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Submission Statement

The destruction of the Kakhova Dam earlier this month has resulted in renewed anxiety that Russian occupation may result in the destabilization or destruction of Ukraines nuclear power infrastructure. Damage done to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant's facilities and Russia's continuing choice to use said plant as a base for military operations raises the specter of a nuclear disaster that could spread radiation across a broad swathe of Europe. Such an event could result in the triggering of Article 5, the collective defense clause of the NATO alliance. This article details possible Western policies that could decrease the likelihood of such an event occurring. Appealing to Russian economic interests as a major supplier of nuclear power infrastructure is an angle I had not considered before.

Ultimately, the only sustainable resolution to the threats facing the ZNPP is the withdrawal of Russian troops and personnel from the plant and the return of the facility to Ukrainian authorities. In the meantime, though, Ukraine’s partners should pursue four lines of effort to help to prevent a radiological incident at the plant.

First, pressure should be placed on Russian authorities and Rosatom management at the ZNPP to grant the International Atomic Energy Agency all requested access. This is critical to enable the agency to continue regular reporting on the status of the ZNPP’s operations — including the state of water levels and key support systems. While the agency may not always wish to publicize key thresholds, it should continue to warn of critical developments and correct alarmist narratives. The agency should also be empowered to report on any denial of access or failures to cooperate. While water supply remains a concern, it is also important that the agency consider and report on ways to minimize water usage at the plant. This should include exploring options for moving ZNPP’s unit five reactor from hot to cold shutdown as soon as this can be safely done.

Second, diplomatic pressure should be applied to create a deconfliction mechanism between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries to allow for the continued supply of water, diesel fuel, emergency equipment, and spare parts, as well as the rotation of workers and International Atomic Energy Agency personnel. This could be supervised by international observers who could identify any disruptions and establish responsibility for them. Moscow places considerable strategic and economic importance on its civilian nuclear sector and exports. With this in mind, appealing to Russia’s desire to maintain its reputation as a responsible nuclear operator may be one admittedly imperfect way of incentivizing cooperation. Stressing the damage that a radiological incident could have on the global nuclear sector and demands for the construction of new nuclear facilities worldwide might also help motivate Russia to keep the ZNPP operating safely.

Third, Ukraine’s partners should make clear to Russia that it does not stand to benefit from engineering — or carelessly permitting — an accident at the ZNPP. Russia does not want further involvement in the conflict from Ukraine’s partners and may calculate that a radiological incident would act as a deterrent or result in pressure on Ukraine to negotiate. Kyiv’s partners should stress to Moscow that they would respond to a radiological incident at the ZNPP by providing Ukraine with more — not less — support. The precise nature of that support would need to be negotiated among Ukraine’s allies and with Kyiv to ensure that it is credible.

Fourth, the attractiveness of manufacturing a radiological incident could be further decreased by reducing its likely impact on Ukrainian military forces. This could be achieved by providing them chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear training and equipment to ensure that they have the right capabilities to respond to the situation. Czechia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, in particular, have considerable expertise in this area. By collaborating to provision and train Ukrainian forces, they could help to convince Russia that there would be little military utility in causing or allowing an accident at the ZNPP.

"War is the continuation of policy with other means."

Clausewitz's statement may be so broadly accepted as to be a truism, but the forces and motives which drive a nation to go to war remain topics of great debate and study. Many wars not only fail to advance a nation's goals but actively undermine or defeat them entirely. The 2002 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq sit within those ranks, having sapped US soft and hard power while delivering benefits that were questionable at best. Given its recency and cultural cachet, a number of thinkers have tried to discern the precise concerns that led the US to conclude that invading Iraq was necessary to achieve its policy goals. This article provides a useful summary of two of those camps, those that believe the US was motivated by concerns over its security, and those who believe it was driven by a desire to protect US hegemony. It makes an attempt at synthesizing the two schools and speaks to the implications of each interpretation on US policy. Finally, the authors call for broader and more culturally/globally inclusive scholarship on the war.

This article is an excellent resource for readers of all stripes. For novices, this is an excellent birds-eye view of the current state of Iraq War scholarship. Those who already have a strong inclination toward one of the two schools described will find valuable sources for broadening and adding depth to their understanding.

This article maps out the debate on the Iraq War’s origins as they have developed over the last 20 years. It aims to play honest broker between competing schools of thought, clearly laying out their interpretations, assessing points of tension, and factoring in the influences of politics and ideology on scholarship. Below, I will show how divergent interpretations of the war have emerged from the different lenses, methodologies, and objectives that scholars have brought to the table.

