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Russia, US to cooperate on fighting Islamic State: Moscow
Sep 29, 2015, AFP
“Putin offered the West a new Grand Bargain — a major deal and a way to forget about the current confrontation, ” said political analyst Lilia Shevtsova.

US, World Powers to Focus on Refugee Crisis at UNGA
Sep. 27, 2015, Voice of America
“We can think of other countries taking in greater numbers of asylum seekers,” said Matteo Garavoglia, a Brookings Institution foreign policy analyst.

Former NATO Secretary General: “I’m Sick of Hungary”
Sep. 24, 2015, Alfahir
Javier Solana believes that the EU institutions provide appropriate response to the refugee crisis, Member States did not. He criticized Orban, who alleged that said Hungary is willing to accept only the Christians, even though Pope Francis urged all Europeans to accommodate families in the parish.

White House Says President Obama and Vladimir Putin Will Meet Next Week
Sep 24, 2015, New York Times
It’s a tough one for Obama,” said Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence officer on Russia who is now at the Brookings Institution. “He has to meet with him given the circumstances. But it’s not very clear what we’re going to get out of it. The Russians have made their position crystal clear: They want to have a central say about what happens.”

Migrant Crisis Strains European Union’s Schengen Agreement
Sep 22, 2015, WEKU
“Well, I think that Schengen is being called into question by European member states putting up barbed-wire fences, yes. But that doesn’t mean an international treaty is – has become abrogated. It takes a little more than that. Maybe this is unduly optimistic of me, but I’m hoping that we can roll this back if we provide for a more manageable and equitable system.” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a fellow at Brookings Institution, the US think-tank.

Can Military Talks Bridge U.S.-Russia Diplomatic Divide on Syria?
Sep 21, 2015, World Political Review
As Pavel Baev and Jeremy Shapiro have noted, the much-hyped Russian military still lacks the capacities to sustain even a combat brigade in Syria. It could mount an air campaign against Assad’s opponents, but in that event, “the main risks would come not from enemy fire but from technical failures, as the Russian Air Force has a sad track record of accidents recently.”

US-Russia: What To Expect From Syria Talks
Sep 18, 2015, International Business Times
Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said talks were worth having at this moment despite opposing views on Assad. “They are going to have to overcome big obstacles, one of which is what is the place of Assad in all of this,” said Pifer. He believes the Russian government has supported the Assad regime for several years because he remained a Russian ally and because Russia worries about who would step in to replace him if he is removed from power. It remained unclear if the U.S. would be willing to keep Assad in power for the short term, a proposal put forth by the U.K.

Could China be Europe’s saviour?
Sep 18, 2015, World Finance
By Jules Gray
Shortly after Li Keqiang’s trip to Europe, US think tank the Brookings Institution published a report explaining why China was looking towards Europe for investment opportunities. The authors of the report, Jonathan D Pollack and Philippe Le Corre, wrote that part of the reason for China’s interest in Europe was to remind other countries, and in particular the US, that it had other potential partners in global trade.

Syria, Europe, and the Boy on the Beach
September 3, 2015, The Atlantic
According to Kemal Kirişci, the European Union has not yet developed a “credible resettlement program that Syrian refugees would have heard, or picked up through the grapevine,” he said. “And had there been such a program I think refugees would have thought twice, three times, before presenting themselves to the unscrupulous human smugglers.”

Washington Forum du 3 septembre 2015 : la crise des migrants en Europe
September 3, 2015, Voaafrique 
Il y a la traversée meurtrière de la Méditerranée et désormais le périple périlleux des Balkans. Les dernières arrivées de l’Afrique et du Maghreb battent tous les records. Les tragédies humaines également – mais que fait l’Europe ? Et quid de l’Union africaine ? Jacques Aristide reçoit le consultant international Athanase Karayenga ; le juriste et écrivain Thierry Baudet ; et le spécialiste des migrations Kemal Kirişci, de la Brookings Institution.

The Importance of Being There: A First-Hand Look at the Many Faces of the Pro-Turkey Lobby in DC
August 20, 2015, Asbarez
On Wednesday, July 15th, the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy think tank based in Washington, DC, hosted an event titled “Considerations and Constraints for U.S., EU, and Turkish Engagement in the South Caucasus”. The event consisted of a panel of discussants to examine and review one of their own recent publications, “Retracing the Caucasian Circle” as a part of the organization’s Turkey Project Policy Paper Series. The program, which began in 2004, is prepared with the generous support of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TUSIAD), with Kemal Kirisci serving as the director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project and specifically as the TUSIAD Senior Fellow – but more about that later. Panelists included Director of the Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe, Fiona Hill, who is a co-author of the report.

Toilettes, RTT, campings : le plan d’attaque de la Chine pour doper son économie 
August 12, 2015, Le Figaro
By Loic Besson
«Le tourisme occidental en Chine a considérablement baissé par rapport aux années 80-90 (…) La mise en exergue de la puissance chinoise ces quinze dernières années, avec ses grands immeubles et ses usines, a plutôt fait fuir les touristes étrangers», explique Philippe Le Corre, spécialiste de la Chine.
L’économie chinoise a désormais besoin de sortir de son schéma traditionnel qui est celui de «l’usine du monde». «Le pays a un vrai travail à faire sur son image», note le chercheur à l’IRIS. Les autorités tentent d’améliorer son soft-power à travers la culture, les centres de langue, les médias. Ce fut le cas en 2008 lorsque Pékin a accueilli les Jeux Olympiques. Le tourisme pourrait-il être suffisant pour sauver l’économie chinoise? «Pas vraiment», estime un expert pour qui, malgré les efforts, «le tourisme représentera au mieux 0,1% du PIB et ça s’arrêtera là».

Dealing with Putin’s Strategic Incompetence 
August 12, 2015, War on the Rocks
By Joshua Rovner
According to Steven Pifer, who worked on the State Department’s NATO desk in the 1980s, “placing nuclear weapons on Russia’s doorstep would be a hugely provocative act. Many allies would regard it as borderline reckless.”

Russia, U.S. Bicker Over Missile Defense Shield After Iran Agreement 
August 10, 2015, The Moscow Times
By Matthew Bodner
But, in the case of the 2009 promise, “Mr. Lavrov misquoted President Obama and almost certainly knows it,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

Tide of humanity that threatens to overwhelm EU’s ability to respond 
August 8, 2015, Irish Independence
By Mary Fitzgerald
In a recent commentary, former EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana argued that Europe had a historical obligation to shoulder more of the burden.
“Europe should take the opportunity to respond to today’s refugee crisis as it would have liked the world to respond to its suffering – and to prove that the EU’s value extends far beyond its borders,” he said.

Making waves, if not ruling them 
August 7, 2015, Deccan Herald
According to Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, most of the economic benefits from Sino-Russian cooperation are still far off. Talks on a pipeline to take Russian natural gas to China foundered this week. In China, plans for an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a development body that excludes the US, have taken priority over any BRICS project.

Pentagon: Team Obama Is ‘Too Timid’ on Putin 
August 6, 2015, The Daily Beast 
By Nancy A. Youssef and Noah Shachtman
“Most assumed that the means of Russian pressure on Ukraine would be economic and perhaps an energy cutoff,” not military action, Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast.

Russia Is Running Out of Options in Ukraine 
August 5, 2015, Defense One
By Brian Whitmore
“It’s a mechanism to distract and destabilize the government in Kiev,” Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me recently. “They can ratchet pressure up or ratchet it down in eastern Ukraine to cause problems for the government in Kiev.”

Who’s Afraid of NATO Enlargement? 
August 5, 2015, Carnegie Europe
By Judy Dempsey
Enlargement of NATO eastward during the late 1990s and the 2000s was not a given. Some of the big Western members didn’t want to antagonize Russia. But Javier Solana, who was the alliance’s secretary general from 1995 to 1999, went out of his way to reassure the Kremlin that NATO expansion posed no threat to Russia’s security.

Iran deal a real win-win 
August 4, 2015, Trend News Agency
By Dalga Khatinoglu
“The agreement is good for both sides. It provides the international community assurance that, at least for the next 10-15 years, Iran’s nuclear program will remain peaceful and not pursue a nuclear weapon,” Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe as well as the director of Brookings’ Arms Control Initiative, told Trend August 4.

Style Could Win Out Over Substance on Iran Nuclear Deal 
August 3, 2015, Geopolitical Monitor
By Zachary Fillingham
The deal should not be viewed as a new strategic partnership, or alliance, or any kind of close association between the United States and Iran. Rather it should be viewed simply as the harbinger of a basic level of bilateral cooperation to achieve specific, shared goals in the region, and by establishing this cooperation it’s possible that the United States might one day free itself from its strategic overreliance on Saudi Arabia. In the words of Brookings’ Jeremy Shapiro, pointed out in another editorial we carried last week, this is not about Washington getting into bed with Iran, but rather about it getting out of bed with Saudi Arabia. Herein lies one of the underlying thrusts of the Iran nuclear deal. It looks 20 years into the future and asks why US interests in the Middle East should be held prisoner to the Kingdom when there’s much more to be gained from a flexible triangular alignment.

Demokratisches Duell in Washington 
August 3, 2015, DW 
By Gero Schliess
Constanze Stelzenmüller von der Organisation “Brookings Institution” verweist noch auf ein anderes Defizit: Eine ernsthafte Präsidentschaftskandidatur setze in den USA voraus, dass man sich ein Netzwerk von Geldgebern und Unterstützern organisiert hat.

East Ukraine War: Donbas Self-Rule Decision Will Not Bring Peace, Says Top US Ambassador 
July 31, 2015, International Business Times
By Christopher Harress
Constitutional changes approved Friday by Ukraine’s highest court to help end the war in Donbass are unlikely to end hostilities between Russian-backed rebels and Ukrainian troops, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said. The legal changes, which still must get approval from the parliament in Kiev, seek to allow some degree of self-rule for the rebels — who are fighting for autonomy in the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk — in exchange for peace across both regions.

Experts, Politicians Speak In Favor Of Preserving US-Russian INF Treaty – Analysis 
July 31, 2015, Eurasia Review
“First of all, to go back and look at 1987, the reasons that the United States and the Soviet Union decided to sign the Treaty is they concluded that having intermediate-range ground-launched cruise and ground-launched ballistic missiles were not in their security interests. If the Russia were to abandon the treaty, and face a possibility that the American missiles return to Europe: I don’t think that would be in the Russian interests, just as I don’t think the possibility of Russian missiles targeting American allies in Europe and Asia is in the US interests,” said Steven Pifer, former US Ambassador to Ukraine.

Why the Iran deal is so huge for Obama’s legacy 
July 31, 2015, Washington Post
By Amber Phillips
From the moment he took office, the Obama doctrine — to the extent that one exists — basically boiled down to this: Diplomacy with so-called enemy countries can be effective, said Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy fellow at Brookings Institute and former State Department aide.

Turkey military locked in fight with PKK militants amid political concerns
July 31, 2015, Shanghai Daily
Omer Taspinar, a Turkish expert at Brookings Institution, also believed that Erdogan is betting that any attack from the PKK or any other group like IS “will create a national security emergency that will strengthen his case for the need of a stronger government and leadership.”

Should we be retracing the Caucasian (chalk) circle anew?
July 28, 2015, Hurriyet DailyNews
“Retracing the Caucasian Circle: Considerations and Constraints for the U.S., EU, and Turkish Engagement in the South Caucasus” is the title of a recent Brookings Institute report presented publicly in Washington on July 15. The report was prepared by the “Center on the United States and Europe” (CUSE) of Brookings, based on its Turkey Project launched in 2004. In collaboration with the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSIAD), Brookings instituted a U.S.-Turkey forum. The recently launched report belongs to the Turkey Policy Paper Series published in this context.

Russia Takes Turkmenistan To Court Over the Price of Gas
July 28, 2015, The Diplomat
By Catherine Putz
Implementation was always going to be the difficult part–even after a decade of negotiations to even get to a deal. As Lilia Shevtsova of the Brookings Institution wrote recently, Beijing drove a hard bargain for Moscow: Russia is paying for the construction and China isn’t interested in paying as much as Europe, if and when the pipeline is completed.

Kirişçi: İstikrar şart!
July 25, 2015, Yeni Akit
Bu ve merak edilen tüm soruları Washington’un önde gelen düşünce kuruluşlarından Brookings Enstitüsü Türkiye Programı Direktörü Kemal Kirişçi Amerika’nın Sesi’ne değerlendirdi. Suruç saldırısı ve sınırda yaşanan gelişmelerin süreci hızlandırdığını ancak tek nedeni olmadığını savunan Kirişçi, son gelişmelerden ‘Türkiye’nin savaşa girdiği sonucu’ çıkarmanın hatalı olacağı görüşünde.

Kerry returns to a Senate more skeptical of nuclear deals than the one he left
July 23, 2015, The Washington Post
By Karoun Demirjian
“For arms control, the administration doesn’t have a Sam Nunn and a Dick Lugar in the Senate anymore,” said Steven Pifer, a former Ukraine ambassador and director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, in reference to Lugar and the former Democratic senator from Georgia with whom he co-authored a landmark 1991 arms control law. “When you look at both sides, Democrat and Republican, there’s no one like them.”

Patriot Park, Vladimir Putin’s ‘Military Disneyland,’ caters to Russia’s martial mood
July 22, 2015, The Washington Times
By Marc Bennetts
“Russia does not have the funds for a new cycle of militarization,” said Lilia Shevtsova, a leading Russian political analyst. “It needs to pay pensions and carry out Putin’s social program from a budget of $430 billion. “We are in a very difficult moment,” she said. “The authorities have returned to military patriotism, but this is likely that last sigh, the agonies of militarism. The country cannot militarize, and it cannot fight a constant battle with the whole world.”

Russia’s Stake in Iran Nuclear Deal
July 18, 2015, Voice of America
By Jonas Bernstein
Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, said, “At the end of the day, Russia does not want to see Iran with nuclear weapons. So they basically share with the other P5 nations and Germany the interest in trying to freeze Iran’s nuclear program,” Pifer said.

Experter: Putin har fastnat i sin egen fälla
July 17, 2015, DN.se
By Mikael Holmström
De något överraskande slutsatserna drar två erkända Rysslandsexperter oberoende av varandra. Ryskan Lilia Sjevtsova som är verksam vid tankesmedjan Brookings Institution i Washington säger till DN att Putin förfördes av segerns sötma efter inmarschen på Krim i februari 2014. “Efter Krim gick Putin i en fälla. Han blev segrare och hans popularitet hemma steg raketartat. Inför Ukrainas svaghet och västs obeslutsamhet tänkte han: ”Varför inte också ta sydöstra Ukraina?” Men han gjorde fyra missbedömningar: Att Tyskland skulle svälja det och att Obama var en patetisk vekling. Putin förutsåg inte heller de ekonomiska problemen för Ryssland och trodde inte att Ukraina skulle göra motstånd,” säger Lilia Sjevtsova.

South Caucasus: Stronger US Presence Needed, Says Panel
July 16, 2015, NewsMax
By Zach Ewell
Primed by the report “Retracing the Caucasian Circle” and an agenda to discuss U.S., European Union, and Turkish relations with the South Caucasus, the panel included the report’s author, Fiona Hill, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe. “We have to recognize that the South Caucasus is an extremely complex region,” said Hill. “On a very superficial level Georgia describes itself as western oriented, [while] Azerbaijan talks about being unaligned with very strong economic ties to Europe under the European Union, [and] Armenia describing itself as closely tied to Russia.”

Putin Flexes Diplomatic Muscle on Iran
July 15, 2015, The New York Times
By David Herszenhorn and Steven Lee Myers
Although the prolonged negotiations over Iran involved multiple nations, including Russia, the final push to complete the accord largely came down to the United States and Iran, with Mr. Putin’s envoys serving as “secondary players,” as one analyst, Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution, put it. … “Russia has been rather ambivalent about striking the deal, not because it is worried about the Iranian nuclear program, but because it is worried about the Iranian oil,” said Pavel K. Baev.

Merkel’s tough tactics prompt criticism in Germany and abroad
July 15, 2015, FT
By Stefan Wagstyl
Even politically neutral German analysts are concerned about the damage that Berlin’s unaccustomed toughness has done to its reputation in Europe. “I am quite appalled at the intensity of the anger,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a fellow at Brookings Institution, the US think-tank. “We have to do better than this. We are talking [to our European partners] like we are talking to our own backbenchers.” Of particular concern is the harm to the Franco-German relationship, the EU’s axis, with a vivid gap emerging between Ms Merkel’s push for firm rules and French president François Hollande’s calls for solidarity.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 pitch: Obama, but better
July 14, 2015, POLITICO
By Glenn Thrush
Yet, as her support of the Iran deal revealed, she is also intent on portraying a future Clinton presidency as less an Obama third term than Obama Plus — with a touch of her I’m-wiser-and-tougher-than-him 2008 primary message. “She’s going to basically support his policies but imply without saying so that she’s going to be tougher,” said Brookings Institution fellow Jeremy Shapiro, who served as a special adviser to the Clinton State Department on Europe and Asia policy.

