When Angela Merkel took office as Federal Chancellor in 2005, she was more prepared for the challenges on the EU’s eastern border than any other West European head of government. However, Berlin had, already before Merkel’s take over of the chancellorship, sent wrong signals to the new neo-imperial leadership in Moscow by inviting Putin to the Bundestag in 2001 and starting the Nord Stream projects in 2005. Consequential missteps before and after Merkel came to power put German Ostpolitik on the wrong path in the new century. In 2014, there was only a partial correction of the Russia course set by Germany’s 1998-2005 Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Today, politicians, diplomats and experts in Moscow likely wonder what has gotten into the Germans since the annexation of Crimea: Weren’t Russian special rights in the post-Soviet space an unwritten law of post-Cold War Eastern European geopolitics accepted by Berlin?
Since spring 2014, Ukraine suffers from a full-scale war in the Donets Basin (Donbas). For the solution of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation, Western and Ukrainian political analysts, opinion- and policy-makers, civic activists as well as diplomats need to jointly implement an agenda of re-imagination, prioritization, pacification and re-integration. The Donbas conflict should be understood anew, approached […]
Co-written with Kostiantyn Fedorenko After the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a geopolitical gray zone emerged between Western organizations on the one side, and the Russia-dominated space on the other. This model was always fragile, did not help to solve the Transnistria problem in eastern Moldova or the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in […]
Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World and the Associate Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. A leading Iranologist, Dr. Daryaee is the editor of the Name-ye Iran-e Bastan: The International Journal […]
“The worst thing we can do, the most dangerous thing we can do is continue to isolate nations, is to continue to not engage nations. Great powers engage.” Foreign Policy compiled a list of “Ten Hagel Quotes You Need to Know,” including the above quote from a keynote speech at the Israel Policy Forum in New […]
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