Stephen J Flanagan

This report assesses China's strategy and diplomacy in the Arctic and the potential implications of Chinese investments and activities there for the regional rules-based order and for regional and transatlantic security. The authors scrutinize Chinese activities that have been problematic in other parts of the world and assess whether they could also arise in the Arctic. The authors also recommend mitigative U.S. actions.

Russia has long used political, military, economic, informational, and clandestine tools against countries in the Black Sea region. In this report, the authors present elements of a Western strategy to counter Russian malign influence and aggression.

The United States has long maintained a strategic partnership with Turkey, a powerful NATO ally, as a central element of U.S. strategy in Eurasia and the Middle East. But Turkey's ties with its neighbors, the United States, and Europe have become strained in recent years. RAND researchers assess key challenges confronting the U.S.-Turkish partnership and advance recommendations to sustain it during what is likely to be a turbulent decade ahead.

Since 2001, the United States has endured a tumultuous period, one dominated by the 9/11 attacks and all that has followed: the war on terrorism, the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, looming confrontations with known or suspected proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, and episodic explosions of mass violence in chronically unstable regions. In this second half of the decade, these and related strategic challenges will test the skill, tenacity, and imagination of the current and the next U.S. administration and the American public. How well these challenges are managed then, or mastered, will greatly influence whether future historians look back upon this decade as a dangerous passage toward a more peaceful, globally connected order or as a descending path into an ever more fragmented, violent world.This volume explores seven looming, as yet unmastered strategic challenges facing the United States. Each chapter tackles one of the following challenges: tackling global terrorism, stopping WMD proliferation, undertaking defense transformation, protecting the homeland, strengthening relations with allies and partners, engaging other major powers, and defusing conflicts in unstable regions. Each chapter takes a similar approach: defining the problem at hand (i.e., a short discussion of relevant trends); explicating current U.S. efforts to master the challenge (i.e., U.S. objectives, methods, degree of success or setbacks); and analyzing looming choices that U.S. policymakers will face in the next decade and, as appropriate, the consequences of alternative courses of action. Strategic Challenges capitalizes on the great regional and topical expertise of the INSS professional research staff to present an authoritative overview of the global strategic environment facing the United States.

Since 2001, the United States has endured a tumultuous period, one dominated by the 9/11 attacks and all that has followed: the war on terrorism, the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, looming confrontations with known or suspected proliferators of weapons of mass destruction, and episodic explosions of mass violence in chronically unstable regions. In this second half of the decade, these and related strategic challenges will test the skill, tenacity, and imagination of the current and the next U.S. administration and the American public. How well these challenges are managed then, or mastered, will greatly influence whether future historians look back upon this decade as a dangerous passage toward a more peaceful, globally connected order or as a descending path into an ever more fragmented, violent world.This volume explores seven looming, as yet unmastered strategic challenges facing the United States. Each chapter tackles one of the following challenges: tackling global terrorism, stopping WMD proliferation, undertaking defense transformation, protecting the homeland, strengthening relations with allies and partners, engaging other major powers, and defusing conflicts in unstable regions. Each chapter takes a similar approach: defining the problem at hand (i.e., a short discussion of relevant trends); explicating current U.S. efforts to master the challenge (i.e., U.S. objectives, methods, degree of success or setbacks); and analyzing looming choices that U.S. policymakers will face in the next decade and, as appropriate, the consequences of alternative courses of action. Strategic Challenges capitalizes on the great regional and topical expertise of the INSS professional research staff to present an authoritative overview of the global strategic environment facing the United States.

A review of the full range of recent official and non-official schemes for improving NATO's conventional posture, from exploitation of emerging technologies to non-provocative defences, in the light of prevailing military, political, economic and demographic trends.