second four-year term on March 11. She has proposed a broad agenda of educational, electoral, and other constitutional reforms. Bachelet is also seeking to […]

Latin America