...Los Angeles, on the allegation that the U.S. government would not sufficiently protect U.S.S.R. athletes and may even actively harm them. Both boycotts involved convoluted diplomatic maneuvering, and neither the U.S. nor the USSR acted alone: in 1980 America rallied Canada, Japan, China, and West Germany, all of which refused to send athletes to Moscow; in ’84 the USSR kept Bulgaria, Mongolia, Vietnam, and East Germany from participating in the...
...y. Much of this body of work, he noted, has been on the participation of the European Union in its Eastern European member states. Notably absent is discussion of the influence of the Russian Federation, the former hub of the USSR and the present-day hegemon in the region. This is interesting for Orenstein and Cameron, especially given Russia’s linkages and leverage in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and the formation of alliances in the region. Co...
...twork of Free Tibet activists. What is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was conquered in a similar manner. Mongolia was recognized as an independent nation by the Chinese due to pressure by its strategic partner, the USSR. After the conquest (or perhaps more fairly, re-conquest) of these lands, the next and more important step was integrating them into the People’s Republic of China. This process is still ongoing, and it is proving much...
...akes practical sense. Just like Canada, Norway’s defense strategy is heavily targeted against Russia. It focuses on the Barents Sea and around the Svalbård archipelagos because of a 40-year territorial dispute with the former USSR. The Barents Sea is known to be home to 3.7 billion barrels of oil-equivalents and 3.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves, according to several private, public, and academic estimations. Yet in the Barents Sea...
WikiCommons Margaret Thatcher was a conviction politician, driven by ideas and grounded in her principles. Her unshakeable belief in economic liberalism and political freedom spread across the world. She oversaw the fall of communism in the USSR while China, India and Latin America opened up their economies and freed up their markets, leading to an era of unprecedented prosperity. Her legacy at home though is quite mixed. To some Mrs. Thatch...
...because there isn’t one. North Korea has been resolutely totalitarian for over half a century. Its leaders are deified while the outside world is demonized. Political opponents are shipped off to prison camps redolent of the USSR’s infamous gulag archipelago. Those deemed a threat are imprisoned along with three-generations of their family. The camps hold an estimated 200,000 out of a total population of only 23 million. And those that aren’t be...
...50s, the world community, frightened by the possibility of an East-West nuclear conflict, had engaged in multilateral talks about Antarctica’s fate in Cold War times. After fierce negotiations that got the better of the USSR’s imperialist policy, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) banned military deployments, nuclear tests, commercial mining, and territorial claims in Antarctica. As early as between 1982 and 1988, though, several...
...This dream was entertained by millions, and it was this emotion that propelled personality cult leaders like Egyptian President Abdel Nasser to rule while Arab governments began to play power politics between the U.S. and the USSR. The recent events in the Middle East signal a resurrection of pan-Arabism. However, this neo-Arabism, intertwined with the core motivations of these related revolutions, is not the same political ideology that gripped...
...ar question. The $64,000 answer—the best the US will be able to do for now—is to follow a policy of deterrence and supplement it with containment. “We try to deal with the problem as we did with a much more serious enemy [the USSR] for a much longer time, and that is through deterrence,” said Richard Betts, Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. “We make it clear to Iran that if they use those weapons against us or our friends...
...endemic corruption that characterized Georgia for the past decade and continues to plague most of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a grouping of former Soviet republics formed in 1991 following the breakup of the USSR. There is considerable reason for optimism: tax revenues rose 43 percent in 2004 compared to 2003, thanks largely to better enforcement, reduced corruption, and a restructured financial police force that discourages bri...
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