Tag Archive for: Russia

The guns of March – Putin’s Ukraine gambit and the US rebalance to Asia

Russian soldiers in Gori city, 2008.The sudden outbreak of tensions in Europe as a result of Russia’s military intervention into the Crimea has led to dramatic days for international security policy makers. One hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, Europe is once again confronting the prospect of major power tensions and even the risk of a new Cold War with Russia. As Strobe Talbott tweeted: ‘Consensus in the cacophony of chatter and sober official statements today: no one wants a new Cold War. That doesn’t mean we’ll avoid it’.

What would a new Cold War between Russia and the West imply for US choices on its rebalance to Asia, and by extension for the security choices of its Asian partners? In 2014, Russia’s armed forces, though significantly smaller than those the Soviet Union possesed at the end of the Cold War in 1991, are still potent in terms of capability. NATO policy in a renewed Cold War with Russia would be focused initially on preventing a conflict in Ukraine from threatening adjoining NATO member states, but could evolve into deterring any Russian threat to NATO’s broader eastern frontier if tensions increased. In this scenario, the US would have little choice but to respond to the needs of its allies in Europe. The alternative of not assisting NATO would risk the fracturing of the Alliance as new members lost confidence in NATO collective security commitments. So renewed tension in Europe may impose significant new demands on US defence deployments such that it mightn’t have the luxury of decreasing its commitments to Europe in order to rebalance its forces to Asia. Read more

1983: on the brink (part 1)

Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov during his September 9, 1983 press conference on the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007

This post is part one of a two part extract by the editors from Paul Dibb’s paper The Nuclear War Scare of 1983, to be released tomorrow.

The last crisis of 1983 was one of the most dangerous episodes of the Cold War. At the moment of maximum stress in the US-Soviet relationship, following a sequence of events that included the shooting down of a Korean civilian airliner by Soviet air defences, and a NATO command post exercise called ‘Able Archer’.

During 7-11 November 1983, the NATO exercise practised nuclear release procedures and was the culmination of NATO’s annual ‘Autumn Forge’ exercise from August to mid-November, which involved 60,000 NATO and US troops. But the 1983 version included crucial new changes. First, it was planned to involve high-level officials, including the US Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Second, the exercise included a practice drill that took NATO forces through high spectrum nuclear warfare and a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons against the Warsaw Pact. Moreover, the procedures and message formats used in the transition from conventional to nuclear war were different from those used before and in this exercise the NATO forces went through all of the alert phases from normal readiness to war alert. Read more

International cyber security: a divided road

In the globalised, interdependent world in which we live our modern lives, the keystone that keeps much of our economies, infrastructures, lines of communication, defence, security, intelligence and social capital enabled is the cyber domain. Due to its international nature, this domain has created intimate interdependencies between states and also new avenues for states to achieve their policy objectives. Furthermore, as the domain empowers individuals, non-state actors and the private sector, a large-scale cooperative approach between a large number of stakeholders is required. And as technology develops in quantum leaps, questions remain about how we, as interdependent actors, will manage the cyber front.

The Budapest Conference on Cyberspace 2012 was the second international conference in a process begun by the UK Government in 2011 in London to begin a dialogue on international shared principles in cyberspace and to outline an agenda for a secure, resilient and trusted global digital environment. What became abundantly clear through the course of the Budapest conference was the divergent intellectual paths that countries are now taking in regard to this issue, and how distinct ‘camps’ are being established in the debate. Read more