Germans lament diplomatic ‘disaster’ in Greece talks
July 14, 2015, AFP
By Deborah Cole
“We have squandered an enormous degree of likeability with a communications disaster,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a German-born fellow at the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution. Just two years ago, a BBC survey pronounced Germany to be the world’s most popular country, with 59 percent of people surveyed around the globe seeing it favourably. In the meantime, Germany’s status as an economic powerhouse, gentle diplomatic giant and soccer World Cup champion projected an image of success, a social conscience and even coolness a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Planet Politics: Germany Takes The Lead
July 13, 2015, Huffington Post 
By Howard Fineman
“It’s an inflection point, a big change,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama administration official who now studies European affairs at the Brookings Institution. “Germany has preferred to keep a low profile when it can.” It no longer can, especially since its hard-line stance on fiscal policy drove it to insist on taking the lead in this case. Even more remarkable than the talk was the action, said Shapiro. Despite a lot of chatter about how France was crucial in the last hours of the negotiations, and how other EU nations were on board, Germany was clearly in the lead at the end.

Why Did Russia Veto Recognizing Srebrenica as a Genocide?
July 9, 2015, Foreign Policy
By Reid Standish
Under Putin, and especially since the Ukraine crisis one year ago, Russia has aimed to roll back Western influence in the Balkans, according to Richard Kauzlarich, a former U.S. ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Moscow believes the current order in the Balkans was formed at a time when Russia was down and the West took advantage of that weakness.” Given the extreme low that Russia’s relations with the West have fallen to, denying recognition of Srebrenica as a genocide is a small move in the wider standoff between Moscow and its adversaries in Brussels and Washington.

Russia Is Now Vulnerable to Surprise Nuclear Attack
July 9, 2015, Vice News
By Ezra Kaplan
“If you are going to do a first strike, you want be able to take out as much of the Russian nuclear force as you can so that you reduce the prospects of retaliation,”Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told VICE News. “Nobody has the capability to execute that.” It’s also highly unlikely that the US would be willing to make the first move against the former Soviet republic. “I can conceive of no circumstance in which the United States would launch a ‘bolt from the blue’ first strike on Russia — not gonna happen,” Pifer said. The only way an American president would launch a nuclear attack, he says, would be in retaliation to another country’s strike.

From Greece To France To China, Nationalism Is Back In A Big Way
June 30, 2015, The Huffington Post
By Howard Fineman
“The ravages of globalization have made national identity that much more important,” said Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution, who previously worked in the Obama State Department. “Since World War II people have searched, nobly, for structures that would bring peace and prosperity to the world. In some ways they succeeded. But nationalism is the most powerful force in modern human affairs,” Shapiro continued. “And that is clear in Europe and elsewhere once again.”

Turkey’s Political Scene Post-Election (Part 1): The AKP-CHP Option
June 22, 2015, The Washington Institute
Under a CHP foreign minister, Turkey would try to pivot back to its traditional foreign policy partners, including NATO and the European Union. Kemal Kirisci of the Brookings Institution likens Turkey’s potential shift to a giant tanker slowly changing course. Given an AKP-led Turkey’s total preoccupation with the Middle East since 2002, a reorientation to Europe and NATO would be gradual and would require support from Turkey’s allies in Brussels and Washington.

Ces étrangers qui achètent de vieux clubs français
June 21, 2015, LeJDD
“Un club est un symbole régional dont les supporters se sentent propriétaires et les Chinois ne sont pas dans une démarche empathique”, avance le chercheur Philippe Le Corre, auteur de L’offensive chinoise en Europe (Fayard). Début avril, Wing-Sang Li a développé l’idée d’une continuité en s’appuyant “sur ce qui fonctionne bien”.

U.S.-Russia military tit for tat raises fears of greater conflict
June 19, 2015, CNN
By Jeremy Diamond and Greg Botelho
“Given the tempo of Russian military operations over the last year,” said Steven Pifer of the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, “you have more interactions, more possibilities for things to go wrong.”

U.S. Readying Plan to Put Tanks on Putin’s Doorstep
June 14, 2015, Bloomberg
By David Lerman and Marta Waldoch
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in the Clinton administration, said stationing equipment on the terrain of NATO’s newer members, which include most of eastern Europe and the Baltics, would be useful. “It puts down a marker that the United States is prepared to defend NATO territory,” said Pifer, a career diplomat who is now an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It makes sense to deploy some American hard power in that part of NATO territory. If there is a crisis, you would only have to move people,” not equipment, he said.

Why Can’t Obama Get Along With Congress?
June 12, 2015, National Journal 
By George E. Condon Jr.
Jeremy Shapiro, a senior adviser in the State Department in Obama’s first term, said Europe’s leaders are also watching intently because a defeat here would doom any proposed broader trade deal with that continent. A loss, he said, “would be a disaster for the president’s trade agenda and for his foreign policy agenda in the second term.”

How Azerbaijan and Its Lobbyists Spin Congress
June 11, 2015, Foreign Policy
By Ilya Lozovsky
In December 2014, the head of Aliyev’s administration penned a vicious (and distinctly Putin-esque) anti-American screed, accusing Washington of fomenting revolution under the pretext of promoting democracy. This, says former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Richard Kauzlarich, was meant as a deliberate message: “You need us more than we need you.” The letter has been accompanied by a relentless anti-American campaign in the state-run media, a series of hostile statements by senior officials, and crackdowns on organizations funded by the U.S. government, like Radio Free Europe.

Kirişçi: “Seçmen Erdoğan’ı Cezalandırdı”
June 11, 2015, Voice of America
By Aysegul Smith
Merkezi Washington’da bulunan Brookings Enstitüsü Türkiye Projesi Direktörü Kemal Kirişçi seçim sonuçlarını değerlendiren yazısında, Türk seçmeninin Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi AKP’ye ve özellikle de Cumhurbaşkanı Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’a sert bir mesaj verdiğini belirtiyor. Kirişçi, demokratik değerleri ve temel özgürlükleri hiçe sayan bir yönetim tarzı benimseyen Erdoğan’ın “kibirli” tavırlarından yorulan halkın AKP’ye sandıkta bir ders verdiğini vurguluyor.

Putin’s Calculated Revival of the Russian Orthodox Church
June 9, 2015, The Fiscal Times
By Rob Garver
Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of several books on Russia, called it “Carefully crafted but perfect for this climate.” Putin’s public religiosity should be seen as a sort of “construct” said Gaddy. Many of the stories are likely based in truth, but at the same time, are being used to remind the Russian people of Putin’s historical vision of a greater Russia with roots that extend far beyond its recent Communist past. “One of his hallmarks is the way [Putin] rewrites history,” said Gaddy.

Jeb Bush embarks on Europe trip ahead of campaign launch
June 8, 2015, MSNBC
By Benjy Sarlin
“It seems to me the downsides are bigger than the upsides,” Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, told MSNBC. “Gaffes are so easy to make because it’s so difficult to understand the nuances of foreign audiences for people who have spent all their time concentrating on U.S. politics.”

Russia’s Ukrainian Retreat
June 8, 2015, Newsweek
By Owen Matthews
Russian-speaking Dnipropetrovsk has supplied two of the fiercest volunteer battalions to the front line, Dnipro-1 and Dnipro-2, financed by two oligarchs who are prominent members of the local Jewish community. “Ukraine’s population is only 17 percent ethnically Russian,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “Putin always mangled this fact, claiming that 17 million Ukrainians were ethnic Russians, which would equate to 37 percent of the population.” If anything, Pifer says, “Russia’s aggression appears to be erasing the dividing line…. One unintended consequence of the conflict is [a new] sense of Ukrainian unity.”

Turks Block Erdogan’s Presidential Ambitions In Historic Parliamentary Elections
June 8, 2015, Vice News
By John Beck
This is partly the result of Erdogan’s own behavior, Kemal Kirisci, director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at The Brookings Institution told VICE News. The President has attacked central bank policies, the banking regulators, and what he’s christened the “interest rate lobby” — all while continuing to spend in an increasingly extravagant manner, including a $615 million, 1,150-room presidential palace more than 30 times the size of the White House.

Russia Wields Aid and Ideology Against West to Fight Sanctions
June 7, 2015, The New York Times
By Peter Baker and Stephen Erlanger
But Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence officer on Russia and now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that with the exception of Ms. Le Pen’s party in France, the assertions about Russia financing European parties seemed based more on speculation than facts. “The question is how much hard evidence does anyone have?” she asked. “And it’s useful for the Russians themselves not to refute rumors and maybe even perpetrate some of them. They want everyone to think everyone is corrupt, everyone can be influenced.”

A dangerous modesty
June 6, 2015, The Economist
But for Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official, now at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, “the Iran deal is not an attempt to get into bed with Iran; it is an attempt to get out of bed with Saudi Arabia.” He argues that America’s dependence on Gulf oil has diminished, and the price has become less sensitive to political crises in the region (see chart). If the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb is set aside, says Mr Shapiro, America could disengage more easily, relying on a lighter military presence to keep the Gulf’s sea lanes open.

U.S. Creates Russia Sanctions Loophole to Counter Kremlin Spin
June 4, 2015, Bloomberg News
By Nicole Gaouette and Brian Wingfield
Clifford Gaddy, a biographer of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group, called the move a waste of money. “It’s like going into hand-to-hand combat with Marquess of Queensberry rules, when they have nunchucks.” Gaddy said, contrasting the 1867 rules governing boxing with Japanese martial-arts weapons.

Book Review: The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century
May 31, 2015, LSE Ideas Blog
By Paul Wingrove
Angela Stent has written an enlightening, well-informed and – above all – a measured and balanced account of relations between the USA and Russia, from the downfall of the Soviet Union to the present day. Her narrative covers US-Russian conflict and co-operation globally (the War on Terror, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Europe). It is substantially up-to-date, although this review refers to the hardback edition of the book published in 2014, which does not include the extra material on the Ukraine crisis found in the more recent paperback edition.

Conference speakers: Europe will keep sanctions on Russia while Ukraine needs to keep up reforms
May 30, 2015, Kyiv Post
By Alyona Zhuk
According to Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the West can and should be doing more to help Ukraine and toughen sanctions against Russia. “I don’t know the specific steps, but when I talk to people in the American government, they say that, on a scale from one to 10 for sanctions, the Western sanctions are about a four, and they say there are a lot of additional things they can do,” Pifer told the Kyiv Post on May 28. “Both in terms of targeting additional companies in the defense, in the financial and the energy sectors, but also broadening the sanctions to the other sectors of Russian economy. And we’ve seen those sanctions can do significant damage.”

Escándalo de corrupción en la FIFA remece y divide a los líderes de la política mundial
May 29, 2015, Economia y Negocios
Los lazos entre ambos países vienen en picada desde abril de 2014, cuando empezó el conflicto en Ucrania. “Todo esto ciertamente no ayuda a las relaciones, que ya se encuentran en mal estado”, dijo Richard Kauzlarich, analista de la Brookings Institution. El experto en política rusa agregó que Putin ve este episodio “incorrectamente como una intromisión estadounidense, cuando los motivos de las acciones del Departamento de Justicia son que en los actos de corrupción están involucrados individuos estadounidenses, y las empresas y las transacciones financieras pasaron por bancos estadounidenses”.

Russia recovery talk premature as sanctions threaten to cripple economy
May 25, 2015, The Washington Times
By Guy Taylor
Despite a small rebound in world oil prices, “Russia is not out of the woods yet because the sanctions are going to continue to have an impact,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former State Department official who served in Moscow and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. … “The ruble has certainly stabilized, and some of the numbers are doing a little better,” Mr. Pifer said, but the bottom line remains that a significant number of major Russian firms are scrambling under sanctions that effectively prevent them from refinancing massive debts with Western lenders.

Pro-Kurdish party holds key to Turkey´s ‘knife-edge’ elections
May 22, 2015, Rudaw
By Selin Cagalyan
“Turkish politics could boil over if HDP’s gamble doesn’t pay off,” argues prominent Turkish academic Kemal Kirisci, director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution. “There are increasing speculations that HDP’s exclusion from parliament would radicalize politics, lead to civil strife and accelerate Turkey’s descent into chaos,” he warns. “It is quite plausible that Ocalan would lose popularity and thereby his ability to control the radical elements within the Kurdish nationalist movement and the PKK.”

La Chine passe à l’offensive en Europe
May 19, 2015, L’opinion
L’affaiblissement du vieux continent après la crise financière de 2008 a favorisé « l’offensive chinoise en Europe », comme Philippe Le Corre et Alain Sepulchre l’ont décrit avec brio dans leur ouvrage éponyme, paru début 2015 chez Fayard. Ce qui distingue les investissements chinois en Europe et dans d’autres pays industrialisés de ceux conduits dans les régions moins développées, c’est la volonté d’acquérir des marques et des technologies grâce auxquelles les entreprises chinoises pourront renforcer leurs positions.

Kerry plays Russian roulette gambling on easing ties
May 19, 2015, Agence France Presse
By Jo Biddle and Nicolas Revise
Some analysts highlighted that in the current climate, US President Barack Obama cannot travel to Russia and risk humiliation by the belligerent Putin. “Having a face-to-face meeting with Putin is very important, but it would be very risky for President Obama to do that,” Brookings Institution expert Fiona Hill told AFP. But she cautioned: “It’s too soon to talk about the reset of the reset.”

The ties that bind Turkey to the EU
May 15, 2015, Today’s Zaman
By Joost Lagendijk
As Kemal Kirisci (Brookings Institution) and Sinan Ekim (Istanbul Policy Center) recently put it in a working paper on Turkey’s trade policy, “By ‘encouraging’ Turkey to adopt the EU regulatory standards and granting it preferential access to the EU’s internal market, the Customs Union increased the competitiveness of Turkish manufactured products.”

UK Election Stokes Rumors Of EU Withdrawal, Scottish Secession
May 13, 2015, The Daily Caller
By Ivan Plis
Philippe Le Corre, a European politics expert at the Brookings Institution, is less optimistic about Cameron’s Scottish balancing act. He told the The DC he fears the country is “not a United Kingdom anymore, but a disunited kingdom. One place, called England, just reelected a Euroskeptic English prime minister, while Scotland just elected Scottish politicians in favor of cutting themselves off from England.”

In Defending Regime Security, Russia’s Domestic and Foreign Policies Align
May 11, 2015, Resurgent Dictatorship
By Dean Jackson
The system of personalized power built in Russia by Vladimir Putin is unlikely to collapse suddenly but will continue to degenerate, writes Lilia Shevtsova in the April 2015 issue of the Journal of Democracy. In her article, “Forward to the Past in Russia,” Shevtsova stresses that protecting this personalized system is now the regime’s main domestic and foreign policy goal. In pursuing this objective, the Kremlin’s toolkit for domestic repression is on full display as it cracks down on political opposition, civil society, and media freedom.

Not exactly peace in our time as Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin exchange frosty glares at Russian VE Day celebrations
May 10, 2015, The Daily Mail
Political analyst Lilia Shevtsova said Sunday’s meeting between Putin and Merkel was highly symbolic. “They are hardly happy to see each other,” the prominent pro-Western analyst wrote on Facebook. “He is trying to retain his seat at the table by turning to the shadows of the past and other people’s glory.” “But she has not accepted his rules of the game having arrived to pay tribute to the people who won.”

How Shirtless Putin Became A Rock Star President In Russia
May 9, 2015, Huffington Post
By Sean Braswell
The son of factory workers, Putin came from St. Petersburg, not Moscow, and had been stationed overseas in East Germany throughout Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika movement. But he had no real leadership experience, having risen only as far as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg — a shortcoming he turned into a strength. “He allowed — even actively encouraged — people to underestimate him,” Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill observe in Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.

Aus NSA-Talkrunde wird Zweikampf zwischen Illner und Altmaier
May 8, 2015, FOCUS
By Thomas Röll
Die Politologin Constanze Stelzenmüller hält dagegen: „Deutschland wurde nicht nur von Russland befreit, sondern auch von Amerikanern, Briten und Franzosen.“ Auch sie fordert, dass Russland seine Politik ändern müsse, bevor man wieder vertrauensvoll mit ihm zusammenarbeiten könne. „Uns trennt im Moment vieles“, so ihr Urteil.

U.S., Britain’s ‘special relationship’ endures but with less vigor
May 8, 2015, The Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
“This government is about reducing public spending, so raising defense spending is fairly unlikely,” said Philippe Le Corre, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “How much can they contribute to the defense of Europe or the Middle East, where the United States is feeling a bit lonely sometimes?” He added: “The United States used to have very good ambassadors in Europe, whether Thatcher or Blair. And Cameron is not a credible figure in Europe.”

Party Leaders End British Election Campaign More Energized Than Voters
May 6, 2015, The New York Times
By Steven Erlanger
And there is an increasing sense, especially in Washington, that Britain is slipping away from its close partnership with the United States, particularly on military matters. A “Little England,” as Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution wrote recently, “does not augur well for a U.S. foreign policy which aims specifically to empower like-minded states to share the burdens of leadership.”

Texas Gunman One of Many With Extremist Trail on Twitter
May 5, 2015, The New York Times
By Scott Shane
“ISIS and its caliphate is becoming a brand, looser even than a network like Al Qaeda,” said Omer Taspinar, a scholar on political Islam and the Middle East at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a kind of spiritual belonging. Claiming credit does not necessarily indicate any kind of organizational link.”

