Blog

by Karim Elkady

The United States does not have a strategy for containing Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the Middle East. During his last trip to Baghdad, on March 7, 2018, Iranian Vice-President Es’hagh Jahangiri promised the Iraqi government a USD 3 billion credit line from the Islamic Republic of Iran to help finance Iraq’s reconstruction efforts. He also expressed Iran’s desire to improve connectivity with Iraq through a 30-km railroad and a bridge to the Iranian highway system. Surprisingly, the United States did not offer Iraq any financial support at Iraq’s Donors Conference that took place in February in Kuwait. Other than a few pledges from the Gulf States, the international community offered only minimal financial support to the Iraqi government.

By Margarita Konaev and Burak Kadercan

From Mosul to Aleppo to Sana’a, a growing proportion of the world’s most violent conflicts are being fought in cities, and an overwhelming percentage of people killed in urban warfare are civilians. Unfortunately, trends in global urbanization and patterns of global armed conflict suggest that future wars will increasingly be fought in urban areas, at a tremendously high cost to the civilians living there. As such, military decision-makers and humanitarian agencies are increasingly interested in gaining a better understanding of the causes, conduct, and consequences of urban warfare.

By Xiaohan (Shirley) Wang

On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the conference’s panel on military intervention.

On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the conference’s panel on the arms trade.

by Denise Looi

On November 10-11, the Center for Strategic Studies co-sponsored the fourth annual Civil-Military Relations Conference, organized by ALLIES (The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services), a Tufts University undergraduate student organization. The student organizers of the conference provided the following summary of the keynote address.

This year’s keynote speaker was Douglas Farah, a senior associate with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a senior visiting fellow at National Defense University’s Center for Complex Operations. He is an expert on transnational criminal organizations, insurgencies, ungoverned spaces, illicit money flows, and resource exploitation in Latin America, and has written extensively about the region.

Xiaodon Liang

The distinction between preemptive and preventive war, left fuzzy after the last major debate before the Iraq War, is relevant again. The public discourse, however, has featured ambiguities in vocabulary that threaten to muddle our understanding of military options and their lawfulness.

A critical ambiguity arises from differences in how the terms “preemption” and “prevention” have been used in the separate but overlapping nonproliferation and public international law literatures. Adding to the confusion, there are also general strategic meanings to the two words that security studies analysts and scholars have used for generations.

Rizwan Ladha

On November 15, the Center for Strategic Studies hosted Laura S.H. Holgate, the former U.S. Representative to the Vienna Office of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to give a talk to students and CSS faculty and fellows at The Fletcher School on her experience in preventing global threats from weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Zoltan Feher

On October 23, the Center for Strategic Studies hosted two high-level visitors from Israel, former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Intelligence and Strategic Affairs Dan Meridor, for a conversation with the Center’s team of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD fellows.

by Zoltan Feher

The 2nd Research & Policy Seminar of the Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies featured our first guest speaker, Peter Dombrowski, Professor of Strategy in the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the Naval War College. Dombrowski presented his latest working paper, “Transoceanic Control: Rethinking American Strategy,” which aims to provide a radically new way of thinking about maritime and naval strategy and, by extension, U.S. grand strategy.

Polina Beliakova

The August events in Charlottesville put the current U.S. government to the test of matching words to images. A deadly car-ramming perpetrated by a young white supremacist against the opponents of a torch-bearing rally, involving Nazi symbols and the chanting of anti-Semitic and racist slogans, killed one and wounded 35 people. President Donald J. Trump’s ambiguous rhetoric in response to these events made the recurring question of the definition of terrorism relevant again: Why do high government officials label some violent events acts of domestic terrorism while labeling other attacks that could have easily passed a duck-test (“does it look like a duck”) differently?