The United States had just gone through a bruising election, but in Congress Democratic and Republican leaders gathered to unveil the bust of Vaclav Havel, the playwright and first post-Communist Czech…
As a fragile ceasefire just about holds in Ukraine, with shelling reported in the pivotal port city of Mariupol, the EU has announced a new round of sanctions against Russia. Targeted at state-owned firms…
NATO’s secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen is fond of saying that the alliance must now transform from a “deployed NATO to a prepared NATO”. But given the current crisis to its eastern flank, many…
After the NATO-led interventions in Kosovo and Libya, many commentators argued that the Responsibility to Protect, the fashionable name for humanitarian military intervention, had finally become an established…
World leaders are congregating in Wales this week for the 2014 NATO summit, where some of the most pressing political issues of the day will be on the agenda. Despite the high stakes, a survey of the general…
As NATO meets in Wales, the public’s attention is bound to be on how the organisation will handle the conflict in Ukraine. But the meeting is also an important window of opportunity to develop a long term…
Jamie Shea, London School of Economics and Political Science
Late one Saturday evening in March, NATO’s Headquarters experienced a large-scale cyber-attack at the hands of a group calling itself Anonymous Bierkut from Ukraine. Non-classified networks were targeted…
Anxiety over the crisis in eastern Ukraine has ratcheted in recent days amid claims of an effective Russian invasion, and warnings of NATO making a 4000-troop reaction force available to the region. As…
NATO member states are meeting this week in Wales at what could prove a milestone summit. Since the 2012 Chicago meeting, the security landscape has changed dramatically and important questions about NATO’s…
World leaders are beginning to converge on Newport in Wales for two days to reflect on NATO’s aims and objectives, ahead of the organisation’s main summit on Thursday and Friday. While in Wales, they’ll…
The 28 nations of NATO, each dedicated to “safeguarding the freedom and security of its members through political and military means” are about to descend on South Wales. The impact of preparing for the…
On July 31, while it remained unclear exactly how directly involved in the Ukrainian crisis Russia is, the British media ominously reported that Nato had been deemed unready to fight a war with Russia…
When it comes to politics, there is a generally held belief that when it is working, it is boring. Europe’s foreign policy politics routinely breaks this axiom because while it can rarely said to be working…
The Russian response to what Moscow perceives as its three main security challenges – Western enlargement, China and terrorism/separatism in the Caucasus – has been expansionism. First in Abkhazia in 2008…
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), once again saved from potential irrelevance, has come to the fore in the West’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis. In the aftermath of its withdrawal from Afghanistan…
The current stand-off between Russia and Ukraine has left the European Union looking perhaps flatfooted and ineffectual. It is an unfair reflection of reality. The EU is not a military alliance and so…
The Russian invasion and rapid absorption of the Crimean peninsula might seem like the spark ready to ignite a new Cold War. In fact, given the feeble Western response so far, the more likely outcome is…
Afghanistan has a special place in the history of international relations, having tested and endorsed many international power equations over the years. But given the imminent troop withdrawal, serious…
The exchange of artillery fire between Turkish and Syrian forces over the past few days has seen a renewed focus on the possibility of an escalating war between Damascus and Ankara. It seems that not since…
On Tuesday 18 September, at the direction of the United States military command in Afghanistan, deputy commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Lieutenant General James…