Ukraine could be nuclear flashpoint
April 25, 2015, The New Zealand Herald
By Peter Huck
“My take is that Russia is set on the path of conflict escalation,” says Pavel Baev, Russia expert and senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institute. “The room for political manoeuvring is limited not by Western policies, but by the deepening economic crisis in Russia. Every measure that makes the next step in escalating the hostilities more difficult and expensive for Moscow is a step in the right direction.”

Current state of Syrian refugees in Turkey discussed in Washington
April 23, 2015, Daily Sabah
By Ali Unal
Commenting on Turkey’s relation with the international community regarding burden-sharing, [Kemal] Kirişci said the chemistry has been off. He also underlined that the Middle East is changing and the future challenge will be to navigate the new political realities, which will make delivering humanitarian aid more difficult. Kirişci concluded his statements by saying, “The real solution to the refugee crises is a political deal that is, unfortunately, unlikely in the near future.”

White House omits ‘G-word’
April 23, 2015, Al-Monitor
By Barbara Slavin
Kemal Kirisci, director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution, agreed with Grigoryan. “I use the term,” he told Al-Monitor. “There is growing recognition that something nasty befell the Armenian community in the Ottoman period and Turks are painfully revisiting this history.”

Putin’s Action Hero: How Steven Seagal Became the Kremlin’s Unlikeliest Envoy
April 20, 2015, BuzzFeed News
By Max Seddon and Rosie Gray
Putin’s macho persona, fashioned by his spin doctors when he came to power as a virtual unknown, is key to the cult of his celebrity. He channels action movie images in televised stunts that paint him as the emblem of the strong, resurgent Russia he seeks to build. He flew in a hang glider with endangered cranes and shot a tiger with a tranquilizer dart. He took to the Siberian wilderness shirtless, riding a horse, swimming in a lake, and stomping through the Tuvan bush with a hunting rifle. “He plays an action hero as president,” said Fiona Hill, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who co-authored Mr. Putin, a study of his personae.

Venäjän ydinaseuhittelu vie tuntemattomille vesille
April 19, 2015, Helsingin Sanomat
By Kari Huhta
“Putin ja hänen piirinsä eivät ole käyneet edes ydinpelotteen peruskurssia”, arvioi venäläistaustainen norjalaisprofessori Pavel Baev Brookings-tutkimuskeskuksen tuoreessa julkaisussa.

Why the US shouldn’t worry about the AIIB
April 16, 2015, CNBC
By Nyshka Chandran
“There are still a lot of uncertainties. There hasn’t been a new institution like this in many years,” warned Philippe Le Corre, fellow at The Brookings Institution. “China is conscious of the fact that it cannot fail. Washington and Tokyo are both watching, so it’s a big challenge.”

Iraq 2.0: The REAL Reason Hawks Oppose the Iran Deal
April 16, 2015, The National Interest
By Justin Logan
At Brookings, Jeremy Shapiro suggests that “the Iranian nuclear program is not really what opponents and proponents of the recent deal are arguing about.” Shapiro says the bigger question is about what to do regarding “Iran’s challenge to U.S. leadership” in the countries surrounding Iran and whether to “integrate Iran into the regional order.”

Ukrainian President Poroshenko Dismisses Envoy To U.S.
April 14, 2015, RFE/RL
By Carl Schreck
Motsyk was a loyal envoy for Yanukovych who publicly lauded reforms undertaken by the former president and dismissed suggestions that Kyiv was backsliding on issues like human rights, civil liberties, and political plurality. Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told The Washington Diplomat in 2011 that he felt “some sympathy” for Motsyk. “One of his jobs is to defend Ukraine, and that’s not an easy case to be defending lately,” Pifer told the monthly newspaper, adding that Motsyk is “very professional.”

GOP targets Hillary Clinton’s years at State
April 12, 2015, Politico
By Michael Crowley and Nahal Toosi
“I don’t think she’s going to break with the Obama administration on any foreign policy issue,” says Jeremy Shapiro, a former official in Hillary Clinton’s State Department who is now at the Brookings Institution. “She made a foray into that, and it didn’t work out very well for her.” That doesn’t mean Clinton won’t signal some differences, Shapiro said. “She wants to distinguish herself rather than break with him. She’s going to basically support his policies but imply — without saying so — that she’s going to be tougher.”

Fight Over Ukraine Darkens Future of Russia-U.S. Nuclear Arms Control
April 7, 2015, The Moscow Times
By Matthew Bodner
“I think at some point, and this may not be for two to three years, the Russians will probably be interested in a dialogue,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the Brookings Institution’s arms control and nuclear non-proliferation program. According to Pifer, the historical record shows that Moscow has always been interested in some kind of cap on U.S. and Russian strategic warheads. Arms races are expensive, and Pifer said that Russia may come back to the table as New START’s 2021 expiration date approaches.

Iran nuclear deal is key to Obama’s nonproliferation agenda
April 3, 2015, Los Angeles Times
By Christi Parsons
The agreement, to essentially limit Iran’s nuclear program for 10 years, could also buy the U.S. time to lengthen the arrangement, said Steven Pifer, a State Department and National Security Council official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and now a nonproliferation expert at the Brookings Institution. “It would be defusing a potentially big problem,” he said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping sounds a lot like Putin in his New Yorker profile
April 2, 2015, Business Insider
By Linette Lopez
Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, is known for his transformation into a pragmatic diplomat as well as being a very good judge of people. “For [Putin], others are participants in a game he directs. He chooses inputs, they react. He judges,” Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of Brookings write in the book “Mr. Putin.” “Their responses to his input tell him who they think he is — but by responding they also tell him who they are, what they want, what they care about.”

‘Victory’ for Russia’s Top State Executives as They Keep Salaries Secret
March 31, 2015, Newsweek
By Damien Sharkov
Lilia Shevtsova, Kremlinologist and Russian politics expert at Brookings says the move shows Putin’s protection for Russia’s oligarchs and the conservative faction which backs Putin – the siloviki. “This is the appeasement of the loyalists of the first circle close to the Kremlin. The loyalty has to be tended in times of trouble,” Shevtsova says referring to the current financial crisis in Russia.

Moscow’s Twisted History Lessons
March 29, 2015, The New York Times
By Maxim Trudolyubov
“German policy makers really did think they, and they alone, could bring Russia into the West,” says Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Germany was Russia’s bridgehead into Europe. Vladimir Putin has destroyed this bridge single-handedly.”

La Chine à l’assaut des grandes marques européennes
March 24, 2015, Le Figaro
By Sébastien Falletti
Le montant des investissements de l’empire du Milieu sur le Vieux Continent en atteste. Au début des années 2000, rappellent Philippe Le Corre et Alain Sepulchre dans leur ouvrage tout juste paru, L’Offensive chinoise en Europe, «il n’y avait eu pratiquement aucun investissement chinois en Europe». Selon la Deutsche Bank, citée par ces deux auteurs, le stock d’investissements chinois y est passé de 6,1 milliards d’euros en 2010 à 27 milliards d’euros en 2014.

Los escenarios políticos de House of Cards: ¿ficción o realidad?
March 24, El País
Según Richard Kauzlarich, analista de la Brookings Institution, la posición de Petrov sobre la defensa antimisiles de la OTAN en Europa es la “posición real de Rusia, y ha sido así desde que el programa comenzó bajo el Presidente George Bush”. “Los rusos nunca creyeron que esas defensas fueran dirigidas contra Irán o Norcorea. Más bien lo vieron como un sistema antirruso diseñado para socavar la capacidad de disuasión nuclear estratégica de Moscú”, agrega.

Sabemos a pergunta mesmo sem saber qual é a melhor resposta
March 22, 2015, Publico
By Teresa de Sousa
A City de Londres “quer ser a maior plataforma bolsista para a moeda chinesa”, lembra Philippe Le Core da Brookings. E é já o maior destino europeu do investimento chinês. Uma fonte da Casa Branca acusou Londres pela sua “constante acomodação” à China.

Russia’s Massive Military Exercise in the Arctic Is Utterly Baffling
March 20, 2015, VICE News
By Ryan Faith
“The new bases may serve as demonstration of Russia’s readiness to exercise its sovereignty in the Arctic, but such feats of arms as the air drop of a company of paratroopers near the North Pole hardly make the right impression on potential investors,” said Pavel Baev, a security expert and nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Russian Cutoff From Banking Backbone Said to Be Ruled Out
March 19, 2015, Bloomberg
By Indira Lakshmanan and Andrew Mayeda
A cutoff would make a cyberattack on foreign banks more likely, as Russia won’t “attack a financial system on which it so heavily depends itself,” said Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Russia is a cyber superpower fully capable of destroying the entire global financial system,” Gaddy, an economist specializing in Russia, said in an e-mail. “So far, we have been protected against that outcome.”

U.S. Delays Ukraine Military Training, General Says
March 17, 2015, The Wall Street Journal
By Philip Shishkin
An earlier deal, negotiated in Minsk, Belarus in the fall, had collapsed quickly. Now Washington and the European Union are watching whether the so-called Minsk-2 truce will prove any more durable than its predecessor. “The administration is being very cautious; they don’t want to upset the Minsk-2 apple cart,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine now with the Brookings Institution.

The rise and demise of the Turkish trading state
March 17, 2015, Hurriyet Daily News
By Barcin Yinanc
“The rise and demise of the Turkish trading state; is there a way out?” was the title of the speech Professor Kemal Kirişci delivered recently to mark the fifth year of the Foreign Policy Forum of Boğaziçi University and TÜSİAD, Turkey’s top business body. Kirişci, who currently works at Brookings Institute as a TÜSİAD senior fellow, is the scholar who had  introduced the concept of a “trading state” to explain one of the factors transforming Turkey’s foreign policy in the 2000’s from “’regional coercive power’ to a ‘benign’ if not ‘soft’ power.”

La banque asiatique divise Washington et Londres
March 14, 2015, Le Monde Economie
By Gilles Paris
Face à la puissance financière chinoise, les préoccupations avancées officieusement par les Américains, notamment le respect de l’environnement, ne semblent guère faire le poids. «Washington ne parvient pas à être une puissance asiatique», estime Philippe Le Corre, de la Brookings Institution, coauteur de L’Offensive chinoise en Europe (2015, Fayard); «en revanche, les Chinois prouvent qu’ils savent faire de la politique en divisant les Américains et les Européens et les Européens entre eux.»

La mort de Boris Nemtsov desservira Poutine
March 11, 2015, Slate.fr
By Daniel Vernet
Ces enfants de l’ère Poutine –il a été élu président pour la première fois en 2000– veulent vivre comme en Europe et ils se sont sentis brimés par un système politique qui n’accepte aucune déviance. La répression, la crise économique et la propagande nationaliste consécutive à la guerre en Ukraine les ont fait rentrer dans le rang. Poutine a retrouvé les taux de popularité qu’il avait en 2008 –plus de 80%– alors qu’en 2012 80% des Russes interrogés par les instituts de sondage ne voulaient pas qu’il se représente en 2018, selon les chiffres cités par Fiona Hill dans son livre Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (non traduit).

Future bleak for Russia’s cowed opposition
March 11, 2015, AFP
By Fran Blandy
“The idea that this murder might lead the Russian population at large to rebel against the climate of hatred and intolerance and demonisation of the liberal, Western-oriented democratic opposition is a deep illusion,” said Clifford Gaddy, Russia analyst and co-author of “Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.”The psychological blow of his murder was “very demoralising for the opposition, as if they didn’t already have plenty to be demoralised about,” said Gaddy. The Washington-based analyst said that whether Nemtsov was killed on orders from the Kremlin — which he believes unlikely — or by ultra-nationalists or Islamists, as other theories go, the effect was the same. “It all reflects on a very dangerous, chilling atmosphere for people who stood on the same side of the barricades as he did.”

In Ukraine, Tomorrow’s Drone War Is Alive Today
March 9, 2015, DefenseOne
By Patrick Tucker
Groups like DPR use highly sophisticated Russian-made unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to collect data to target missiles and artillery fire, which has proven to be an enormous advantage on the battlefield. When Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and a delegation went to the front lines of the conflict to assess how the United States could help, Ukrainian commanders requested jamming equipment and radar to better intercept Russian drones. They also asked for as well as American-made military drones, like Reapers (though not necessarily armed).

Will debt negotiations force Greece into Russia’s orbit?
March 9, 2015, Fortune
By Chris Matthews
But this logic misses the forest for the trees and might end up costing Germany and the Eurozone a lot more, in terms of hard cash and geopolitical power, according to Daniel Speckhard, former U.S. Ambassador to Greece. “Greece is much more important than people think,” says Speckhard. “The conventional wisdom is now that we can allow a Grexit and just cauterize the wound, but it’s not that simple.”

U.S. believed security for Seoul ambassador adequate before attack
March 6, 2015, Reuters
By David Brunnstrom
Two retired former U.S. ambassadors said security was largely a judgment call for individual ambassadors and there was a constant trade off between security and the desire to be seen as open and accessible. “The only way you are going to stay perfectly safe is if you stay holed up in the embassy and I would argue that the ambassador’s not doing his job in those circumstances,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution think tank.

History, Religion Hamper Efforts to Counter IS Propaganda
March 6, 2015, Voice of America
By Mohamed Elshinnawi
Omer Taspinar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said the collective memory of most Arab states is based on a sense of being victimized by a conspiracy of external powers. “Victimhood is very convenient because it allows you to escape responsibility and accountability. Since you are never guilty, someone else has to be at fault for causing all the problems,” said Taspinar.  “You unleash the media and blame the West on the grounds that they are racist, orientalist, imperialist, etc. and as a result, the citizenry of these states believe their destiny is not in their hands.”

U.S. Weighing Whether Arms to Ukraine Would Help, Nuland Says
March 4, 2015, Bloomberg
By Nicole Gaouette
In a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing later in the day, Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group, dismissed the idea that arming Ukraine would create a split between the U.S. and European allies. “There’s no evidence to back that” assertion, said Pifer, adding that “other allies would probably begin to provide weapons once the United States began to do so.”

It’s Only $25 To Ride Turkey’s ‘Highway To Jihad’
February 27, 2015, The Daily Caller
By Erica Wenig
Even in light of Turkey’s efforts to increase security along its border with Syria, most of the 500-mile stretch of land is open land, so it would be very difficult to seal. Turkish officials, “could tighten control of official border crossings, said Kemal Kirisci, an expert at the Brookings Institution. “But you could never seal it.”

Who Needs the Department of Homeland Security Anyway?
February 26, 2015, Foreign Policy 
By John Hudson
But not everyone is sympathetic to Ridge’s blame-shifting. “The irony in that complaint is that the very reason DHS was founded was to deal with the problem of insufficient coordination within the government,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If DHS failed to solve that problem, it’s unclear why it exists.” Even strong defenders of the department acknowledge that more needs to be done to shore up support for DHS, but there’s very little agreement on how that should be done.

Anti-Putin Opposition Looks to Russian Spring for Revival
February 26, 2015, BloombergBusiness
By Jake Rudnitsky, Milda Seputyte, and Stepan Kravchenko
Buoyed by a wave of patriotism after Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last March, Putin now enjoys 86 percent support, according to a survey published Thursday of 1,600 people from Feb. 20-23 by the Moscow-based pollster Levada Center. It placed the president just below October’s record-matching 88 percent and well above his 69 percent rating before the Black Sea peninsula was taken. “The patriotic ‘Crimea’ mobilization still is present,” though polls can be “deceitful,” Lilia Shevtsova, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said from Moscow by e-mail. “The Communist party in Russia unraveled when the polls still showed 99.9 percent approval.”

Paralyzed by Ukraine, Dumbfounded by Russia
February 23, 2015, Defense One
By James Oliphant
Putin’s Russia, says Brookings’ Jeremy Shapiro, “is the only existential threat the United States faces. Even if it is a low-probability outcome, it is a very bad one. I think it’s worth talking about up front.” Shapiro does not support arming Ukraine. He says Obama should engage Putin directly to defuse the crisis and perhaps even grant Russia some say in the affairs of its border nations rather than stumble into a war incrementally.

Is Vladimir Putin hiding a $200 billion fortune? (And if so, does it matter?)
February 20, 2015, The Washington Post
By Adam Taylor
Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution recently explained to WorldViews that one of the reasons sanctions against Russia weren’t working was because they were designed to financially target Putin’s close associates. “There’s an element there of thinking you can hit the guys around Putin as if it’s like a real oligarchy,” Gaddy said. “These oligarchs, the richest people in the world, their only protection in that society [is Putin]… This is like a Mafia operation. He makes sure that the key people around him are vulnerable.”

Visa-free travel, win-win for Turkey, EU
February 20, 2015, Daily Sabah
By Merve Aydogan
The agreement, which was ratified on Oct. 14, is “likely to enhance tourism, which, in turn will contribute to the growth of local economies,” according to the analysis published by Kemal Kirişci and Sinan Ekim. The “EU-Turkey Visa Liberalization and Overcoming the ‘Fear of Turks’: The Security and Economic Dimensions” analysis by Kirişci and Ekim has also emphasized the fact that there are concerns that the decision to liberalize visas for Turkish nationals might become politicized.

