By Telos Press · Friday, December 22, 2023 Now available: Shards and Specters of the New World Order, by Timothy W. Luke. Order the paperback edition today in our online store and save 20% by using the coupon code BOOKS20. Also available in Kindle ebook format at Amazon.com.
Shards and Specters of the New World Order: Casting Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies as Critique
by Timothy W. Luke
 From ideological dynamics in revolutionary Russia, cultural stagnation in the USSR, and ineffective Soviet governance in the 1980s to the USSR’s institutional collapse in 1991, the emergence of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin’s wars in Ukraine since 2014, Timothy W. Luke’s Shards and Specters of the New World Order investigates how the geopolitical clout of the United States has worked to contain, but at other times sustain, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. Luke’s critical studies also examine how Moscow’s strategies provoked radical Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan and aided anti-Western client states, like Iraq and Syria, that threatened the New World Order envisioned in Washington after 1991.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, March 28, 2022 One of the surprising aspects of the Ukraine War is that it came as a surprise. After the devastation that Russia wreaked in Chechnya, after the invasion of Georgia, after the occupation of Crimea—and the list goes on: after Russia’s complicity in the destruction of Aleppo and the violence of the Wagner Group deployments especially in Africa, and, most obviously, after Putin’s explicit declaration of his intent, the West could nevertheless watch Russia prepare for the invasion and still believe that it would not happen. Before the invasion would have been the time to arm Ukraine. Instead the West succumbed to a Chamberlain-like logic of self-delusion: if we do nothing, the aggressor will dissipate. The wishful thinking of liberalism is a scourge. It remains to be seen whether the brutality of Russian violence will change that mindset in the foreign policy elite. Optimism is not warranted.
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Is Putin the madman they say? Or is he, to the contrary, somebody who coldly calculates his rational self-interest, in the manner of Thomas Hobbes’s legendary sovereign power or Niccolò Machiavelli’s eponymous prince?
In short, is it surrealism, rooted in deranged psychological fantasy, or Realism, grounded in hardcore political science, that we are up against?
Or could there be an alternative way of looking at it, one less familiar, more specific, grown-up, and intellectually challenging, if also less emotionally reassuring?
Let’s try putting in jeopardy our own “moral clarity” for a change. After all, while every war must perforce seem “needless” to beautiful souls, just as any person in charge of a modern state could be tagged a “killer” by children, nevertheless, military conflict, experience teaches, will not always be so readily averted.
If only for the sake of a diverting thought experiment, let’s examine in a bit more detail some possibilities—in hopes of dispelling a portion of the gloom that engulfs us in these dark times.
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By Gábor T. Rittersporn · Tuesday, March 8, 2022 I was completely wrong when I opined on February 9 that the Russians would not invade Ukraine. I mistakenly took them for more rational than they turned out to be. Mea maxima culpa. For the rest, I was not mistaken at all when I enumerated the reasons that militated against a martial adventure. The course the war took shows that the Russian leadership neglected them or, what is worse, does not read the Telos blog. Here are some obstacles to a successful operation I indicated and the consequences we can see today.
With the exception of the inhabitants of the separatist regions, no one greeted the Russians as liberators. The invaders crossed the border at provinces with a sizable Russian population, at regions where a significant proportion of people claim Russian as their mother tongue, no matter the ethnic group their ancestry happened to belong to. At the 2019 elections, all these regions voted overwhelmingly for current president Volodydmyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish origin, not necessarily an advantage in Eastern Europe. The comedian-turned-war-leader won more than 73 percent of the voices against his rival, billionaire and outgoing president Petro Poroshenko, who can boast Ukrainian forefathers. The Kremlin bosses apparently believed that only ethnic, religious, and linguistic affinities define political allegiances in Ukraine, or they simply did not take the trouble to have a look at the relevant statistics.
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By Telos Press · Friday, July 16, 2021 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Kiran Sridhar about his article “Russia’s Hybrid Warfare Strategy and How to Combat It,” from Telos 193 (Winter 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. Their conversation addressed the ways in which Putin’s Russia, guided by the Gerasimov Doctrine, has mounted an effective asymmetrical challenge against the West through the spread of mendacious information online and in social media, thereby empowering elements of society distrustful of democracy and fomenting conspiratorial thinking; the launching of cyberattacks against the West’s technological infrastructure; and the use hybrid forces that operate at the behest of the Russian government without being directly controlled by it. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 193 are available for purchase in our store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, November 2, 2020 As the world becomes increasingly more focused on the second coronavirus wave and the American elections, Erdoğan’s mercenaries and army will most likely invade Northern Syria again in the coming days and weeks.
Erdoğan knows that no regional or global power will seriously challenge him if he occupies the rest of Northern Syria, also known as Rojava. During the last four years, he has seized every opportunity to execute his neo-Ottoman enterprise. He has openly recruited jihadis and occupied three strategic areas in Rojava. As the Syrian Kurds remain the most stubborn obstacle to his regional expansion southward, he has made his intentions to eliminate the semiautonomous administration in Northern Syria abundantly clear.
The Trump administration has little concern for the situation in Syria. Dismissing the Pentagon officials’ strong advice, Trump has given in to Erdoğan’s demands in Northern Syria more than once. Erdoğan secured Trump’s implicit approval to attack the Syrian Kurds about a year ago, during a dubious phone call between the two leaders. Given that things might change under a Biden administration, it is safe to assume that the opportunistic Erdoğan has already planned a devastating strike to knock out this secular, semiautonomous, multiethnic entity in Rojava.
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