No single article can tackle every aspect of Iraq War scholarship. Thus, this essay focuses on three questions that are essential for explaining the war’s origins but that continue to divide scholars. First, was the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq driven more by the desire for security or the pursuit of primacy? Second, was the Bush administration’s decision to pursue “coercive diplomacy” in the fall and winter of 2002–2003 a genuine attempt to avoid war or a means to legitimize a decision for war made earlier in 2002? Third, how much did neoconservatives matter in the making of the Iraq War?

The first question — security vs. hegemony — constitutes the primary point of scholarly disagreement about the Iraq War. Security-focused explanations like those found in Leffler’s new book argue that the Bush administration’s primary motive was protecting the nation from future terrorist attacks in the transformed, post-9/11 environment in which threats like Iraq had to be re-evaluated.2 Scholars in the hegemony school like Ahsan Butt argue, in contrast, that the Bush administration used 9/11 and the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to justify a war that was motivated primarily by the desire for regional and/or global hegemony.3 Other important questions flow from this security-hegemony divide, including the nature of Bush’s coercive diplomacy strategy and the role of neoconservatives in causing the war.

A few caveats: This essay does not defend the existence of the security-hegemony divide nor take sides in this debate. Instead, it seeks to explain its parameters, evolution, and stakes. Some may object to this depiction of two broad interpretive camps as oversimplifying a vast body of nuanced scholarship. To address this problem, this article tries to identify possible means of synthesizing these interpretations. The security and hegemony camps do overlap in some ways, as discussed below, but this divide also reflects that scholars themselves have identified genuine differences about what set of factors drove the causal boat. Finally, this essay concludes with a plea for more global and cultural analysis of the Iraq War as a way to challenge this binary.

In sum, competing interpretations of the war’s origins are entwined with debates about its lessons. It is proper that scholars contest how this war should inform the future of U.S. foreign policy. Nonetheless, partisans in this debate risk filtering history through ideological prisms and using it to win arguments. Still, this article suggests that even as the United States refocuses toward great-power competition, the meanings and lessons of the Iraq War remain hotly contested and highly consequential for America’s global role. This is especially true as the generation that fought the Iraq and Afghanistan wars enters leadership positions in the military and politics. Their interpretations of that conflict will matter immensely for how they think and act, just as competing viewpoints about the Vietnam War mattered for that generation.

Submission Statement

Top leadership is under particular scrutiny during any war effort, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine is no different. Sergei Shoigu(Russia's defense minister) and Valery Gerasimov(commander of Russia's forces in Ukraine) have received particular scrutiny for their roles in the Russian military's failures in Ukraine. This scrutiny escalated into crisis when Denis Prigozhin marched towards Moscow with Wagner PMC, allegedly as a response to failures by Shoigu and the MOD in Ukraine. This article by FT examines the fallout and immediate implications for Shoigu and Gerasimov in the wake of this attempted insurrection. Quotes from Dara Massicot and an anonymous insider provide valuable prognostication about the immediate future of the two. I was particularly struck by the point Massicot made, that(at least in the short term) Putin dismissing either of the two would be seen as having terms dictated to him by Prigozhin. It may be the case that this coup attempt has actually made it more likely that Shoigu and Gerasimov will continue in their positions, regardless of their lack of performance.

Max Seddon is the Moscow bureau chief at FT. Dara Massicot is a senior policy researcher at RANDCorporation focusing on defense issues in Russia.

There was no sound on the brief video of Sergei Shoigu published on Monday morning or any indication of where Russia’s defence minister was as he pored over a battlefield map.

But the seemingly mundane footage was the first evidence that Shoigu was still in his job. Neither he nor Valery Gerasimov, commander of Russia’s invasion force, have been seen in public since Yevgeny Prigozhin launched an extraordinary coup attempt to oust them on Friday.

“Shoigu and Gerasimov are so bad in their jobs that it’s dangerous to Putin to leave them in place,” said Dara Massicot, a senior political scientist at the US-based Rand Corporation. “But loyalty and stability are number one for Putin. I just don’t see how he’s going to have these terms dictated to him like this.”

“Shoigu and Gerasimov are now obvious lame ducks and they will be removed, I think,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defence think-tank. He did not exclude the possibility that the two men’s departure could have been part of the brokered deal that led to Prigozhin standing his men down. The Kremlin has denied this.

The damage to Russia’s prestige has been such that even pro-war commentators on state television and social media admit that the coup called the entire war into question.