Obama Saw Too Late Putin’s Return Would Undermine Reset
February 19, 2015, Bloomberg News
By Mike Dorning
Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year and its support for separatists in Ukraine’s east have soured Obama on Putin and prompted U.S.-led sanctions that have helped push Russia’s economy toward recession. The confrontation “will continue and could escalate pretty easily,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” The standoff between Obama and Putin complicates efforts to defuse the Ukrainian conflict, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken the lead.

Russia sanctions ‘do not have a deterrent effect’
February 18, 2015, CNBC
By Dina Gusovsky
The new sanctions extend mainly to Russian deputy ministers, parliamentarians and organizations, including separatist rebel and other paramilitary groups that the European Union believes have helped to fuel the war in Ukraine. “They are not likely to have any economic impact, and are almost entirely political and symbolic in nature,” said Fiona Hill, director and senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution. She said the sanctions could in fact strengthen the resolve of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Des instituts Confucius au rachat du Club Med, la Chine à la conquête de l’Europe
February 16, 2015, La Libre
By Philippe Paquet
Le phénomène est encore modeste, en dépit de quelques coups médiatiques spectaculaires, mais il est appelé à prendre de l’ampleur et, dans cette stratégie pékinoise, l’Europe est une cible prioritaire. C’est ce que montrent Philippe Le Corre et Alain Sepulchre dans “L’Offensive chinoise en Europe” (Fayard). Le premier est un ex-correspondant de la presse française en Asie, le second un ancien cadre belge de Total en Chine. Tous deux travaillent dans la recherche et la consultance.

Ukraine cease-fire ignored around key railway hub
February 16, 2015, USA Today
By Oren Dorell
“If the cease-fire does not take hold and you see a resumption of fighting, the question of military assistance to Ukraine will be right back on the top of the list,” saidSteven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Pifer said Ukraine’s forces are reluctant to retreat because of the strategic value of Debaltseve and because of past experience with the insurgents.

U.S. Jewish Groups Back Azerbaijan Despite Rights Concerns
February 13, 2015, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Carl Schreck and Luke Johnson
Richard Kauzlarich, a former U.S. ambassador to Baku, said Azerbaijan’s tolerance toward Jewish communities is indeed a positive and a “good example” to the rest of the Muslim world. At the same time, Azerbaijan’s official message “has gotten more developed in terms of trying to deflect some of the questions that are obviously difficult to answer,” such as human rights, added Kauzlarich. “Pointing to this, religious tolerance for them is another plus in the dialogue on things like human rights, which aren’t as pleasant,” he said.

Chine: une menace ou une chance pour l’Europe?
February 12, 2015, Le Point
By Romain Gubert
Serge Abou est l’un des personnages que l’on croise dans L’Offensive chinoise en Europe, le dernier ouvrage de Philippe Le Corre et Alain Sepulchre, publié chez Fayard. Les deux auteurs connaissent parfaitement la Chine. Le Corre est chercheur à la Brookings Institution à Washington après avoir été longtemps journaliste en Asie notamment pour Le Point ; Sepulchre est l’ancien dirigeant de Total en Chine et enseigne aujourd’hui à l’université Paris-Dauphine ainsi qu’à la Chinese University de Hong Kong. C’est une formidable enquête qu’ils livrent sur l’influence chinoise sur le Vieux Continent.

After Minsk – why the ‘arms to Ukraine’ debate will continue
February 12, 2015, Financial Times
By Gideon Rachman
Yet, in the following days, it became clear that even the experts at Brookings are not united. Jeremy Shapiro, who worked in the State Department in Obama’s first term, warned that Russia would respond to US weaponry with further escalation, arguing that “Ukraine clearly is much more important to Russia than the US.” Fiona Hill, head of the Europe program at Brookings, has also just published an op-ed (co-written with Clifford Gaddy) in which she makes a similar argument, warning about the threat of a wider regional war and arguing that an American decision to arm Ukraine could split the western alliance.

We keep trying to understand Putin. Why do we keep getting him wrong?
February 12, 2015, The Washington Post
By Adam Taylor
That’s a question Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution have been thinking about for years. Hill and Gaddy, who have both studied Russian politics for decades, first released their book “Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” in 2013. It quickly became one of the most respected portraits of the Russian leader. Now, with even more eyes on Putin, they’ve released a new edition of the book with five new chapters to bring it up to date.

Ukraine Cease-Fire Leaves Control of Border Unresolved Until Year’s End 
February 12, 2015, The New York Times
By Michael R. Gordon
“The deal likely was the best that Poroshenko could have achieved under difficult circumstances, with Russia continuing to back the separatists,” said Steven Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine, referring to Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president. “But Minsk II raises tough questions and leaves difficult issues for later,” Mr. Pifer added. “It is a fragile arrangement, requiring good faith and follow-through from parties that have shown little of that in the past.”

Ukraine Cease-Fire Hopes Exceed Expectations
February 12, 2015, The Wall Street Journal
By Stephen Fidler and Laurence Norman
In the short term, disagreements are likely over the agreed withdrawal of heavy artillery systems from eastern Ukraine; in the longer term, for example, a promised constitutional reform to decentralize power is likely to run into hurdles. It also includes, said Fiona Hill of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a strong onus on the Ukrainian government to fulfill its terms—including financing welfare payments to people in areas controlled by the Moscow-backed separatists. “I don’t see how this is going to be particularly sellable in Kiev,” she said.

Trapped in Baku
February 11, 2015, Foreign Policy
By Michael Weiss
One former American diplomat questions the U.S. embassy’s hands-off approach. “If the embassy knew that person was married to an American citizen, that would require more than if this were just a normal Azerbaijani citizen facing harassment or arrest by the police,” said Richard Kauzlarich, who served as ambassador to Azerbaijan in 1994-1997. “There’s not much you can do for your average everyday citizen of the country you’re embassy is in, but if it’s the spouse of one our own, that changes things.”

At the Time Warner Center, an Enclave of Powerful Russians
Feb. 11, 2015, The New York Times
By Stephanie Saul and Louise Story
“He has taken a leave of absence this year from Penn State. “I think important Russians, just in general, it’s the case that people whose business interests are in Russia now, they feel very uncomfortable being seen as close to America,” said Barry Ickes, an economics professor…who has worked closely with Mr. Vavilov.”

An arms race won’t help Ukraine
February 10, 2015, The Washington Post
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
But arming the Ukrainian military is not in the best interest of the United States, nor is it in the best interest of Ukraine. It will only worsen a bloody crisis that has already claimed thousands of victims. As I have argued in the past, there is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one; and a new supply of U.S. arms will provide ammunition for Russian leaders who believe, fairly or not, that America is attempting to turn Ukraine into a military base near Russia’s borders. Indeed, as Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution writes, “If U.S.-provided weapons fail to induce a Russian retreat in Ukraine and instead cause an escalation of the war” — which they almost certainly will — “the net result will not be peace and compromise.”

Niemiecka polityka zagraniczna na rozdrożu
February 9, 2015, Gazeta Wyborca
“Niemcy podejmowały kilkakrotnie próbę zrewidowania polityki zagranicznej: po upadku muru berlińskiego (1989), po Srebrenicy (1995), po atakach terrorystycznych (w USA 2001), po konflikcie o Gruzję (2008) i podczas kryzysu euro (2009). Ale rok 2014 przyniósł nową jakość, ponieważ położył kres strategicznemu partnerstwu z Rosją” – oceniła w rozmowie z PAP analityczka z Brookings Institution w Waszyngtonie, Constanze Stelzenmueller.

Ukraine crisis exposes transatlantic rift
February 8, 2015, Deutsche Welle
By Michael Knigge
“Obama is under incredible pressure to supply arms to Ukraine,” Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution told DW. “So far he has not caved in.” But how long he can – and whether he wants to hold out – remains unclear. “This is an extremely dangerous situation,” said Hill. Many in Washington, she noted, want instant action and do not really understand Merkel’s position. What was missing was a greater strategy beyond calls for sending arms to Ukraine.

Merkel, Hollande und Putin sprechen am Sonntag weiter
February 7, 2015, Der Tagesspiegel
By Christoph von Marschall, Barbara Junge, Nina Jeglinski, Dennis Hallac
Fiona Hill ist Russland-Expertin von „Brookings“, dem einflussreichen Washingtoner Think-Tank. Wie Michele Flournoy, die in München ist, um Waffenlieferungen an die Ukraine zu fordern, hat auch Hill ein Ziel: Amerika und den Westen von eben dem abzuhalten. Die Putin-Kennerin warnt davor, den Mann im Kreml mit Einschüchterung brechen zu wollen. Das würde nicht funktionieren. Im Gegenteil. Putin funktioniere anders. Gemeinsam mit ihrem Kollegen Clifford Gaddy hat Hill vergangene Woche das Buch „Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin“ veröffentlicht, die Weiterschreibung einer vorigen Studie zur Person Putin. Darin beschreibt sie einen KGB-geprägten Geheimdienstoffizier, der den Westen gar nicht verstehen kann. Der Mann im Kreml gehe ohnehin davon aus, dass der Westen eine Bedrohung für Russland sei.

Russians Seeking Homes — Far From Putin
February 7, 2015, OZY
By Sebastian Jost
“It’s becoming increasingly isolated,” he says. That said, we’re not about to see a new Iron Curtain, which is ironic given the rise in the number of Russians who figure their fortunes would be better off abroad, says Richard Kauzlarich, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. But the new reactions rich Russians are facing are a departure from the cushy treatment many once enjoyed: In London, for instance, Oracle once provided a One-Stop Package to especially desirable families.

Pressure mounts on Obama to arm Ukraine troops
February 6, 2015, CBS News
By Rebecca Kaplan
Those who argue in favor of giving the Ukrainian military better offensive and defensive weapons say they are under no illusions that Ukrainian troops can ever defeat their Russian counterparts. What they can do is make further aggression and escalation so costly for the Russians that they see no choice but move toward a diplomatic solution, Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News. “Further escalation is not easy for Russia because they then have to make it less of a separatist conflict and then they have to use the Russian army more,” Pifer said. It will make it “that much harder to hide casualties from the Russian public, which the Kremlin is desperately trying to do.”

Ucraina, Hollande e Merkel presentano il piano di pace a Mosca
February 6, 2015, Il Tempo
Due analisti Fiona Hill e Clifford Gaddy autori del saggio “Mr.Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” sul Washington Post, in un intervento in cui si schierano decisamente contro l’ipotesi di inviare armi all’Ucraina, riconoscono la difficoltà nel definire una strategia per affrontare la Russia che non alimenti il ciclo di escalation favorevole a Putin. Se gli Stati Uniti decidono di inviare armi, gli ucraini non saranno gli unici intrappolati in un conflitto militare in crescita con la Russia. “Chiunque pensa che la retorica bellica di Putin sia un bluff fa delle assunzioni molto rischiose. Dobbiamo tenere a mente le guerre che il leader russo ha lanciato in Cecenia e in Georgia. È dalla guerra in Georgia che Putin prepara il comparto militare a combattere una guerra regionale con alle spalle la protezione dell’arsenale nucleare russo”.

As Kerry visits Kiev, proposed arming of Ukraine mulled in US
February 5, 2015, Al Jazeera America
By Tom Kutsch
But Putin’s political power has remained seemingly unchallenged domestically, and his calculus in Ukraine appears to be quite insulated from the economic misfortunes that have befallen Russia. “As far as he [Putin] is concerned, the U.S., the EU and NATO are already at war with Russia because they’ve imposed sanctions,” said Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, speaking on the Diane Rehm Show. “When we make a decision like this [to arm Ukraine with weapons], we have to think about all of the different things that Putin might do, and we cannot assume that he will be pushed back or deterred based on what we think will be the reaction of the Russian population.”

Arms to Ukraine debate divides Western allies, experts
February 5, 2015, EUobserver
By Andrew Rettman
Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German diplomat who chairs the Munich security meeting, wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times that unless the West intervenes the “violence will go on”. But Jeremy Shapiro, a former US official who also works for Brookings, said it would lead to Russian escalation and would give the Kremlin a propaganda victory. “The Russian regime has defined the struggle in Ukraine as part of an existential battle against American imperialism … American provision of arms would lend credence to that view and increase the Russian government’s freedom of action at home”.

Defense chief nominee Ashton Carter, unlike Obama, backs arming Ukraine
February 4, 2015, Los Angeles Times
By W. J. Hennigan and Paul Richter
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said Carter’s testimony was “perhaps a signal that there has been an evolution in the administration’s thinking about the issue.” It’s also possible that Carter’s comments were intended to send a signal of firmness to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from pushing farther into Ukraine. Critics argue that arming Kiev would set off a dangerous escalation and would bolster Putin’s arguments that the West is fomenting the conflict.

IMF Said to Seek Limit to Ukraine Aid Share as War Escalates
February 4, 2015, BloombergBusiness
By Andrew Mayeda
Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking with Poroshenko in Kiev on Thursday, said the U.S. seeks a diplomatic resolution in Ukraine. Military aid could boost the nation’s forces, improving the IMF and Ukrainian government’s chances of stabilizing the economy and pursuing a political settlement, said Steven Pifer, one of the ex-officials and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “Europe doesn’t want a state the size of Ukraine failing on its doorstep,” said Pifer, now director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

US ‘looking at options’ to arm Ukraine against separatists
February 3, 2015, France 24
By Tony Todd
Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and one of the report’s authors, told FRANCE 24 that increasing military assistance to Ukraine in the form of “lethal defensive weapons” would make Russian President Vladimir Putin realise that “the costs outweigh the gains” in his country’s “egregious” support of separatist rebels. Asked if arming the rebels would lead to escalation of the conflict, Pifer responded that while he and the “US government wish this situation wasn’t as it is, there is the question of how to respond to Russian aggression”.

Renegotiating ties with Russia in the current ‘post’ post-Cold War era
February 1, 2015, AFP
By Jo Biddle
“Our basic problem is, how do we stop the hot war on the ground in Ukraine and not get into a more and more escalatory relationship with Putin,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe. “It’s a really tough challenge, and I can’t say that anybody’s got all the answers now,” she told reporters. “But we need to start working on a frame right now where we figure out how we manage this relationship and how we put it on a different footing.” Waiting to see how the sanctions bite, or whether in a next step the West should begin to funnel arms to the Ukrainian military, would just be courting disaster.

Why Putin Is the Big Winner in Greece’s Elections
January 27, 2015, Foreign Policy
By Keith Johnson and Jamila Trindle
“Sanctions are consensus-based, and if Putin can pick off a few weak countries from the pack,” it makes it much tougher to present a united, effective front, saidFiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution and co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. Talk of fresh financial sanctions comes as Russia’s economy continues to deteriorate, both from Western pressure and from the plunge in oil prices over the last six months. On Monday, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s joined its peers and downgraded Russia’s sovereign debt to junk status, pushing the ruble to a six-week low.

Putin låter politiken styra över historien
January 25, 2015, Svenska Dagbladet
By Igor Torbakov and Martin Kragh
På mer än ett sätt visar de rådande uppfattningarna om historia och minne på hur de styrande och de styrda tvärtom möts i dagens Ryssland. Som Fiona Hill ochClifford Gaddy argumenterar i boken ”Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” (2013) har Putin, i sitt förhållningssätt till frågan om hur det förflutna bör presenteras, agerat som en skarpsinnig politiker och före detta säkerhetsagent: människor kan endast manipuleras ifall man först tar reda på vad de efterfrågar.

Quantitative Easing, Mario Draghi spara il bazooka ma ha quattro ostacoli sulla traiettoria
January 22, 2015, L’Huffington Post
By Mario Alfieri
Per un analista attento come Carlo Bastasin della Brookings Institution, “il fatto che i tassi di interesse a lungo termine siano stati sempre inferiori al tasso di crescita ha consentito agli Usa di ridurre i debiti di imprese e famiglie senza frenare investimenti e consumi.” Anche in Giappone i chiaroscuri della Abenomics non hanno impedito allo yen di apprezzarsi e all’economia di Tokyo, dopo decenni di stagnazione, di tornare più attrattiva.

Over én million ukrainere er drevet på flukt” on
January 18, 2015, Aftenposten
By Reidun Samuelsen
I desember falt den russiske valutaen. Det kan påvirke Moskvas politikk overfor Ukraina, tror Pavel K. Baev. Det vil være naturlig at opinionen vil stille spørsmål ved president Putins pengebruk, når sanksjonene rammer og rubelen nå blir mindre og mindre verdt. Er det smart å bruke mye penger på en militæroperasjon i Ukraina, som ikke leder noe steds hen? På den annen side kan en tenke seg at Putin vil tenke som så, at han har ingenting mer å tape på å fortsette å destabilisere Ukraina. Sanksjonene er alt på plass, og det er ingen som tror NATO vil gå til krig over Ukraina, argumenterer Baev.

Photos From the Coldest City on Earth
January 14, 2015, Smithsonian
By Natasha Geiling
It’s also an expensive city to sustain: emergency fuel shipments to Siberian cities cost Russia an estimated $500 million per year. According to Clifford Gaddy, an economist with the Brookings Institution who co-authored the book The Siberian Curse, it would be less expensive for the country to simply fly laborers into Siberia to extract the natural resources and then fly them out again instead of paying to keep Siberian cities functioning.

