On June 26, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, beginning an ugly war that resulted in more than a million casualties, and demonstrated to even the most optimistic that a Cold War was seriously underway. That was just two weeks after I got my master’s degree from Stanford, so it is no exaggeration to say that I am a child of the Cold War.
Long-haul truckers from the North Caucasus to Western Siberia began a protest against a new GPS-based federal road tax on November 11. Independent truckers formed slow-moving convoys that caused kilometer-long traffic jams throughout the affected regions.
Over at EJIL: Talk!, the estimable Marko Milanovic notes what he describes as a "hugely important" surveillance opinion in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights.
"We can not succumb to fear", Obama said, standing alongside French President Francois Hollande after they met at the White House to discuss the anti-ISIS mission.
The downing of a Russian jet by NATO ally Turkey on its Syrian border two weeks ago may have resulted in the beginning of a significant, comprehensive Russian policy shift toward Turkey, and it is likely that the estrangement between the two countries will continue even if the tension over the jet is eased.
Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia's provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey's downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace.
Russia just got Montenegro admitted to NATO. At the meeting of its foreign ministers on December 1, the NATO alliance agreed to extend an invitation of membership to a country with which it was at war in 1999.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in the Syrian conflict has been welcomed by some as a moment for the Kremlin to “come in from the cold.” Russia’s conflict with the Islamic State, the argument goes, has aligned the country’s interests with those of the West. Even Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane does not seem not to have deflated this optimism.
The international community recently took an important step toward establishing global norms of behavior in cyberspace with the publication of the UN’s outcome report from its 2014/2015 Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Information Security.