“This is a serious blow to the authority of the country and the authority of the president,” Karen Shakhnazarov, a Kremlin-linked film director, said on a popular online livestream show. “There was a feeling here that everything was unshakeable, and that turned out not to be the case.”

The reception Wagner’s men got in Rostov shows the popularity of Prigozhin’s tirades against the army leadership. On Saturday morning, when Prigozhin demanded a face-off with Shoigu and Gerasimov, Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy head of Russian military intelligence, laughed: “Take them!”

When Wagner left the southern city that was the launch pad for the coup, crowds waved, cheered and took selfies with Prigozhin — but booed the security forces who came to replace them.

Though Putin publicly backed Shoigu’s efforts, Prigozhin vehemently refused — conscious of the damage such an arrangement would do to his standing as a powerful warlord who answered only to Putin, according to a person who has known him since the 1990s.

“He understands fully well that if he turns into a zero, then Shoigu would have dealt with him at some point. So he went all out and decided to show Putin that he’s the only real one out there and he needs to be left alone with his money,” the person said. “He got it a bit wrong, and everything went to shit, as it usually does [in Russia].”

Putin’s biggest mistake, Rand’s Massicot said, was to give Shoigu his backing without finding an acceptable way for Prigozhin to save face.

“When he threw his support behind the defence ministry, it basically put a target on Prigozhin’s back,” she said. “A competent statesman would have reached out to offer Prigozhin an incentive, or something to buy him off. Clearly, that wasn’t done.”

With Prigozhin now in exile, Shoigu’s position could even be strengthened, according to the person who knows the warlord — as Putin will see no reason to fire a loyalist.

“Shoigu’s the only winner,” the person said. “He’ll be the defence minister forever.”

Submission Statement

Stephen Kotkin is a highly respected Russian historian. This interview did an excellent job situating Prigozhin's insurrection within the broader context, both in terms of Russian history and the war effort as a whole. I was particularly struck by the comparison of this to 1917, where security measures taken to stabilize the country unintentionally accelerated its collapse.

Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Key points:

Prigozhin is improvising, but his successes have already changed the game.

Social media is a massive X-factor for modern governance. This coup was executed more on smartphones than on the streets.

Instability is being watched closely by all powers, but especially China.

Allowing an alternative to arise was a colossal mistake, not what Kotkin expected from Putin.

Ukraine is presently ill-positioned to take advantage of Russian instability, but that could change as rifts in the Russian military/government continue to deepen.

Right now, Western powers need to stay out, lest Putin paint Prigozhin as a Western puppet.

Submission Statement

Several analysts have pointed out that the approaching multipolar world is quite different in character from the Cold War era and even the periods before. Unlike then, the powers of the modern-day are not characterized by an ideology or system they wish to impose upon a sphere of influence. Rather, they are defined by their support or opposition to the current liberal order as a whole. China and Russia seek to weaken and subvert the world order, without articulating a real alternative to said order. Conversely, the US and the West seek to preserve the world order. In that vein, this article submits a hypothesis on why China feels its actions are the most optimal for its own success. The pessimistic view on the gamble China is making is that China sees the changes in the liberal international order right now as inevitable and continuous. They believe that the order will continue to decline regardless of their actions and that they are simply positioning themselves to take advantage of the world to follow.

Interestingly, implicit in this article is a theory of victory for the United States. If America can ensure that the institutions of the liberal international order remain intact and inclusive, that smaller countries have more to gain from engaging with the rest of the world than withdrawing, and that current attempts to sabotage that world order do not succeed, then China will find that bet they have made on a fragmented world will turn out to be an unwise choice after all.

MARK LEONARD is Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of What Does China Think? and The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict.

Although China and the United States agree that the post–Cold War order is over, they are betting on very different successors. In Washington, the return of great-power competition is thought to require revamping the alliances and institutions at the heart of the post–World War II order that helped the United States win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This updated global order is meant to incorporate much of the world, leaving China and several of its most important partners—including Iran, North Korea, and Russia—isolated on the outside.

But Beijing is confident that Washington’s efforts will prove futile. In the eyes of Chinese strategists, other countries’ search for sovereignty and identity is incompatible with the formation of Cold War–style blocs and will instead result in a more fragmented, multipolar world in which China can take its place as a great power.

The very different responses of China and the United States to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the divergence in Beijing’s and Washington’s thinking. In Washington, the dominant view is that Russia’s actions are a challenge to the rules-based order, which must be strengthened in response. In Beijing, the dominant opinion is that the conflict shows the world is entering a period of disorder, which countries will need to take steps to withstand.

