Tag: Russia

Fight or Flight?

Mike Coté2 Comments

The case for not abandoning Afghanistan to a brutal fate under the Taliban.

America’s precipitous withdrawal from our combat mission in Afghanistan continues apace. Make no mistake: our rapid evacuation from Afghanistan is an abrogation of our duty, a failure of our will, and a gift to wannabe totalitarians and terrorists across the globe. It is clear that our current administration (and, frankly, the prior two which preceded it) has no conception of America’s permanent interests in Central Asia, and is more than willing to cede our hard won gains of the last 20 years at the altar of temporary political expediency. Our mission in Afghanistan was not only positive for the Afghan people, it was also – when properly conceived and executed – good for America’s long-term national security and geopolitical interests.

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A Tale of Two Pipelines

Mike Coté3 Comments

Fossil fuel pipelines on both sides of the Atlantic have been in the news recently — one for nearing completion and the other for being halted. Both have interesting international implications and each pipeline’s story defies convenient narratives based solely around climate change. In this tale of two pipelines, I’m for the completion of one and against the completion of the other. Unfortunately, the reverse is actually happening in reality. Let’s start with the pipeline that I support, yet is now being shut down — possibly for good.

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Foreign Telegram – February 3, 2021

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In this recurring series of posts, I’ll be highlighting some of the most important and interesting developments in foreign affairs that may have been missed by casual news consumers. These posts may be infrequent, but that all depends on what catches my eye in the realm of international events. I’ll generally describe a few items in each Foreign Telegram, giving an overview of the news itself and some brief commentary on what it all means. Without further throat-clearing, here’s the Foreign Telegram for February 3, 2021.

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The Victorian Cold War

Mike Coté3 Comments

The Great Game and the Eastern Question in the Late Nineteenth Century

Introduction

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was a global geopolitical, commercial, and strategic conflict which ran from the end of the Second World War in 1945 through the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This long-term, aggressive confrontation between two major world powers without direct military combat was, to many, an unprecedented occurrence which had no major modern historical analogs.[1] Many observers expected the period after World War II to be as rife with conflict as were the years of the first half of the twentieth century, but this was not the case; a number of factors contributed to this, including nuclear weaponry and greater use of  diplomacy.[2] “The absence of another great power war was given its name ‘the Long Peace’ by John Gaddis in 1986, a term that endured after the end of the Cold War as this absence continued.”[3] The fact that this period was uncommonly peaceful was both unexpected and welcome; it has been studied for years as a fascinating historical development. But was it a novel historical circumstance at all? If one looks closely, one can find a significant analog just a century earlier.

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The End of History or a Familiar Refrain?

Mike Coté1 Comment

The River of Time

From the very beginning of recorded history through the modern day, humans have experienced radical fluctuations in our political systems, our personal ideologies, our liberties, and the way we live our lives. We have embraced the idea of change as a species, and writers and thinkers throughout the course of history have reflected this obsession. Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of the earliest ancient philosophers, saw the reality of change as universal in nature and among mankind; his idea that the only constant in life is change has echoed through the millennia that have elapsed since he lived.[1] One of the trademark opaque phrases of Heraclitus that illuminates this idea states that “All things come into being through opposition and all are in flux like a river”[2]; this image of the river is useful in understanding change and our human perception of it. For as much as we can see the change that is occurring through the flow of the river, we also perceive the river as unchanging so long as it remains flowing and within its banks. This perception of change reflects a deeper reality in human affairs, as we often recycle or rediscover older ideas or paradigms and see them as novel inventions of our own time. Our language and idioms have reflected this for quite some time; the phrase ‘everything old is new again’ is common in English-speaking societies, but the feeling it expresses is universal. The French use – in their stereotypically pessimistic and existential manner – the idiom ‘plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose’, which translates roughly as ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.[3] This phrase captures a key sentiment in humanity which has been repeated through history – that of the fact that constant change generally does not truly reverse the basic order of things or change human nature. This is true for historical change in ideologies and political systems as much as it is for anything else; the only constant, which remains the same throughout time, is that things are always in a state of flux and humans tend to repeat older ideas or cycles in newly updated ways. If this is true, we should expect human societies to always be in a state of change and conflict; yet some theorists throughout history have taken an opposite approach, claiming that history itself has an endpoint or goal. Historians and thinkers who fall into this teleological camp – from Augustine and Bossuet to Hegel and Marx – vary wildly in their ideas about history, but all agree that history is progressing towards a specific end. Still, few of these thinkers saw their own time as representing the ‘end of history’, only predicting that it would come at some point in the future. For most of the human past, the idea that history had ‘ended’ would have seemed ridiculous, especially given the inexorable reality of change and the often-drastic upheavals that surrounded it. But apparently unique historical circumstances only a few decades ago led many to embrace this old philosophy anew and claim that their era was indeed the realization of the ‘end of history’.

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