The Last Hundred Days

by SARAH MANNEY, Stanford University '18 At the end of the French Revolution of 1789, historian R. R. Palmer wrote that “The wars of the kings were over; the wars of the people had begun.”[1] Today, this maxim threatens to be reversed. Although increasing Chinese and Russian assertiveness towards the West leads many to question...

Freezing Hot: Escalating Tensions in the Arctic

by SARAH McKELLAR, American University '19 The Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force Report, Arctic Imperatives: Reinforcing U.S. Strategy on America's Fourth Coast, stated, "The United States, through Alaska, is a significant Arctic nation with strategic, economic, and scientific interests.”[1] For a significant amount of time, the U.S. government has put the Arctic region...

From Prague to Putin: An Analysis of Czech-Russian Relations and their Echoes in Eastern Europe

by ANNA STONEMAN, University of Chicago '21 The democratization of the Czech Republic has long been predictive of the political and ideological leanings of Eastern Europe. For a brief period during the heart of the Cold War and the decades following, the nation became widely perceived as bastion of the West, and the ideology it...

A Comparison of Past Russian Involvement in Georgia and Ukraine

by ISAAC TRONCOSO Whether one points to an interconnected economic system which binds together the fates of faraway nations, ideological winds contradicting a historical narrative of human progress towards globalization, the fracturing of states’ spheres of influence, or an arguable decrease in relevance of states themselves, it is clear that we live in an age...

The Crimean Crisis: A Russian History and Perspective

by ISAAC TRONCOSO The history of Eastern Europe since 1989 has been a tale of rapidly alternating optimism and cynicism, recovery and setbacks, all framed by the pursuit of a path out of the Soviet political and economic model. The smaller Eastern European states suffered from unique challenges, as their only experienced politicians and bureaucrats...

The Shah Deniz Project: An Opportunity to Rethink European Energy Security after the Crimean Crisis

AYHAN KUÇUK — Today, Europe imports more than half of the energy it consumes and more than one third its natural gas imports currently come from Russia. Russian gas is delivered to Europe through different routes mainly via the largest channel through Ukraine. The 2009 gas supply crisis was so recent, when a dispute between...