Chinese leaders see the United States as the principal threat to their survival and have developed a hypothesis to explain their adversary’s actions. Beijing believes that Washington is responding to domestic polarization and its loss of global power by ramping up its competition with China. U.S. leaders, according to this thinking, have decided that it is only a matter of time before China becomes more powerful than the United States, which is why Washington is trying to pit Beijing against the entire democratic world. Chinese intellectuals, therefore, speak of a U.S. shift from engagement and partial containment to “total competition,” spanning politics, economics, security, ideology, and global influence.

China is confident that the United States is mistaken in its assumption that a new cold war has broken out. Accordingly, it is seeking to move beyond Cold War–style divides. As Wang Honggang, a senior official at a think tank affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, put it, the world is moving away from “a center-periphery structure for the global economy and security and towards a period of polycentric competition and co-operation.” Wang and like-minded scholars do not deny that China is also trying to become a center of its own, but they argue that because the world is emerging from a period of Western hegemony, the establishment of a new Chinese center will actually lead to a greater pluralism of ideas rather than a Chinese world order. Many Chinese thinkers link this belief with the promise of a future of “multiple modernity.” This attempt to create an alternative theory of modernity, in contrast to the post–Cold War formulation of liberal democracy and free markets as the epitome of modern development, is at the core of Xi’s Global Civilization Initiative. This high-profile project is intended to signal that unlike the United States and European countries, which lecture others on subjects such as climate change and LGBTQ rights, China respects the sovereignty and civilization of other powers.

China’s leaders have made an audacious strategic bet by preparing for a fragmented world. The CCP believes the world is moving toward a post-Western order not because the West has disintegrated but because the consolidation of the West has alienated many other countries. In this moment of change, it may be that China’s stated willingness to allow other countries to flex their muscles may make Beijing a more attractive partner than Washington, with its demands for ever-closer alignment. If the world truly is entering a phase of disorder, China could be best placed to prosper.

Submission Statement

Michael Kofman shares his thoughts about the last 24 hours in Russia. Unfortunately, I have no way of sharing the podcast in a publically available manner, but the key points are below.

Michael Kofman is the Director of Russia Studies at CNA and a Senior Adjunct Fellow at CNAS.

Summary of Events

-Almost exactly 24 hours ago, it looked like Prigozhins conflict with the MOD had reached a boiling point, when he announced a march on Moscow, demanding the resignation of Shoigu and Gerasimov.

-The Russian government moved quickly to shore up its ranks, releasing public statements from within the Russian military(General Surovikin) and Russian government(FSB) against the coup

-Most of Wagner was likely not at the front when the announcement was made. They were likely in training camps in Luhansk. This facilitated a very quick advance into Rostov-on-Don and the Southern Military District headquarters located therein.

-Most Russian units stood by due to chaos and confusion, as well as the perception of Wagner forces as friendly units.

-By morning, a relaxed "standoff" had developed between Wagner and MOD forces in the city, with some Wagner and infantry pointing guns at the SMD building while others drank coffee or smoked cigarettes.

-This was not bloodless. Wagner was bombed by SU-34s and took down several aircraft themselves. Wagner may have done more damage to Russian aviation than Ukraine has in the past month.

-Kofman cannot imagine that this ends here.

Analysis

-Prigozhin is clearly getting desperate and running out of options, but he may understand something about Shoigu and the regime that we do not as outside observers. Prigozhin saw that Shoigu was weak, that the regime was far more hollow than it looks, and that he had the opportunity to launch this attack and extract concessions even when from the outside it looked pretty futile.

-Even if Prigozhin is talking about Shoigu and Gerasimov, this is a coup against Putin. It is Putin's power that is being challenged here.

-Wagner's forces were let through unopposed likely due to confusion and stupidity rather than as a show of support.

-Coup failed to generate support from elites within the system. Clearly, key security systems(FSB) were on the side of the regime.

-Prigozhin's timing is terrible. the Russian army is clearly doing better defensively than most had expected, sapping some of the weight from his arguments.

-Most coups fail very quickly and early on. Russia in particular does not have a good history of successful military coups.

-If Prigozhin walks out of this with a deal and his head, we will have learned a lot about Russia in the past 24 hours.

-Personalist authoritarian systems must prevent alternatives from emerging. A coup-proofing system emerges from this. Whether or not he was under a delusion about it, what Prigozhin did was a challenge to that system. Based on what Kofman saw in Rostov-on-Don, the performance of that system was not encouraging.

