International Relations
Chapter 4 investigates how Russia’s involvement in the Arab Spring has influenced its role in a changing international order and how the contest over power and norms has become a defining feature of its current relations with the West. We examine how Russia’s cultural and historical beliefs and distinctive vision of the international system of sovereign states are reflected in its attitudes to international law, often in opposition to Western approaches. Drawing on the work of leading international relations and legal scholars as well as Russian presidential and foreign ministry documents, we offer a critical analysis of how Russia articulates its normative position on issues of sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, the use of force and responsible protection of populations in order to defend the legality and moral rightness of its policies in the context of its military intervention in Syria, and how Russia justifies its policies on humanitarian aid. We conclude by highlighting, first, how Russia’s search for international legitimacy in terms of rule-making is bound up with its need to secure its international status, consistent with its ideas of the emergence of a multipolar world, and how it exerts diplomatic power to make strategic use of normative arguments in pursuit of its wider political and security aims in challenging the Western-led ‘rules-based’ international order; and second, how Russia is making a decisive shift away from engagement with the West over liberal approaches to responsible protection norms and the provision of humanitarian assistance.
Chapter 6 offers an empirical assessment of Russia’s economic and security interests in the MENA states and how they have shaped specific aspects of its military and trade policies. Drawing on defence/economic data from authoritative sources, we analyse Russia’s deployment of military power in the Syria conflict, assessing to what extent this reflects a militarisation of Russia’s broader security policy aimed at maximising its geostrategic influence; we then examine Russia’s trade interests and ask whether the MENA region represents a priority in its foreign economic policy. We challenge the common Western notion of a ‘resurgent’ Russia that seeks to entrench its geopolitical position in the MENA region by committing expeditionary forces for power projection, in competition with other external states; we argue that, while the limited Syria intervention had a substantive impact on Russia’s military planning and while Moscow’s economic and security interests underpin a more pronounced presence in the wider region, there are substantive external and domestic constraints on Russia’s foreign policy ambitions deriving from both the unstable security environment and Russia’s own limited resources. Finally, we consider how Russia’s MENA strategy is encompassed within its broader foreign policy thinking and practice and how the Putin leadership marshals its resources to achieve its objectives. We conclude that, though a more influential future role in MENA affairs cannot be ruled out, the limited structural power at Russia’s disposal is out of proportion to the longer-term political-military and economic investment that a commanding presence in a conflict-prone region would require.
The book presents a detailed analysis of Russia’s involvement in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the turbulent period since the Arab uprisings in 2011. It examines the key policy challenges faced by Russia in the MENA region, in the context both of its own domestic politics and of a changing international system, offering a conceptually rich study that reflects the profound complexity of the evolution of Russian foreign policy over the last decade. The book incorporates chapters on Russia’s involvement in MENA politics and its engagement with other key actors external to the region; Russia’s political and military involvement in the Syrian civil war; the domestic sources of its foreign policymaking in the MENA region; its contest with the Western powers over international norms; its response to the challenge posed by Islamist extremism in the MENA region, including the return of foreign fighters to Russia’s North Caucasus; and its political-military and economic interests in the MENA region. The concluding chapter offers some key insights into Russia’s MENA strategy and analyses the implications of its involvement there for its broader foreign policy, not least its war with Ukraine. The book responds to the surge of interest in Russia’s more assertive strategy following its military campaigns in Syria and Ukraine, challenging arguments expressed in the existing literature while offering an original and vivid account of Russian thinking and decision-making since the inception of the Arab Spring.
Despite the failures of precision during the Second World War, the ambition continued to drive early American nuclear strategy. H.H Arnold rose to become the first head of a new independent US Air Force and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Despite President Truman’s attempts at international control of atomic energy, Arnold used his power to push for American nuclear strategy to be based on the long-held ambition for precision. To make this ambition a realistic possibility, he invested in technical and strategic research to make it an achievable and deployable concept.
Thanks, in part, to RAND, the Kennedy administration, Albert Wohlstetter, and advances in new weapons technologies, the ambition to achieve ‘pinpoint’ precision returned to the forefront of American warfare. From Desert Storm to Kosovo, the War on Terror to modern drone warfare, the Epilogue explains how the century-long pursuit for precision continues to impact warfare today. Yet there is a warning. As Albert Wohlstetter argued in 1988 – ‘high-tech is not an American monopoly’ – and precision technologies are now spreading around the world to a record number of hostile state and non-state actors. What can the history of precision teach us about the global proliferation of precision technologies and the future of precision threats?
After years of development and testing during the 1920s and 1930s, the time to implement precision bombing came with the advent of the Second World War. But despite the best attempts of people like Arnold, Spaatz, and Hansell to evolve and amend precision strategies to meet the demands of the conflict, in the cold hard realities of war precision was an illusory and at times counterproductive ambition. It would end with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Chapter 1 takes readers back to the brutality of the First World War. It is revealed how public and political demands to avoid the horrors of trench warfare, and the vast cost to life, led early American airpower thinkers to seek alternative practices of war. Colonel Edgar S. Gorrell and Brigadier-General William ‘Billy’ Mitchell were two ‘precision pioneers’ who devised the novel ambition to achieve precision in the bombardment of the enemy while reducing the risk to American and civilian life. This idea would come to dominate American military airpower during the inter-war years and would be handed down to a new generation of American airpower thinkers – such as H.H. Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and Hayward Hansell – who would implement the ambition during the Second World War.
War historian and drone expert, James Patton Rogers, takes readers on a journey through the past, present, and future of American warfare. By highlighting the innovative thinkers of the First World War, the experimental technologies of the Second World War, and the surprising Cold War nuclear strategies that drove the ambition for precision airpower, this book explains how precision strategies and weapons (such as drones and precision-guided missiles) became the dominant feature of war that they are today.
Why attempt to achieve precision in warfare? The Prologue explains what precision is and why it has been ardently pursued by a select group of US military thinkers and defence intellectuals for well over a hundred years. Yet where are the gaps in this history? And what can the history of precision tell us about the rise of precision weapons and drone warfare today?
From 1950 onwards, American nuclear strategy took a turn from the long-held ambition to achieve precision bombardment and adopted General Curtis LeMay’s destroy everything mantra. Targeting lists and proposed bomb deployment numbers quickly increased from the tens to the hundreds and into the thousands. Subsequently, by 1960/61 and the acceptance of Single Integrated Operational Plan 62 (SIOP-62) the American military was left in a situation where, if war was to break out (or was to be perceived to be breaking out), the United States would be on a default footing to launch a pre-emptive atomic strike which would destroy the Soviet Union and devastate its satellite states many times over.