Category: Foreign Policy

NATO training exercise Trident Juncture, a massive two-week show of force being held in the North and Baltic Seas off the coast of Norway, is set to be the largest of its kind since the heyday of the Cold War — and with good reason. As Russia’s surface fleet suffers setback after setback, the redirection […]

The most successful element of Russia’s 2016 influence campaign pertaining to the presidential election was not getting Donald Trump elected — it was convincing the American people that Russian influence efforts are a partisan issue. Ever since then, analysts attempting to make objective assertions about the ways Russian influence efforts can affect the American public […]

The problem with foreign policy and geopolitics has never been about the mechanisms of international relations. For all intents and purposes, our global powers interact quite a bit like patrons at a crowded bar: trying to manage polite dialogue with familiar strangers, all the while maintaining closely held ulterior motives. That guy in the corner […]

Arctic Circle — Earlier in October, British Royal Marines and Dutch Royal Marines were conducting combat training exercises in the Arctic. The exercises were part of a training regime intended to enhance relations between the two European nations, establish interoperability between the two Corps, and signal that the Arctic is still depoliticised. But they weren’t […]

With Venezuela on the brink of starvation and an economy that has gone from the richest in South America to a starving population, could new leadership in Brazil offer different solutions to the Venezuelan crisis? While it does not seem Jair Bolsonaro wants to intervene militarily in Venezuela, he does seem very willing to work […]

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against two more members of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) relating to a concerted effort to steal commercial aviation secrets from U.S. based companies. This marks the third time that members of the Chinese government have been directly implicated in espionage and the theft […]

Chinese President Xi Jingpin elevated the aggressive rhetoric between China and the United States last week when he reportedly told his top military advisers to prepare for war in the South China Sea. The speech, which was made during an inspection tour of China’s Southern Theatre Command, did not directly reference the United States in […]

As President Trump’s trade war with China continues, weakening relations between the two powerful states have already begun exacerbating tensions between U.S. and Chinese interests in other realms of geopolitics. Diplomatic spats about how the United States views Taiwan, and a looming standoff between the Chinese and the U.S.-led Pacific forces that challenge China’s claimed […]

This is the second part of the article regarding SAS involvement in proxy operations during the Cold War. You can read Part I here. Historically, the Mahra tribe had lived in a tri-border area that overlays Saudi Arabia, South Yemen, and Dhofar.  After the British withdrew from South Yemen in 1967, and the country went communist, […]

The early 1970s. With the help of the British, the Sultan of Oman is in the final stages of winning a communist insurgency in the southern part of his country (Dhofar). British contribution was limited to a few Royal Air Force (RAF) squadrons, seconded officers and enlisted men to lead the local troops, and — […]

Dolna Krupa, Slovakia — Paramilitary and influence operations can take many forms. They could be a team of Delta Force operators conducting Operational Preparation of the Battlefield (OPB) in an unstable region; they could be a CIA front company creating a pro-U.S. narrative in a far-away country; but they could also be a Russian biker-gang […]

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced to the world that the United States would be pulling out of a Cold War era missile treaty first established between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty had a specific aim: to ban the development and deployment of conventional or […]