-Wagner's regime ties may be through the GRU, and the FSB was likely opposed to its existence. FSB is likely to send an "I told you so" message to Putin.

-Probably 1500-2000 Wagner forces crossed the border with Prigozhin. The forces that entered Rostov-on-Don looked like two companies worth. Prigozhin is overstating the size of Wagner overall(not 15,000, and certainly not 25,000).

-Prigozhin planned this, but he was also pushed to this by RUMOD ultimatums that would mean the functional destruction of Wagner(forcing Wanger soldiers to sign contracts with military). Russia made the mistake of pushing Prigozhin into a desperate act while also not preparing for that act. Very stereotypical of the competence level of this regime.

-Wagner troops are going to be fine, they are going to be given a general amnesty for this. Putin clearly and publically put the blame on Prigozhin, not his soldiers.

-If Kofman was Prigozhin, he would not trust that deal for a minute. If RUMOD is using this deal to buy time to mobilize their forces, this will not go his way.

-This could have been the beginning. If this had gone on for more than a day, it could have catalyzed the disintegration of the regime as a whole.

-Key questions: Will Wagner abandon their main bargaining chip, Rostov? What are troops and commanders on the front lines thinking about what's going on back home? What was Prigozhin's theory of victory, and why did he turn back? Does he understand the full implications of what he did?

Submission Statement

Michael Kofman almost does not require an introduction. While this interview was before Prighozin began his march to Moscow, there is a brief discussion on the leader of Wagner to the end that, in hindsight, comes off a bit like foreshadowing.

Michael Kofman is the Director of Russia Studies at CNA and a Senior Adjunct Fellow at CNAS.

In today’s episode, Mike looks at the slow progress of the Ukrainian offensive and what, if anything, it means for the course of the war. He also discusses Russia’s defensive strategy and how grateful he is not to be in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s head. Mike and Nick recorded this show on Friday, June 23rd before the Wagner insurrection began to escalate. We will have more podcasts and articles on the recent events in Russia in the coming days and weeks.

Hey guys, sorry to be a bit nonnoncredible for a moment, but I've set up [email protected]. Same rules as the reddit sub, with an emphasis on serious discussion of defense topics. I would really appreciate it if you subscribed! Especially if your home instance isn't sh.itjust.works, we haven't been indexed on .world or .ml yet cause no one is subscribed to us from there. Thanks!

Submission Statement Given recent events, the dynamics underpinning military coups are understandably in vogue at the moment. This article focuses specifically on military coups and the factors which determine their success: the capacity to perform a coup, the motivation to do so, the lack of opposition, and the amount of popular support.

While I did find this article to be illuminating, I do have some reservations. The factors listed seem to be descriptive rather than predictive--that is, they are good for describing why a coup was successful or a failure, but they are bad at predicting the course of coups in progress, or before they occur. An attempt to apply these factors to the recent move by Wagner, for instance, will quickly run into frustration. Wagner certainly has the motivation, but what about capacity? Certainly not in theory, but watching them march to Moscow unopposed it's hard not to imagine that Russia's actual capacity to resist Wagner is significantly less than it ought to be. Similarly, opposition. Putin should be capable of mounting a serious challenge to Wagner's attack, but it's easy to imagine a situation where he flees and the current government collapses in his wake. If anybody knows of any literature that attempts to predict the progress of a coup, I would appreciate it if you could share it.

Florence Gaub is a Franco-German researcher, security expert, and futurist who focuses on foresight-based policy formation for international relations and security policy. She is the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College.

Until three years ago, it was widely perceived in Europe that the era of military intervention in politics was over: strongmen like Idi Amin and Hafez al-Assad were long dead, and the world had seen the likes of Mubarak toppled and Pinochet voted out of power. The armed forces appeared to have returned to the barracks for good. Although the coups in Egypt and Thailand, in 2013 and 2014, respectively, were a reminder that the military can still play a political role, it was the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey which drove this point home. As the military’s raison d’être is clearly the defence of a state, any venture by it into politics is generally seen as an anomaly – yet this repeatedly occurs. So why (and when) do coups happen? Mainly for four reasons: the armed forces have the capacity, the interest, no legitimate opponent and a degree of popular support. If all four elements are not present, however, a coup will fail – as was, arguably, the case in Turkey.

Basically just the title. I realized that several sublemmys on other servers were out of date when I viewed them here. Is there a way to manually trigger a refresh, or is that a periodic thing?

Honestly it’s a bit frustrating, I had assumed the website was just directly loading from the host server as opposed to loading a cached version.