Muslims fear backlash from France magazine attack
January 9, 2015, The Express Tribune
“The unrest was both a direct result of the idleness of many youth of immigrant origin and an indirect result of the creation of a vicious cycle in which because these young people have little hope of getting a good job in the future, they have no real incentive to succeed at school,” wrote Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse of the Brookings Institute in a recent report.

Paris attack heightens European tensions with Muslims
January 8, 2015, USA Today
By Oren Dorell
The terrorist attack on the satirical weekly in Paris threatens to create deeper animosities between Europe’s growing Muslim minority and a native population that is increasingly embracing anti-Islam and anti-immigration movements. “The radicals are trying to exacerbate tensions that are already there,” said Jonathan Laurence, author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. “They’re trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and the West.”

Al Qaeda Trained Suspect in Paris Terror Attack, Official Says
January 8, 2015, The New York Times
By Eric Schmitt, Michael S. Schmidt and Andrew Higgins
Jonathan Laurence, the author of “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims,” said in a telephone interview that intelligence services in European countries had so many residents with jihadist sympathies that it was very hard to separate those who merely offer verbal support for groups claiming to fight for Islam from those who are prepared to take up arms. “Mass surveillance of an entire community is not an option because civil liberties also need to be balanced with the potential benefit it will gain,” Mr. Laurence said.

L’«interdipendenza» che serve all’Europa
January 7, 2015, Il Sole 24 Ore
Pubblichiamo uno stralcio della presentazione del nuovo libro di Carlo Bastasin “Saving Europe, Anatomy of a Dream” illustrata dall’autore al convegno ASSA/AEA di Boston. Vorrei spiegare perché chiamo “Guerra di Interdipendenza” quello che sta succedendo in Europa dallo scoppio della crisi. Non lo faccio a cuor leggero. Non bisognerebbe abusare della categoria della guerra nel linguaggio comune.

L’offre de la Russie à l’UE: ‘Laissez tomber les Etats-Unis, joignez-vous plutôt à notre Union Economique Eurasienne’
January 6, 2015, Express
By Audrey Duperron
Selon Steven Pifer, l’ancien ambassadeur américain en Ukraine qui est maintenant analyste chez Brookings, un think tank de Washington, l’objectif réel de l’UEE n’est pas seulement politique, mais il vise également à étendre l’influence de la Russie sur ses pays voisins « en créant des institutions qui donneront à Moscou plus d’influence au Kazakhstan et à la Biélorussie ». « Je parie que le Kazakhstan comme la Biélorussie, même s’ils voient certains avantages aux aspects économiques de l’Union, redoutent aussi de se retrouvés entraînés dans des politiques russes qu’ils désapprouvent », spécule-t-il.

Moskva vyzýva na spoluprácu EÚ a Eurázijskej únie
January 5, 2015, Euractiv
Bývalý americký veľvyslanec na Ukrajine Steven Pifer, ktorý pracuje pre think-tank Brookings Institution vo Washingtone, varuje, že Moskva utvára inštitúcie, ktoré ďalej posilnia jej vplyv v Kazachstane a v Bielorusku. „Eurázijský projekt je prelud z post-sovietskeho súostrovia, kde sa autoritárski lídri navzájom využívajú, aby si zachovali svoju moc,“ vraví autorka knihy Putinove Rusko Všeobecné informácie o Ruskej federácii.viac na www.EuropskaUnia.sk Lilia Ševcova.

As Russia’s Economy Sinks, Vladimir Putin Must Choose Between The Military And Social Spending In 2015 
December 31, 2014, International Business Times
By Christopher Harress
The nexus of falling oil prices and a destabilized Russian economy has placed the former Soviet state in a financial tailspin as it enters 2015. Add the increased international tension arising from its annexation of Crimea and the conflict in East Ukraine, and it’s clear Russia is heading into a tumultuous year that will raise questions about whether the nation can sustain its current military posture across Europe. “I think the desire is there to continue with the heavy military presence, but the question is, do the economics allow it?” said Steven Pifer, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, during a phone interview. “It will then reach a point where President Putin needs to make some fundamental choices about guns versus butter.”

Aleksei Navalny, Putin Critic, Is Spared Prison in a Fraud Case, but His Brother Is Jailed
December 30, 2014, The New York Times
By David M. Herszenhorn
“Kremlin liberalism,” Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on Russian domestic politics at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a post on Facebook. “Let’s put him on a long leash. We can always shorten it. And the brother gets a real sentence. This means that we take a family member hostage! And we can make his life in prison unbearable.” A trenchant critic of Russia’s rampant corruption, Mr. Navalny became a hero to the tens of thousands of Muscovites who took to the streets to protest vote rigging in parliamentary elections in 2011.

Ein fragwürdiger Handelspartner
December 27, 2014, Tagesschau.de
By Silvia Stöber
In Aserbaidschan gebe es so viele politische Gefangene wie in Russland und Weißrussland zusammen, erklärte dazu der ehemalige US-Botschafter in Aserbaidschan,Richard Kauzlarich. Eine von Menschenrechtlern im August erstellte Liste zählte bereits 98 politische Gefangene auf. Zwei der Autoren, Leila Junus und Rasul Jafarov, sitzen nun selbst im Gefängnis.

Obama and Putin: From frosty to frozen
December 19, 2014, CNN
By Stephen Collinson
Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar and author of an acclaimed book on Putin, says the Russian leader’s anti-Western instincts have hardened since he returned to the Kremlin as President in 2012. “Putin projects onto us the kind of actions he would take — believing that the CIA Cold War operations are still in place. He understands the world from a different vantage point. He is acting within that on the assumption that we are at war.” Obama, already beset by foreign policy problems, has no desire for a new Cold War and says Russia’s actions are simply not in its own interests.

US Congress Wants To Give Weapons To Ukraine To Fight Russia; Obama Hesitant To Pass Bill
December 18, 2014, International Business Times
By Christopher Harress
“Overall, this will not be seen as a positive act in Russia, but the bill is also not as robust as it might have been,” said Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine between 1998 and 2000, in a phone interview. “And I think at the end of the day, the president will have little choice but to sign it because it was passed by such overwhelming numbers in the Senate and the House.” The military aid, which the bill says is aimed at “re-establishing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” is to include weapons, defense services, and training to the government of Ukraine over a three-year period.

Russia Bailout Talk Absent as Pariah Putin No Latter-Day Yeltsin
December 18, 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek
By Ian Katz and Jeanna Smialek
Yet any approach to the IMF for aid would be unexpected. Asking the IMF for help is “completely impossible — it will never happen,” said Clifford Gaddy, an economist specializing in Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who was an adviser to the Russian Finance Ministry in the 1990s. “No more debt enslavement” has been a fundamental tenet of Putin’s rule and foreign policy, Gaddy said.

U.S. Says Russia Sanctions Vindicated As Ruble Tumbles
December 16, 2014, RFE/RL
By Carl Schreck and Luke Johnson
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said the likelihood of Russia budging in the Ukraine impasse could depend on how the Kremlin perceives the goal of Western sanctions. If top Russian officials see the removal of the sanctions regime as part of the solution to its current economic troubles, “that should be an incentive to get the Kremlin to change its course on Ukraine,” Pifer, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told RFE/RL. “If the Russian leadership has bought into their own line that the point of sanctions is simply to bring down the Putin government, then it’s going to be hard to get a change in policy,” he said.

Putin: Master of destruction
December 13, 2014, Macleans 
By Michael Petrou
But, after months of conflict, it still hasn’t made similar moves to take formal control of Ukrainian territory in the hands of pro-Russian rebels. “It may be more of a pressure point, if they keep it as an open status,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former American ambassador to Ukraine. Pifer believes further Russian aggression in Ukraine might be deterred if the West provides Ukraine with “defensive” arms, such as portable anti-tank missiles, to raise the cost to Russia of new military offensives. While most Russians supported Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, they don’t want to fight a large-scale war in Ukraine.

US Congress approves bill authorizing defensive weapons and more for Ukraine
December 12, 2014, Kyiv Post
By Oksana Grytsenko
Steven Pifer, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and now director of the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, said there is still a debate in the U.S. government on whether America should arm Ukraine. “Thus far the policy remains on to provide only non-lethal military assistance,” he said

CIA Torture Report Creates Few Ripples Across the Pond
December 10, 2014, TIME 
By Simon Shuster
But the prevailing sentiment among Europe-watchers was that these revelations were considered old news. “All of this was ten years ago,” explains Constanze Stelzenmueller, an expert on European politics at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “What’s striking is that the Americans are now really trying to do a reasonably honest and non-partisan accounting of what happened.” That American admission of guilt, and the integrity it required, did not go unnoticed even in some of the most damning editorials published in the mainstream European press.

Will Prince William at least get playable DVDs?
December 8, 2014, POLITICO
By Hilary Krieger
But the perfect personalized gift, even if accompanied by enough flowers, chocolate and properly formatted DVDs to satisfy the Royal Air Force, might not be enough to return the U.S.-U.K. alliance to its former glory. “If you’re in a bad relationship, then every slight has cosmic importance,” said Jeremy Shapiro, who served as the Obama administration’s senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs until last year.

Carthage, Rome and beyond
November 27, 2014, The Economist
So what should European governments do? One of the most prominent academic observers of European Islam, Jonathan Laurence, has a suggestion. Those governments should watch closely what happens in Tunisia—to see whether an Islamist movement can become a law-abiding player in the affairs of a multi-party democracy. Compared with its counterparts in other Muslim and Arab countries, that country’s Islamist party, Nahda, seems moderate and capable of self-restraint. As The Economist has reported, it has suffered some electoral reverses recently, and has apparently accepted these setbacks in good grace, while still hoping for a share in the country’s governance.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Mario’s? Getting to QE
November 21, 2014, Bloomberg
By Simon Kennedy
The proposal is echoed by Carlo Bastasin of the School of Political Economy at LUISS University – Rome. He proposed a “silver bullet for the European crisis” by suggesting the creation of an asset-backed security reflecting the attributes of existing euro-zone debt that the ECB could then buy. “The new ABS would not be an attractive innovation for the ECB only, but would greatly benefit private investors, both European and non-Europeans, who are longing for a European liquid and safe asset,” Bastasin wrote in a Nov. 14 paper. “If the total amount of QE is estimated at 1 trillion euros, the market behind the new security would amount to one of the largest in global finance.”

East-West conflict set to run and run
November 20, 2014, BBC News
By Mark Mardell
But Fiona Hill, author of the recently updated Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, believes that Putin is driven by the perception that Europe and the US are trying to undermine him at home, and shrink his sphere of influence. “His threat perception is very different, (to ours) and we have a very hard time explaining to him this is incorrect and that we haven’t been trying – in our expansion of Nato and the EU – to overthrow his system,” she said.

Ukraine Wants The Weapons The U.S. Has Promised
November 20, 2014, BuzzFeed 
By Max Seddon
“What it looks like they are talking about is that providing more defensive weapons may deter further Russian military action,” Steven Pifer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told BuzzFeed News. “The view in the government now is that the Russians have done absolutely nothing to implement those parts of the agreement that required Russian action. The calculus has changed.”

Russia-West tensions soar as Putin quits G20 summit
November 17, 2014, AFP 
Lilia Shevtsova, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said as Russia’s confrontation with the West grew bigger, Moscow was becoming increasingly dependent on China. “An outcast? Yes, the APEC in Beijing and the G20 in Brisbane confirmed that Putin had become an outcast,” she said on Facebook. “A dependent outcast — world politics does not know a combination that would be more explosive.”

How not to lose the media war against IS
November 17, 2014, Deutsche Welle
By Thorsten Benner
This overlooks the fact that while terrorist groups do exploit social media, they are also a treasure trove of information that governments can use. As US experts Jeremy Shapiro and Dan Byman have argued: “At the very least, intelligence officers can learn the most prominent ways jihadists recruit others and try to counter them. At best, they can communicate with actual and potential terrorists, feeding information – and misinformation – to their networks.”

Sweden Confirms Submarine Presence
November 14, 2014, Voice of America
By Matthew Hilburn
Richard Kauzlarich, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the revelation was not surprising given the pattern of “aggressive” Russian military actions, but he did say those actions could end up costing Moscow. “The risk to Moscow however is twofold: first, the unannounced incursions could result in an accident involving civilian aircraft or shipping,” he said. “Second, rather than dividing the NATO allies and non-NATO states like Sweden, it actually brings them closer together.”

VP Biden to Tackle Key Conflicts in Travels to Ukraine, Turkey
November 13, 2014, Voice of America
“There is a lot of indication that suggests to me that Russia is not interested in promoting a solution based on Minsk, but it is interested in a frozen conflict,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer. …“Unfortunately we see no real interest on the part of Russians in moving to a peaceful settlement. And so what that means for the West is that the West has to continue to apply economic sanctions. There is lots of evidence that the sanctions are having a significant economic impact,” he said.

Vladimir Putin, historian-in-chief 
November 12, 2014, European Council on Foreign Relations
By Maria Lipman
Now, in 2014, Putin’s ideas of history have been purged of their conciliatory notes, and instead align with the new, Cold War-style confrontation with the West. In their writings about Putin, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy have pointed out the Russian president’s “obsession with history”. Already in 2012, they described him as “a student of Russian history who is moving increasingly into the dangerous territory of writer, manufacturer and manipulator of history.” Putin’s identity as a “history man” has become even more striking lately, both on the world stage and at home. Last year, Putin demanded that the history course taught in Russian schools be devoid of “internal contradictions and dual interpretations”.

Germany After The Berlin Wall: From Painful Reunification To Global Powerhouse
November 8, 2014, International Business Times
By Brianna Lee
These assertive moves represent a surprising and potentially historic new shift in Germany’s foreign policy, said Brookings senior fellow Constanze Stelzenmuller. “Germans were very cautious initially, as a result of habits of 40 years after [World War II] of whipping out their checkbook and saying the use of force is for other people. Those took a long time to overcome,” she said. Now, she said, the Ukraine and ISIS crises are “forcing Germany to reconsider its policy of restraint and reluctance to engage in the more traditional kinds of power politics.”

Ukraine to Freeze Payments in Separatist Areas
November 5, 2014, The New York Times
By Andrew Kramer
Mr. Yatsenyuk’s announcement forces Russia to confront the problem of what to do with eastern Ukraine, a rust belt of outmoded, inefficient and noncompetitive industries like coal mines, steel mills and rail car manufacturers that had survived the post-Soviet period on a patchwork of subsidies from Russia and Ukraine. “For those who want to punish Russia, and nothing else, that’s the answer: Hand over Ukraine to the Russians,” Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes of the Brookings Institution wrote last spring in a study of the eastern region’s economies. “It would suck them dry.”

Hybrid warfare: The new conflict between East and West
November 5, 2014, BBC News
By Bridget Kendall
Clifford Gaddy, from the Brookings Institution in Washington, co-author of a recent profile of President Putin, says the point is he wants people to be afraid of him. “It is a fundamental principle of Russian foreign and security policy in particular that you can’t really trust anyone,” he says. “You have to have some kind of form of intimidation or hook or blackmail threats that would ensure that they behave the way you want.” In the new grey land of hybrid warfare, goes the theory, there are no longer good and bad guys

Euro crisis firms German power
November 3, 2014, AFP
However, Germany expert Constanze Stelzenmueller, from the Washington-based Brookings Institute, said Berlin’s reluctance was waning, pointing to recent decisions over the Ukraine and Syria crises. “If anyone had told me half a year ago that Germany would be doing stage three sanctions against the Russians and delivering weapons to the Kurds, that would have been completely unimaginable,” she said. “I think the Germans are now putting their money where their mouth is. I think this is a very real shift.”

Red Hot Chilly Peoples
October 31, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Keith Johnson
Tense as the talks have been since Russia cut off Ukraine’s gas supplies in June, experts think the accord will hold up. “I think this deal can stick,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All sides have an interest: Ukraine wants and needs the gas to get through the winter; Russia wants to earn money, including getting some of the old gas debt repaid; and the EU wants to ensure no problems could disrupt transit gas flows through Ukraine to Europe,” he said.

Turkish Leader, Using Conflicts, Cements Power
October 31, 2014, The New York Times
By Tim Arango
Omer Taspinar, a scholar on Turkey at the Brookings Institution, said: “The Lawrence of Arabia speech was a part of this act — to show how the borders of the Middle East were drawn up by imperialists and how we are face to face with a new Western agenda.” This deep-seated view that the problems of the Middle East can be explained by Western actions over the past century, combined with a measure of ambivalence among Turkish religious conservatives who form the core of his constituency about joining the West in a fight against Sunnis, help explain Mr. Erdogan’s reluctance to take a stronger role in the United States-led military coalition.

How Republicans Got Their Groove Back on Security
October 29, 2014, The Atlantic
By Noah Gordon
Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, says social perceptions are an important factor. “In the ’60s and ’70s counter-cultural movements, the Democrats became very associated in mainstream America with a sort of anti-militarism, the sort of street protests that you saw in ’68 and in the earlier ’70s,” he says. “That created a real gulf between the Democrats and the military, which has also translated into being seen as not being tough on foreign policy.”

