Carnegie Moscow Center
Eurasia today is much broader than two decades ago, but it is also more interconnected. In this new environment, Russia should define its post-imperial role in ways that are appropriate for the 21st century.
The death of North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il increases the likelihood that the stress on the multiple fault lines in Korean society will reach the point of breaking. Secret talks with China to plan for contingencies may be needed now more than ever.
On its twentieth anniversary, the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program remains an important tool for international cooperation to reduce nuclear dangers, but there remain some tough questions about the continued viability of the model.
As Kazakhstan celebrates its twentieth anniversary of independence, the country faces a number of tough geopolitical, political, economic, and social challenges.
Legacies of the Soviet era still pervade Kazakhstan, 20 years after independence, and leave most citizens unable to offer a detached judgment of what benefits Kazakhstan might have derived from seven decades of Soviet rule.
Russia is the world’s biggest hydrocarbon producer, and China is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing energy markets. The two are neighbors, yet their energy relationship is very thin. Instead, they compete for vast and largely unexplored Central Asian resources.
Greater understanding and cooperation with China is crucial to Russia’s future as a Euro-Pacific nation-state.
Beijing and Moscow’s opposition to Western initiatives may seem like solidarity between two authoritarian governments or a coordinated effort to dilute Western domination of global politics, but the reality is far broader.
In the coming months, Washington will need to walk a fine line to maintain pressure on Iran while trying to prevent the nuclear crisis from escalating out of control.
The situation in Syria is unlikely to improve in the near future. It is increasingly likely that the violent domestic unrest can only be resolved through a regime change.