Public sentiment in many states has turned against nuclear energy following the March 2011 accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. The Fukushima accident was, however, preventable.
Despite the overlapping interests of Russia and China, the two countries are not allies. Moscow will not accept a junior position vis-à-vis Beijing, while the Chinese regard Russia as a fading power.
Russia and China are suspicious of multilateral institutions created by the West and hostile to anything that could justify external intervention in a sovereign state’s affairs, but both are learning to use international forums to their advantage.
As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, Russia has substantial leverage in the post-Soviet space and is the EU's most important neighbor. However, in the coming decades Russia will face serious internal and international challenges.
Turkey is a particularly critical key actor for building a Euro-Atlantic Security Community, with a growing influence within the Euro-Atlantic region.
Enhanced energy security is particularly important for a more cohesive security collaboration among the states of the Euro-Atlantic region.
Today, unprecedented challenges from without and within threaten to reverse the progress toward the safe, secure, undivided Euro-Atlantic world hoped for in the wake of the Cold War. To overcome that future, a twenty-first-century problem demands a twenty-first-century solution.
Without intellectual efforts it is impossible to find a viable solution to the dire post-August 2008 reality, which put both Georgia and Russia in an extremely difficult situation.
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.
It is unlikely that nuclear weapons proliferation in South Asia will lead to a deliberate outbreak of large-scale war, but a catastrophic conflict could occur even though neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis intend to start a nuclear war.