Ukraine voters demand pro-Western reforms
October 27, 2014, USA Today
By Oren Dorell
Ukraine’s voters delivered a mandate for a pro-Western government. The question is whether the victorious political leaders can deliver the economic and anti-corruption changes they promised. “You now have a Rada (parliament) that reflects the mood of the country,” Steven Pifer a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said Monday, a day after national elections.

NATO: Russia Ramping Up Military Probing in Baltics
October 26, 2014, Voice of America
By Matthew Hilburn
Richard Kauzlarich, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, called Russia’s moves “a new pattern of aggression.” “I don’t think we’ve reached the peak of this yet,” he said. “I think there’s more to come. They’re going to keep at it.” Russia’s moves are meant to send a message to the Baltics, Kauzlarich said. “I think they want to make clear to the Baltic states that Putin has them every bit as much in his policy attention span as other [areas of the world],” he said. “This idea of protecting Russian minorities that has been the justification for what he’s done in Ukraine is coming up in the Baltics.”

Western analysts fear blowback from Russia sanctions
October 23, 2014, Financial Times
By Neil Buckley
Discussing sanctions and Russia’s economy, Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution evoked Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a recent book on the origins of the first world war. “I fear very much that . . . there is an element of sleepwalking in the policies of key players in today’s world,” he said – not least among those in the US who had designed the sanctions. They had been drawn up hastily by a small group, with unclear aims and questionable results. Mr Gaddy, a leading Russia economy analyst, says Russia’s relatively primitive economic structure would enable much of it to withstand sanctions. Instead, sanctions hit the most modern, western-integrated parts of the economy, and their owners.

At Valdai Club Meeting in Russia, Divergent Views of Ukrainian Crisis
October 22, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By: Stephen Fidler
Clifford Gaddy of the Washington-based Brookings Institution said he had heard Western companies describe Russia as “radioactive.” But he said that while sanctions were having an impact on the economy, it wasn’t clear they were having their desired effects in changing Russian behavior. Moreover, it was damaging “the most progressive, most modern” sectors of the economy—and “strengthening the most backward parts of the economy.” Moscow was a cyber-superpower and, if cut off from the international financial system, might be tempted to disrupt it, he said.

Manifestations à Hong Kong : et maintenant?
October 17, 2014, LeJDD
By Thomas Morel
Pour Philippe Le Corre, spécialiste de l’Asie à l’institut Brookings aux Etats-Unis et à l’Iris à Paris, cela a peu de chances de se produire : “C.Y. Leung n’a pas de pouvoir dans cette affaire, il n’est que le messager de Pékin. Dans ces conditions, il ne faut pas espérer le voir céder aux exigences des manifestants”, explique-t-il au JDD.fr. Le chef de l’exécutif avait d’ailleurs déclaré, quelques jours plus tôt, qu’il y avait “zéro chance” qu’il recule sur son projet de réforme électorale. “En 2017, la Chine pourrait faire de C.Y. Leung un bouc émissaire, en le poussant vers la sortie pour satisfaire la population, qui demande son départ depuis plusieurs mois déjà”, ajoute Philippe Le Corre. “D’ici là, je suis convaincu que le mouvement ne s’arrêtera pas, quitte à prendre une autre forme.”

Putin Loses His Best Friend: Expensive Oil
October 15, 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek
By Jake Rudnitsky and Henry Meyer
If crude prices remain depressed, the Kremlin could cut social programs and pressure businessmen to maintain full employment, Clifford Gaddy, an economist specializing in Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said by phone. “This regime is more consciously prepared to deal with low oil prices than either the Soviets or the authorities in the 1990s,” Gaddy said. “It’s possible that they are over-extended, but Putin is a strategic planner who has certainly considered life at various price points.”

Putin Lures Russia Scholars With Chilled Vodka, Raw Octopus 
October 3, 2014, Bloomberg
By Kasia Klimasinska
Some attendees try to get Putin’s autograph, turning into “little groupies,” said Clifford Gaddy, an economist specializing in Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has attended Valdai gatherings…. According to the Brookings experts’ account, Putin used one of the meetings to explain his views on the dangers of fracking, the technology that allowed the U.S. to top Russia’s oil production and spurred hopes for higher domestic natural-gas production in Eastern Europe, which is highly dependent on imports from Russia.

How ExxonMobil swayed US sanctions and strengthened Putin’s hand
September 30, 2014, Quartz
By Steve LeVine
Of course, even if the sanctions are lifted, ExxonMobil may decide not to develop the Russian Arctic right away. “It strikes me as very expensive oil and gas to produce and transport compared to alternatives, both non-conventional and deep-water, elsewhere in the world,” Richard Kauzlarich, a former US ambassador and member of the US National Intelligence Council, said in an email. “Could Exxon choose to slow-roll the Russians?”

Independence activists still win with Scottish ‘No’ vote
September 19, 2014, USA Today
By Oren Dorell and Kim Hjelmgaard
And though British Prime Minister David Cameron may have won the day, his victory comes at a considerable price: the promise of greater financial autonomy to the country’s regions, meaning future squabbles and more division lie ahead for the Union. Salmond “has potentially transformed the United Kingdom,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “This referendum basically begins a process on issues of governance.”

Ukrainian president goes to Washington wanting more than moral support
September 18, 2014, CBS News
By Stephanie Condon
The bill, however, could at least help stave off further Russian aggression, Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News. Ukraine could never beat Russian forces, he noted, but with lethal military support like anti-armor weapons, it could impose greater costs on Russia for its interference. So far, the Obama administration has been hesitant to provide lethal support, but “if you’re overly cautious the Russians may be tempted to escalate,” Pifer said.

Washington fears vote for Scottish independence could damage ‘special relationship’
September 16, 2014, McClatchy
Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, predicted that in the event of a vote for independence, the Obama administration “in order to make the best of a bad situation,” will mostly likely urge the fast completion of a “negotiated, agreeable divorce.” “They will, I think, quietly, and to some extent behind the scenes, push for EU and NATO membership for Scotland on reasonably fair terms,” Shapiro said last week at a Brookings event. “The U.S. essentially sees this as two of its best friends divorcing and that is never a joyful experience.”

Syrian child workers ‘left behind in life’
September 16, 2014, Yahoo News
Turkey’s Disaster & Emergency Management office (AFAD), the government body responsible for Syrian refugees in Turkey, estimates that the number of Syrian in Turkey exceeded 900,000 as of April 2014. Approximately 220,000 live in refugee camps, while others are scattered in cities across the country. Syrian refugees joining the informal labour market has pushed wages down, which has increased resentment among the local population, wrote Kemal Kirisci in a brief for the Brookings Institute. “Current Turkish labour laws make it very difficult for Syrian refugees to obtain work permits and seek employment in the formal economy,” he found.

Global players may just need to like or lump a Yes
September 16, 2014, Herald Scotland
By David Leask
Take the United States. President Barack Obama has already said he thinks we’re Better Together. But how will he react if we decide that we are not? Fiona Hill, director of the Centre on the United States and Europe at Washington’s Brookings Institute, has an inkling. “There will be quiet work behind the scenes to make sure the UK and Scotland handle this thing well,” she said. “I can’t see that it would be in the US interests to have Scotland left out of the EU and Nato. Why would they want that?” And, with the Kremlin re-invigorated, he’ll have to dig deeper into his pockets. “Scotland will have to step up and not try to hide behind England’s coat tails on defence,” said Ms Hill. “Before Vladimir Putin decided to move in to Crimea it would have been a safe bet you could get away with lower spending. Not now.”

The End of Ukraine?
September 15, 2014, Maclean’s
By Michael Petrou
Western sanctions, and the retaliatory Russian ones, hurt those countries as well. Here, too, Russia is likely willing to absorb more punishment than its adversaries. “Russia is prepared to fight harder to keep from losing Ukraine than the West is prepared to fight to get it,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former American ambassador to Ukraine. But there’s another factor to consider, says Pifer: “Do the Russians care more than the Ukrainians? How hard are the Ukrainians prepared to fight if this ceasefire collapses?”

Washington waits as the Scots mull independence
September 13, 2014, EuroNews
Jeremy Shapiro, is from the Brookings Institution a Washington think-tank: “The Trident issue reflects directly on US security and on the role that the UK plays in overall security of the west, NATO and the nuclear deterrent. So it’s of particular interest. There are specific technical issues which would need to be resolved which the United States obviously has a direct interest in.”The White House will be watching the implications of a Scottish vote for independence on other important European allies such as Spain and Italy

Azerbaijan Tightens Screws On Civil Society, Independent Media
September 9, 2014, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Robert Coalson
Former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Richard Kauzlarich agrees that Baku believes the West is distracted by Ukraine and the Middle East and could be using the opportunity “to complete the internal repression and eliminate foreign NGOs.” In a written response to a query from RFE/RL, Kauzlarich also says Baku might be giving in to Russian pressure to distance itself from the West. Another possibility, he says, is that Baku could be reacting to pressure from Washington to negotiate a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict “rather than [impose] the Azerbaijan solution on Armenia.”

Kurdish Question Litmus Test for Turkey’s New Government, Experts Say
September 8, 2014, Rudaw 
By Yerevan Saeed
“Now the question is: how can a Turkey that becomes more autocratic provide hope for solving the Kurdish problem? said Omer Taspınar, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and an expert on Turkey and its estimated 15 million Kurds. “This is the paradox: can the president with centralized decision making, who wants to continue a hegemonic style of governance, provide hope for the most important issues of the country, such as human rights, democracy, minority rights and the Kurdish question?” Taspinar asked.

U.S. Delegation Is to Visit Moscow to Review Claims of a Missile Violation
September 8, 2014, The New York Times
By Michael R. Gordon
And some Western experts say that Moscow has not pursued meaningful compromises over the issue and seems disinterested in negotiating deeper cuts in long-range arms as it pursues a weapons modernization program that involves the deployment of new nuclear-tipped land-based missiles, new missile firing submarines and a new air-launched cruise missile. “As much as I would like to see deeper nuclear reductions, the Russians are unlikely to agree to a new treaty during the remainder of President Obama’s term,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who served as a senior State Department official.

Did Vladimir Putin Just Save NATO?
September 4, 2014, The Daily Beast
By Nico Hines
Steven Pifer, who spent 30 years working on Russia and NATO at the State Department and the National Security Council, said it was high time the member states remembered why the North Atlantic Treaty was drawn up in the first place. “NATO has to take some steps that are designed to reinforce the Article 5 collective defense provision—and I think that effect is entirely attributable to Mr. Putin,” he said.

Obama Expresses Skepticism About Possible Ukraine Cease-Fire
September 3, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Colleen McCain Nelson
Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said “the very act of going to Estonia is a shot across Putin’s bow.” Mr. Putin has been unbowed by warnings from the West or sanctions. Russia’s incursion into Ukraine has ramped up in recent days, and Mr. Putin said last week that his forces could take Kiev in two weeks if he desired, according to a European Union official.

Can NATO Find A Way To Contain Russia?
September 3, 2014, NPR
By Greg Myre
To allay Russian concerns, the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 stipulates that NATO won’t put nuclear weapons or permanently base combat forces in Eastern Europe. “NATO, when it enlarged, tried to do it in a way that was not militarily threatening to Russia,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, who is now at the Brookings Institution, told NPR. But trust has always been lacking. The two maps below show how dramatically Europe’s landscape has changed since the Soviet breakup. While NATO countries see the steady advance of the alliance’s protective shield, Russia sees the relentless encroachment on a region it regards as its sphere of influence.

NATO Plans New Military Outposts to Stop Putin—Just Don’t Call Them Bases
September 3, 2014, The Daily Beast
By Eli Lake
However, Jeremy Shapiro, an expert on NATO at the Brookings Institution and a former member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, said new crippling sanctions on Russia would be risky. “Russia is bigger than all of our previous sanction targets put together,” he said. “It has a lot more links with the world economy than any other country in the past. There is almost nothing to learn from the Iranian experience, the U.S. government cannot know what the meaning of these sanctions really are.”

Obama to Push NATO’s Renewed Purpose
September 2, 2014, National Journal
By George E. Condon Jr.
Steven Pifer, who spent more than 25 years working on Russian and European issues at the State Department and as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, said the current crisis in Ukraine has sharpened the thinking of the allied leaders. Now at the Brookings Institution, Pifer said he detects “really a strong sense within the alliance that NATO needs to come home; needs to refocus on territorial defense, and needs to move away from the out-of-area counterinsurgency stabilization missions that have characterized the last ten or 15 years.”

Why President Obama’s trip to Europe probably won’t be boring this time around
September 2, 2014, The Washington Post
By Katie Zezima
Let’s face it: NATO summits aren’t usually the most scintillating gatherings. “President Obama has supposedly said that he finds these things dull,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “[Former Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates reportedly wouldn’t go to NATO meetings unless his staff supplied him with a sufficient number of crossword puzzles.” But the summit to take place this week in Wales should buck the trend.

Is Vladimir Putin Covering Up the Deaths of Russian Soldiers in Ukraine?
September 1, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Reid Standish
Putin has seen his approval ratings sky-rocket amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine, but mounting casualties are likely to undercut the political benefits Putin has accrued from his stand-off with the West. “Short, bloodless, victorious wars are popular everywhere,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told Foreign Policy. “It’s only afterwards, when the casualties begin to mount, that people start to ask, ‘Was that really worth it?’”

Obama to Reassure Baltic States Worried About Russia
September 1, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Colleen McCain Nelson
Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that by visiting Tallinn and emphasizing the defense of NATO allies, Mr. Obama is putting his own credibility on the line and sending the message that the U.S. will respond to Russian provocation. “That means that, ‘If you do something, I’m going to have no choice but to respond,’ ” he said of the implications of Mr. Obama’s trip. “I am committing myself and the United States of America to a forceful response.’…That’s definitely a message to the Russians and to Vladimir Putin.”

As Obama Heads to Summit, NATO Finds Renewed Purpose 
September 1, 2014, National Journal
By George E. Condon Jr.
Steven Pifer, who spent more than 25 years working on Russian and European issues at the State Department and as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, said the current crisis in Ukraine has sharpened the thinking of the allied leaders. Now at the Brookings Institution, Pifer said he detects “really a strong sense within the alliance that NATO needs to come home; needs to refocus on territorial defense, and needs to move away from the out-of-area counterinsurgency stabilization missions that have characterized the last ten or 15 years.”

The red phone is ringing: U.S.-Russia hotline turns 51 as relations grow cold between superpowers
August 29, 2014, New York Daily News
By Victoria Johnson
With the threat of a re-emergence of the Soviet Union and Russia granting asylum to NSA-leaker Eric Snowden, Angela Stent, the author of “The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century” said Obama-Putin’s relationship is the most hostile since Kennedy and Khrushchev and that this might be the second Cold War. It’s hard to imagine Obama ever gifting Putin a wolf-skin coat — as President Gerald Ford did to President Leonid Brezhnev — or playing horseshoe on Camp David — as President George H.W. Bush and President Boris Yeltsin did. “We’re on different sides of the divide here, and it is a rivalry,” said Stent.

La OTAN abre las puertas a la incorporación de Ucrania
August 30, 2014, El Mercurio
En su momento, esto fue considerado un gesto conciliador hacia Moscú, que se sumó al arrendamiento de la base naval de Sebastopol hasta mediados de siglo, y hacia la población prorrusa del este de Ucrania, que se oponía al ingreso en el bloque aliado. Esta vez, el gobierno seguirá adelante con su petición a la que la Alianza Atlántica abrió las puertas. “Si Rusia continúa su invasión a Ucrania la oposición al acercamiento de Kiev a la OTAN va a disminuir”, afirmó a “El Mercurio” Richard Kauzlarich, experto de la Brookings Institution.

From Syria to Ukraine, crises fill the Obama-NATO agenda
August 29, 2014, McClatchy 
By Lesley Clark
The summit comes as NATO and the U.S. are preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of the year, and the Russian intervention has given the organization a new sense of purpose, analysts said. “People now see, in Moscow, a threat, a concern that wasn’t there just a year ago,” said Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.

‘Golden Sanction’ to Halt Putin in Ukraine Stays Elusive
August 28, 2014, Bloomberg
By Alan Katz, Nicole Gaouette and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
The alternative — compromising with Putin to convince him to withdraw his troops from Ukraine — is politically unacceptable in the U.S. and Europe, where leaders have built momentum behind the idea of punishing him, said Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Putin biographer.

Just How Far Will the Empire Strike Back?
August 28, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Elias Groll and Reid Standish
According to Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution, Russia would need on the order of 50,000 to 80,000 troops just to occupy the city of Luhansk or Donetsk. To carve out a corridor from Luhansk to Donetsk would require a vastly larger number and would place Russian troops in areas where they are likely to receive a hostile reception by the local population.

Ukraine says Russian forces cross border in tanks, armored vehicles
August 25, 2014, The Washington Post
By Annie Gowen and Karoun Demirjian
Steven Pifer, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the Clinton administration, said that the success or failure of the summit will depend a great deal on “what kind of attitude Putin walks into the meeting with.” Clever diplomats ought to be able to assemble a package of concessions on trade and natural resources that would enable Putin to “extract himself from this mess . . . if he wants a way out,” Pifer said.

