By George Friedman
On Sept. 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush addressed Congress. He spoke in the wake of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the weakening of the Soviet Union, and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. He argued that a New World Order was emerging: “A hundred generations have searched [...]

read more....

“China and Russia represent the return of economically successful authoritarian capitalist powers, which have been absent since the defeat of Japan and Germany in 1945,” writes Azar Gat, a national security specialist at Tel Aviv University, in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Ironically, at precisely the moment when America’s military power appears to be at its apex, the [...]

read more....

Vladimir Putin’s appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic “union” of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today’s Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the 1970s. That economy, too, was fueled by then-record [...]

read more....

Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if [...]

read more....

An inside look at the Russian leader’s autocratic regime and his turn away from the West
In 1999, Russian President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, an all-but-unknown former KGB officer, as his successor. Putin imposed a discipline on Russia that had been absent since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and he ushered in the beginnings of prosperity [...]

read more....

Poland is balking at further negotiations with the United States over plans to deploy an anti-ballistic missile shield, prompting Washington to seek out Lithuania, formerly part of the Soviet Union, as a possible location for the interceptors, officials said Wednesday.
Read More…

‘Anxiety’ in Moscow over US-Lithuania missile base talks Financial Times
US talks missile defense with Vilnius [...]

read more....

The nuclear strike codes were kept inside a black vinyl briefcase known as “the Football.” The Football enabled the President to order the obliteration of thousands of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Within seconds of the authentication of a presidential order, missiles would lift off from silos on the plains of [...]

read more....

A new film about Nazi-Soviet links
BEING burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow by nationalist hoodlums must count as a kind of Oscar if you are a Latvian filmmaker whose aim is to expose modern Russia’s blindness to the criminal history of the Soviet Union. The ire of Young Russia’s protest outside the Latvian [...]

read more....

Still, it is worth recalling a time when a little openness flew out of control.
As a correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times in Moscow in the late 1980s, I had a ringside seat to observe the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union under Mr. Gorbachev. The collapse of the Soviet empire and [...]

read more....

Twenty-two years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, work is under way on a colossal new shelter to cover the ruins and deadly radioactive contents of the exploded Soviet-era power plant.
…
The explosion at reactor No. 4 on April 26, 1986 was the world’s worst nuclear accident, spewing radiation over a large swath of the former Soviet [...]

read more....