As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way
August 15, 2014, The New York Times
By Peter Baker
“At least since World War II, presidents have been unwilling to discuss deficiencies in capability because they’re expected to do everything, and they like that sense of omnipotence,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama State Department official now at the Brookings Institution. “Obama has been trying to change that in the last year because he senses that the requirements of omnipotence have gotten so far out of whack with what he can actually accomplish that he needs to change the expectations.”

Putin Seen Punishing Own People Not Foes With Sanctions
August 8, 2014, Bloomberg
By David J. Lynch
Putin, a former KGB officer who has effectively ruled Russia for almost 15 years, probably believes he can outlast his adversaries, says Steven Pifer, who was U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. “For a country that imports 40 percent of its foodstuffs, banning imported food would seem to be an odd strategy,” he said. “But the calculation he’s making here is that he can find a way to ride this out.”

Iraq Strikes Seen as Giving Putin Pretext in Ukraine
August 8, 2014, The New York Times
By Peter Baker
Just as Mr. Obama says he is trying to protect Yazidis and Kurds threatened by Sunni Muslim extremists, Mr. Putin may argue he wants to protect Russian speakers from Ukrainian fascists. “This could provide another justification — he could just throw it back at us,” said Fiona Hill, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former American government intelligence officer on Russia who helped write “Mr. Putin,” a book on the Russian leader. “Whether this is the excuse he needs or not is another question. But is this an excuse he may use? Absolutely. It just adds more fuel to his fire if he wants one.”

Russia’s Food Fight Could Leave It With Egg on Its Face
August 7, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Jamila Trindle and David Francis
Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said relying on domestic agriculture will likely prove politically popular for Russian President Vladimir Putin but impractical. “It will appeal to the domestic constituency in rural areas,” Pifer said. “The problem is, you don’t build apple orchards to replace 700 tons of Polish apples overnight.”

Sanctions Target Russian Oil, But Will That Persuade Putin?
August 2, 2014, NPR
By Jim Zarroli
“Europe now gets probably 25 to 30 percent of the natural gas it uses from Russia, and the Europeans don’t want to see that cut off,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Nor will the sanctions affect oil production that’s taking place now. Any impact the sanctions will have on the oil sector is very long-term. Russia now has vast oil supplies, exporting 10 million barrels a day. But over the next few decades, the reserves are expected to run dry.

Vladimir Putin: Collision course
July 25, 2014, Financial Times
By Kathrin Hille
“Sanctions will be costly to Russia; there is no disputing that . . . But if the motivation is defence of vital national interests and survival, Russia – like any state – will resort to import substitution and even more radical sorts of interventions to defend itself, no matter what the cost,” Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes wrote in a paper for the Brookings Institution in May. “History tells us that Russians can endure enormous hardship. Coping and survival are part of Russian history and the Russian national identity.”

Is Putin getting away with murder?
July 24, 2014, Maclean’s
By: Michael Petrou
“The United States and Europe do not have a way to directly affect the calculations of separatists in eastern Ukraine, so the target has to be Moscow,” says Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former American ambassador to Ukraine. “What you want to do is press the Russians, first and foremost, to cut the supply of weapons that is going into eastern Ukraine and is sustaining this conflict, and then get Moscow to press the separatists to stop fighting.”

U.S. Stops Short of Finding Russian Role in MH17 Crash
July 23, 2014, Bloomberg
By: David Lerman and Nicole Gaouette
Churkin said during debate at the UN that the video was shot in Ukraine, not Russia. The U.S. intelligence community is now sorting through data to verify the location, the American officials said. “That’s a hopeless battle,” Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group, said of a narrative tussle with Russia over events. “Who would we ever want to convince of our version who doesn’t already believe it? Russian citizens? Forget it. We shouldn’t even waste our time battling over the narrative.”

Ukraine Knew of Separatists’ Air-Defense Capabilities, Say Officials
July 19, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Margaret Coker and Robert Wall
“It’s about 90% certain that the separatists shot down the aircraft down by accident,” said Steven Pifer, director of arms control and nonproliferation at Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution. Although Ukraine and Russia have Buk antiaircraft systems, “I would think it improbable the system would not have been provided by the Russians,” he said.

Russia isn’t an immutable force
July 18, 2014, Global Post
By Gregory Feifer
The venerable Brookings scholars Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes recently wrote that the crisis in Ukraine is the indirect result of NATO expansion in the 1990s, which threatened Moscow at a time it couldn’t counter that move. It’s inevitable, they argue, that Russia, the traditional great power, would seek to defend its interests by opposing such threats to its influence. Now Western countries would do best to help solve the Ukraine crisis by doing what it takes to assure Russia its power isn’t at risk.

U.S. weighing new sanctions if Moscow is linked to airliner crash
July 18, 204, The Los Angeles Times
By Paul Richter
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said separatists were suspected of shooting down the plane because the Ukrainian military’s missiles were further from the front lines. He said it was likely that the West would begin pressing much harder on Russia to stop its arms supply to the separatists. Pifer, now with the Brookings Institution, said there were strong arguments for Putin to shift ground and reduce his support for the separatists. Already, he noted, the Russian leader has gotten much of what he has wanted: The Ukrainian government has agreed to decentralize power in Ukraine, to respect the Russian language, and not to seek to join NATO.

Dutch Forces Found at Fault in the Srebrenica Massacre — 20 Years Later
July 17, 2014, VICE News
By Kayla Ruble
“Anything that touches on Srebrenica… it always reopens wounds that were never really closed,” Richard Kauzlarich, the former US ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, told VICE News. “[The court case] in itself is a bitter reminder of what happened in those horrific days when Srebrenica fell.” According to Kauzlarich, ethnic tensions in the country have not resolved over time and these events give a reason to revisit the very issues that led to the conflict in the first place. While the physical damage of the war has largely been repaired, Kauzlarich said psychological fear and hatred towards others are still present.

U.S., EU Escalate Russia Sanctions as Putin Holds Firm
July 16, 2014, Bloomberg
By Margaret Talev and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
“These sanctions get the Russians’ attention,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in Washington, said in a phone interview. “You’re now targeting major companies — Rosneft, Novatek and now the Gazprombank.” OAO Gazprom (OGZD), the Russian gas giant, wasn’t included in the sanctions.
‘What they’re trying to do is find a way to ratchet up the sanctions while holding something in reserve,’’ Pifer said of the U.S. actions. “They’re trying to do this in a graduated way.”

As Ukrainian forces advance, Putin plays a double game
July 14, 2014, Reuters
By David Rohde
“Putin in the last several weeks has been playing a dual game,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and Brookings Institution senior fellow. “There have been things that suggest that Russia wants to help solve this diplomatically … But you’ve continued to see evidence that Russians weapons are flowing into Ukraine.”

New Ukraine FM Seen Bringing Sober Style to Kyiv Diplomacy
June 23, 2014, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Carl Schreck
Analysts say Klimkin’s central role in negotiating the terms of the agreement was likely a key factor in his appointment. “Klimkin is an experienced diplomat, with a substantial background in Ukraine-Europe relations,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told RFE/RL. “So I see his appointment as confirmation that President Poroshenko attaches priority to developing Kyiv’s relationship with the European Union.”

Obama’s Mideast airstrike refrain: ‘And then what?’
June 19, 2014, The Los Angeles Times
By Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons
Wednesday, however, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed Obama’s approval rating on foreign affairs had hit 37%, a new low in the survey. “For the first time, they are wondering about whether they have to look strong,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a Middle East expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution who until recently served in the State Department. “I think that the president is going to be very loath to submit to those pressures,” Shapiro said. But if the decision on force becomes a “close call,” then “it’s more possible now than it was last year.”

U.S. Issues More Russia Sanctions Threats; Markets Yawn
June 19, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Jamila Trindle
“The sanctions have still completely failed in their primary political purpose in terms of changing Russia’s course,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If the Russians conclude that it’s all talk, they’re not going to respond the way we want them to.”

US, Iran hold ‘intensive, useful’ talks as negotiations intensify
June 10, 2014, Al-Monitor
By Laura Rozen
“Subconsciously, [Fabius] hates when [the] US-Iran meet bilaterally for the usual French reasons,” Jeremy Shapiro, a Brookings fellow in foreign policy studies, told Al-Monitor. “More consciously, he doesn’t trust the US as negotiators and believes he plays an important role in shoring them up and ensuring that they don’t give away the store.” France’s new political director Nicolas de Riviere will take part in bilateral discussions with Iranian negotiators in Geneva on Wednesday, Araghchi told Iran’s IRNA news agency.

Conflict with Russia over Ukrainian Crisis not New ‘Cold War’
June 6, 2014, RIA Novosti
It is premature to say that Russia and the West once again plunged into a ‘cold war’, the Ukrainian conflict is a regional rather than a global problem, participants of an expert forum said Thursday in Washington. “The reason that it [current conflict] isn’t a cold war is that it’s not global and its nature is not ideological,” Director of the Center on US and Europe, Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill said. The Ukrainian crisis looks more like a regional European crisis, but “not a cold war in a dimension that it was before,” Hill clarified.

Russia Tried to Disrupt Ukraine Vote, Senate Panel Told
June 5, 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek
By Nicole Gaouette
With Russia’s close ties to Ukraine, it’s important that Moscow is drawn to become “part of the solution, not part of the problem,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told the Senate committee. Pifer, Green and others stressed the need to help Ukraine build its infrastructure, its ability to govern and its ability to connect to citizens in the eastern part of the country, where Russian-backed separatists have mounted an insurgency. There was unanimous consent on the need to proceed with sanctions, particularly as the Russian economy has been struggling, said Pifer, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group.

Former Officials: US Should Give Ukraine Anti-Armor Weapons, Deploy Own ‘Heavy’ Forces
June 5, 2014, Defense News
By John T. Bennett
“One area where the United States should do more is military assistance,” Steven Pifer, US ambassador to Ukraine under the Clinton administration, said Thursday. “It is appropriate to consider providing light anti-armor weapons and man-portable air defense systems, particularly since the Ukrainian military, at US and NATO request, eliminated many of its [MANPADS] so that they would not be subject to possible theft and terrorist use,” said Pifer, who also was a senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

Obama visit to region highlights very different paths taken by Poland and Ukraine
June 2, 2014, The Washington Post
By Zachary Goldfarb
But Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said a reform program for Ukraine, with a population of 45 million, might have to be comparable in size to that which was deployed to reincorporate East Germany into West Germany. Reunification, beginning in 1990, took more than a decade and cost more than a trillion dollars. “Twenty-five years later, the appetite for taking on those huge economic transformations is no longer there,” Hill said.

Obama to urge Europe to keep up pressure on Russia
June 2, 2014, Associated Press
But at least some parts of Obama’s visit will challenge the notion that the West has isolated Moscow. Russian President Vladmir Putin is scheduled to join U.S. and European leaders in France Friday for a day of events marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Putin will also hold one-on-one talks with French President Francois Hollande, his first meeting with a Western leader since the Ukraine crisis began. “Putin may not get to host the G-8 but if he gets to go to Normandy with everybody, it begins to diminish the appearance of isolation,” said Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who now serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Inside Azerbaijan’s Bizarre U.S. Lobbying Push
June 2, 2014, BuzzFeed
By Rosie Gray
Experts say the Azeris are looking to both compete with the Armenian lobby in the U.S. and also show their bosses back home they are simply accomplishing something. “In part they’re taking their cues from things the Armenian-American groups have done in California where they’ve gotten cities or state governments to pass similar kinds of resolutions on behalf of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Richard Kauzlarich. Nagorno-Karabkh remains disputed between the two countries, and experts have warned for years that conflict could again break out over the territory.

La Turquie plus que jamais divisée à l’aube de la présidentielle 
June 2, 2014, LaPresse 
Cette volonté de polarisation à l’extrême du pays fonctionne, puisqu’elle a permis à l’AKP d’emporter haut-la-main les municipales du 30 mai (30%). “Cette stratégie populiste et opportuniste de la victimisation paie au moment des scrutins, car les Turcs aiment les perdants,” estime le professeur Omer Taspinar, codirecteur du programme turc de la Brookings Institution. “Mais l’AKP a remporté toutes les élections depuis 2002», ajoute-t-il, «alors pourquoi une telle agressivité et une telle intolérance?”

Obama Heads to Europe
June 1, 2014, National Journal
By George E. Condon Jr.
“Ninety percent of reassurance is showing up,” said Jeremy Shapiro, recalling Woody Allen’s famous dictum. Shapiro, a senior adviser on Europe and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff in Obama’s first term, added, “The main thing he has to do on the trip is show up in terms of Poland. Essentially, what he’s trying to say to Poland and to other Eastern European countries in NATO is that the United States is behind you.” That reassurance is badly needed, according to Ryszard Schnepf, the Polish ambassador to the United States.

Vladimir Putin, Master Player
May 28, 2014, Los Angeles Times
By Doyle McManus
“Putin has been watching carefully how people react,” Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, a longtime Putin-watcher, told me. “By pulling back over the elections, he created himself a breathing space…. Now everyone is saying, ‘We must deal with Russia.’ But that puts Russia in the driver’s seat. “Even Poroshenko is saying it’s time for normalization with Moscow,” she noted. “He knows who’s going to call the shots over Ukraine’s future: not Brussels, not Washington. It’s Moscow.”

Despite Fighting, Hopes Rise In Ukraine
May 26, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Lukas I Alpert, James Marson and Ian Talley
A second European diplomat said there were already many member states who were hoping the situation would calm and they wouldn’t have to impose the broader measures, which are likely to cause significant economic pain to Europe as well. But that doesn’t mean that the sanctions battle is over. Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who’s now a director of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, said the West would remain vigilant. “If the Russians don’t use their influence with the separatists if the crisis escalates, then they’re not helping and that would merit consideration of further sanctions,” Mr. Pifer said

Russian tech start-ups abandon Moscow
May 24, 2014, USA Today
By Oren Dorell
Economist Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution says recent confrontation with the West over Crimea and what the State Department says is Russian meddling in eastern Ukraine has created a new sense of “the Russian nation under assault.” The USA and Europe implemented sanctions against about 30 Russian individuals and dozens of companies. The sanctions forced Visa and MasterCard to stop doing business with four sanctioned Russian banks, and the credit giants may leave Russia altogether. That would be a major blow to Russian companies with Western customers, Gaddy said.

Confused about what’s at stake in Ukraine’s elections? Here are five things to know.
May 23, 2014, Christian Science Monitor
By Sara Miller Llana
Despite the obstacles – in addition to the corruption and distrust that have marred Ukrainian democracy in the past two decades – some do believe that a successful election is the only way to steer the country away from crisis. “I think they… realize how dire the situation is,” says Steven Pifer, who was the American ambassador to Ukraine in the late 1990s. “And if they do not take advantage of the possibilities they have now they will be in a very difficult situation for years, if not decades.”

Turkey Seeks More Assistance For Syrian Refugees
May 22, 2014, Daily Sabah
By Ragıp Soylu
However, the rapid increase in the number of Syrians who are looking for immediate shelter in Turkish metropolitan areas has forced the government to seek extra measures to help with the growing demands of those people. “It is clear that refugees are not about to return home anytime soon. The refugee population outside camps is expected to surpass 1 million by the end of the year. The government is trying to register them but the process is far from complete. Turkey should recognize that many Syrians have already started to integrate into Turkish society,” wrote Kemal Kirişci, a senior fellow of Brookings Institute in his report on the Syrian refugees crisis.

What You Need To Know About Russia And China’s Gas Deal 
May 22, 2014, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Luke Johnson
However, Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes on Russia’s economy, says that there are so many components to the contract that individual figures are close to meaningless. “Looking at something like the price, looking at something like an interest rate on a loan, or a size of the loan or the amount of the prepayment — any individual item like that really doesn’t mean anything unless we were to know the whole array of provisions in this giant deal,” Gaddy says. “There’s incentives to obviously make it look like this is a good deal for one or the other side. The Russians certainly don’t want to look like they’re caving in too much.”

Ukraine Crisis Pushing Putin Toward China
May 19, 2014, The New York Times
By Neil MacFarquhar and David M. Herszenhorn
“That is a big shift,” said Clifford Gaddy, of the Brookings Institution in Washington and the author of a book on Mr. Putin, “and indicates how serious they are in taking a step toward China.” Mr. Gaddy added, “It is a shift in rhetoric, and we will see if it is followed up with a shift in action.” In highlighting that the sanctions are helping to disrupt the Russian economy, the Obama administration has virtually ignored that it is pushing Russia toward greater dependence on China, Mr. Gaddy noted.

Russia’s ‘wake-up call’ has West pondering once-unlikely scenarios
May 17, 2014, McClatchy 
By James Rosen
“NATO is not going to intervene militarily to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity, nor is NATO prepared for such a contingency,” Riccardo Alcaro, an expert on trans-Atlantic politics and security at the Brookings Institution in Washington, told McClatchy. “There is really no desire in either the United States but particularly in Western Europe to wage war against Russia over Ukraine.” The only scenario in which NATO would even consider military intervention, Alcaro said, would be if there were “massive bloodshed for an extended period of time” in Ukraine.

Russia’s Energy Giant Turns Up The Heat On Ukraine
May 14, 2014, NPR
By Jackie Northam
Clifford Gaddy, a Russia specialist at the Brookings Institution, says as the dispute between the two countries grows, Moscow is more willing to use natural gas as a weapon. “The ways in which Russia can play with this gas lever, how it can use it, these are not things that they just think of from one day to the next,” Gaddy says. “They’ve thought out the scenarios; they’ve gamed it all; they have fallback options; they’re using it very tactically.”

NSA looms over Merkel-Obama visit
May 2, 2014, The Hill
By Julian Hattem
The NSA is not expected to be a major part of Friday’s meeting, with the two leaders focused on how to deal with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean it won’t continue to bubble to the surface, analysts say. “I don’t think they can very easily just move on from this, but that doesn’t mean that cooperation on other dossiers is precluded,” said Jonathan Laurence, a political science professor at Boston College and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In U.S., Calls To Hold Energy-Rich Baku’s Feet To The Fire Over Rights
May 2, 2014, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
By Luke Johnson and Carl Schreck
Richard Kauzlarich, former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan under the Clinton administration, said that Azerbaijan would be more successful in painting itself as an attractive partner for Western countries by improving its human rights record rather than cracking down at home. “If the Azerbaijanis were thinking about ways to increase the attractiveness of Azerbaijan as a strategic partner, they would, you know, they would move in the opposite direction: releasing political prisoners, removing the restrictions on access to media and generally improving the human rights situation,” Kauzlarich told RFE/RL.

So Far, U.S. Sanctions Over Ukraine May Be Inflicting Only Limited Pain on Russia
May 2, 2014, The New York Times
By Peter Baker and Andrew E. Kramer
The president argues that his measured strategy has sent a potent signal while preserving a united front with hesitant European allies and holding more powerful sanctions in reserve in case Mr. Putin orders a full-scale invasion of eastern Ukraine. Some lawmakers and Russia specialists in both parties, however, argue that his approach has been too measured. “If they named two or three big financial institutions, that would have had a big impact,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine, who is now at the Brookings Institution. “They say they don’t want to shoot all the bullets at once. They could have shot some more bullets and still had plenty in reserve.”

Putin’s Endgame Collides With European Integration
May 1, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Stephen Fidler
“Putin’s territorial grab in Crimea” threatens European efforts dating back to the end of World War I to stop territorial change by force, says Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution and the author of a biography on the Russian leader. She says 20 years of assumptions about continuing European integration have been turned on their head. Mr. Putin is “telling us that he doesn’t believe in this enterprise,” she says. His endgame, she says, is one where Russia’s pre-eminence in its neighborhood is recognized. “I can’t see how that endgame is going to be acceptable to the rest of Europe.”

Sanctions Revive Search for Secret Putin Fortune
April 27, 2014, The New York Times
By Peter Baker
Some argue that Mr. Putin may want money, or the appearance of it, because it is the measure of stature and power in a society whose transition to capitalism has produced instant billionaires out of the wreckage of Communism. “I came to the conclusion after time that some of these reports may be seeded by people around Putin himself,” said Fiona Hill, who was the chief Russia expert at the National Intelligence Council and last year co-wrote a book about Mr. Putin. “Russians have to have the biggest and the best. It’s part of the mystique, part of the image.”

With ‘Condolences,’ Turkey Is Now Facing Its Own History
April 24, 2014, VICE News
By John Beck
But how much weight did his statement really carry, and does it signal a change in Turkish attitudes? Erdogan’s statement was certainly designed to make an impression. Officials took the unusual step of releasing it in 9 languages, including Armenian. Kemal Kirisci, senior fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at Brookings Institute told VICE News that the wording of the statement was a significant step forward in Turkish-Armenian relations. “I think it is a very important development, Turkey is on a journey and is increasingly facing its own history.”

Russia bars Tartar leader Mustafa Jemilev from entering Crimea
April 22, 2014, FT 
By Guy Chazan
The news alarmed a community that has watched Russia’s annexation of Crimea with deep disquiet and international observers. Steven Pifer, a former US Ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Brookings Institute, said the move by Russia to block Mr Jemilev’s entry into Crimea was “not likely to give Tatars confidence about life under Russian rule”.

Worldview: Putin plays long game
April 17, 2014, Philadelphia Enquirer
By Trudy Rubin
The Russian leader couldn’t care less about world opinion. His Ukrainian adventure has sent his popularity soaring at home and sends a clear message to Kiev: Either you come back under Russia’s wing, or I will ruin you – whether by destabilizing the country or by invasion. “Putin is not interested in compromise,” says the Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. “He’s playing the long game. He’s willing to push things to the end.”

Ukraine Talks End With Accord on Steps to De-Escalate Conflict
April 16, 2014, Bloomberg 
By Sangwon Yoon and Stepan Kravchenko
While the other parties to the talks won’t accept Russia’s contention that Ukraine’s regions have the right to secede — and even be annexed by Russia, as Crimea has — the Ukrainians have conceded that their current political structure is “too centralized,” said [Steven] Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a policy research organization in Washington. “There can be some diffusion of power and authority, which would give the provincial governments and even cities more authority, and that’d be a good thing from the perspective of effective, efficient, accountable governance,” he said.

Russia is only a regional power? Don’t bet on it, some say
April 15, 2014, McClatchy
By Hannah Allam
“Putin’s approach has been, ‘I’m going to restrict your political space, but I’m going to give you in return a growing economy and a higher living standard.’ And from 2000 to 2008, he delivered on that big time. The Russian economy grew 6 to 7 percent per year,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who leads the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative in Washington. “Their economy, in terms of the export structure, is kind of Third World,” Pifer said. “Who do you know who goes out and buys a Russian television or a Russian car or a Russian computer? Other than weapons and nuclear reactors, they don’t build things the world wants to buy.”
“If you take away the nukes and the U.N. Security Council,” he said, “they’re Brazil.”

NATO tries to assure allies as Ukraine violence spreads
April 15, 2014, USA Today
By Jim Michaels
The plan is an effort to provide assurances for NATO members, such as Poland and the Baltic states, that the United States and its allies will be able to protect countries within the alliance. “They are looking for reassurance,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine. NATO and the United States have already beefed up their naval presence in the Black Sea and increased air patrols over the Baltic nations….”What they would really like to have is some NATO military presence on the ground,” Pifer said.

Ukraine feels nervous as big powers debate fate
April 8, 2014, The Associated Press
By Maria Danilova
But Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now an analyst at the Brookings Institution, contests that view. He says that the United States, under Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomacy, wants to ensure that Ukraine is an active partner in talks. “I think Mr. Lavrov would like to make this a U.S.-Russia negotiation on Ukraine’s fate … I don’t think secretary Kerry plans to go there,” said Pifer. He cast Kerry as telling the Russians: “You have to have this conversation with Ukraine.”

US, Russia plan Ukraine talks even as worsening crisis casts doubt on dialogue
April 8, 2014, Christian Science Monitor
By Howard LaFranchi
The pro-Western government in Kiev says Moscow is really seeking to “divide and destroy” the country. And many Western experts on Russia agree with Kiev’s assessment of Russian intentions. “What we’re seeing from [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is a very clear but dark game plan,” says Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “If he can’t have Ukraine, then he is fully prepared to trash it.”

Putin Stirs Azeri Angst That Russia Is Set to Extend Sway
April 7, 2014, Bloomberg 
By Zulfugar Agayev
Azebaijan’s strategy of plotting a course between Russia and the EU has left it “even more vulnerable to Russian pressure” to join the planned Eurasian Union,Richard Kauzlarich, the U.S. envoy in Baku in 1994-1997, told the Azeri service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty March 7. While Putin has used the simmering conflicts in the Caucasus to keep Russia’s southern neighbors “off-balance,” putting at risk investments made in energy links binding Azerbaijan with Europe, such tactics have failed to undermine the projects, according to Matthew Bryza, the U.S.’s ambassador to Azerbaijan in 2010-2011.

After Crimea, West’s Spies, Armies to Raise Russia Focus
April 7, 2014, Reuters
“There is a good supply of Russia experts out there – people who have lived there with lots of good experience – but the demand has just not been there from government,” says Fiona Hill, U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia in 2006-9 and now director for the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “The Pentagon in particular has lost a lot of its Russia expertise, as has the White House,” says Hill.

U.S. Will Not Stand In Way Of Scottish Independence: Salmond
April 4, 2014, Reuters
By Alistair Bell
In the United States, government officials have started to worry about the possible dissolution of traditional ally Britain and plans by Salmond to throw Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet out of the Faslane naval base in western Scotland. “The main questions on the U.S. side have so far been on the security front. On the idea of what’s going to happen on the nuclear deterrent because obviously the U.S. has a large vested interest in the nuclear submarine capacity,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington.

Turks Doubling Money Under Erdogan Means Graft No Vote-Loser
April 2, 2014, Bloomberg
By Ali Berat Meric, Benjamin Harvey and Isobel Finkel
“Without a major economic downturn — a financial crisis, massive unemployment, a debt crisis — the Turkish people will not give up their attachment to AKP,” Omer Taspinar, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said by e-mail on March 30. “Forget corruption, ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’ sums it all.” Turkey’s gross domestic product per person adjusted for cost of living doubled to about $15,000 since Erdogan took power in 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund.

West stumbles as autocratic force trumps economics
April 1, 2014, Reuters
By David Rohde
Steven Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that economic inter-connectedness will have an impact on Putin. Pifer said the Russian leader knows he needs trade with the outside world. “While the West may rule out the military option,” Pifer wrote in an email, “it has other tools, including political isolation and financial sanctions that could inflict serious pain on the Russian economy.”

Promises of Diplomacy But No Advances in Ukraine Talks
March 30, 2014, The New York Times
By Michael R. Gordon and Neil MacFarquhar
“Ukraine’s government structure has always been overly centralized in Kiev,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as the US ambassador in Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. “The president, for example, appoints provincial governors,” Pifer added. “Some diffusion of power from Kiev to provincial capitals to deal with regional issues would likely promote more efficient, effective, and accountable governance. But we should be leery of the Russian position. Moscow does not care about more efficient governance; it wants to create opportunities to meddle in Ukraine’s internal politics.”

Flurry of diplomacy raises hopes in Ukraine
March 29, 2014, USA Today
By Richard Wolf
Steven Pifer, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institute and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said Kerry’s U-turn back to Europe was a good sign. But he expressed skepticism about Russia’s moves and motives. “It’s a good thing that there’s a conversation going,” Pifer said. But he noted that “we continue to see the Russian massing of forces along the eastern Ukraine border. The question will be, does Lavrov have something new to say?”

Russia’s economy is not in great shape—but it’s nowhere near as bad as in 1998
March 27, 2014, Quartz
By Steve LeVine
Clifford Gaddy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Barry Ickes of Penn State University did probably the best analysis of the situation. Their 1998 Foreign Affairs article, “Russia’s Virtual Economy,” (paywall), remains a classic takedown of the illusions that underlie investment booms. In their rendering, it turned out that almost nothing was as it seemed in Russia’s economy. Does the current malaise compare?

Can Obama Reassure Putin on NATO?
March 26, 2014, ABC News
By Kirit Radia
“Putin’s desire to keep Ukraine in Moscow’s geopolitical orbit means that he does not want Ukraine to draw closer to the European Union as well,” said Steven Pifer, a former US Ambassador to Ukraine who is now with the Brookings Institution. “A Ukraine that signs and implements the EU association agreement will be just as much out from Russia’s sphere of influence as a Ukraine that joins NATO. If Putin trusts the president on this (not sure that Putin would), it might help, but only partly,” Pifer added.

G-7 snubs Putin to meet on Crimea
March 24, 2014, USA Today
By Janelle Dumalaon and Oren Dorell
But Clifford Gaddy, a Russia scholar at the Brookings Institution, said the USA and its allies in Europe are in a new Cold War with Russia. He said it’s unclear how much they’ll be willing to fight it. “We’re talking about a very confrontationist relationship,” said Gaddy, who co-authored a biography titled “Mr. Putin; Operative in the Kremlin.” “Putin is not going to back down on Crimea. It’s more likely he moves ahead on other parts of Ukraine and probably elsewhere. We’re not going to formally declare that we accept that.”

Ein kühl berechnetes Spiel
March 23, 2014, tageschau.de
By Silvia Stöber
Es sei hilfreich, die Entwicklungen in Russland selbst zu verfolgen, rät Putin-Biografin Fiona Hill vom Brookings Institute in Washington. Wie bei jedem langjährigen Staatsführer bestehe auch für Putin die Gefahr, dass sowohl das Volk als auch enge Mitstreiter seine Legitimation in Frage stellen und Alternativen suchen. Schon der 2011 mit dem damaligen Präsidenten Dimitri Medwedjew abgesprochene Ämtertausch und Putins Rückkehr in den Kreml hatte Enttäuschung vor allem in der russischen Mittelschicht ausgelöst.

How America and Europe hope to put pressure on Russia
March 22, 2014, The Economist
Even if the lists are lengthened to include the families of the main targets, the sanctions will fall far short of the chokehold on Iran’s economy. Those sanctions were comparatively easy to put in place because the country was already cut off from the world economy. This is not the case for Russia. “Tough sanctions would mean saying to BP, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Boeing and Siemens that they can’t do business in Russia,” says Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. This would not only damage Western companies, but also Western governments, Ms Hill says, which could expect embarrassing videos squirrelled away by Russian spies to start appearing on the internet.

Ukraine Upheaval Highlights E.U.’s Past Miscalculations and Future Dangers
March 20, 2014, The New York Times
By Andrew Higgins
To some degree, the current clash is a result of the success of the early efforts to integrate Poland and the Baltic States into the West. “Everyone thought the Eastern Partnership was just another flabby European project,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington and co-author of a political biography of Mr. Putin. “But once a country signs up, it is in Weight Watchers and, if they follow the regimen, they change,” she said. “Russia realized this and did not like it.”

European NATO States Urged to Spend More on Defense
March 20, 2014, National Journal
In the last six years, European Union countries have reduced their defense spending by approximately 15 percent, while Russia has upped its military budget by roughly 30 percent, concluded a 2013 report by the Center for European Reform. “This requires a complete reappraisal of how we approach Russia,” said Brookings’Fiona Hill, a former U.S. national intelligence officer who focused on Russia. “Putin has made it very clear he intends to reassert Russia’s sphere of influence. … We don’t have a strategy to deal with that.” Moscow’s actions in Ukraine have particularly worried Eastern NATO countries such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which fear Russia might next turn its sights on them.

Tumult In Crimea Has Some Fearing A Cold War Redux
March 19, 2014, NPR
By Michele Keleman
Said Fiona Hill: “He’s operating in a very different framework from us and different from what people have been assuming. All the way along, there’s been this kind of sense that Russia was moving in a different direction. And what Vladimir Putin is saying that Russia’s present is shaped by its past, by this perception of the past. I mean, really, he has put Russia back, but he isn’t putting Russia in a place that leads it forward. And now, we’ve got to figure out, you know, where do we go from here in this relationship?”

La crise ukrainienne, une épreuve décisive pour l’OTAN
March 19, 2014, Le Monde
By Nathalie Guibert
L’OTAN voit sa politique d’élargissement questionnée, la crise enterrant toute perspective dans l’espace post-soviétique. «L’OTAN devrait approfondir sa coopération avec la Géorgie et la Moldavie (…). Mais elle doit éviter des gestes qui déclencheraient un nouveau conflit dans le Caucase qu’elle n’assumerait pas», estime Steven Pifer, expert de la Brookings Institution et ancien ambassadeur américain à Kiev.

Obama imposes sanctions on 11 Russians, Ukrainians over Crimea
March 18, 2014, Reuters
By Steve Holland, Matt Spetalnick and Susan Heavey
Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said Surkov was a long-time Putin assistant and that Glazyev had been the Kremlin’s point person on Ukraine over the past year. “These steps by themselves likely will not change Mr. Putin’s course, but he has to take account that both U.S. and EU officials say more sanctions are on offer, perhaps including broader financial measures against Russia,” Pifer said.

Putin’s Motives Rooted in History Remain a Mystery Abroad
March 18, 2014, Bloomberg 
By Nicole Gaouette
Fiona Hill, also a Brookings scholar and co-author with Clifford Gaddy of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” argues that the Russian president, a 61-year-old former KGB officer, is best understood as a composite of multiple identities that stem from his and his country’s past experiences. His views, they say, “have deep roots” in several centuries of Russian political thought. “This is why Putin’s actions in Ukraine are broadly popular in Russia — among both the ‘patriotic elites’ and the general public — and have resulted, in February-March 2014, in a significant surge in his approval ratings,” Hill writes in a March 16 Brookings paper.

Experts say sanctions will have little influence on Vladimir Putin
March 17, 2014, Washington Examiner
By Brian Hughes
“In the world, as Putin sees it, there are only a handful of truly politically sovereign states. Even fewer states have a true national identity,” explained Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution. “Russia is more than just a ‘nation,’ a ‘people,’ a ‘state,’ it is also a separate ‘civilization.’ All this means that, for Putin, there is very little margin for negotiations, for domestic or foreign policy deals, or for taking an off-ramp,” she added.

Crimea annexation would take Moscow into uncharted waters
March 16, 2014, FT
By Guy Chazan and Kathrin Hille
Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former US ambassador to Ukraine, said Mr Putin has another alternative course of action – to “let Crimea hang in a kind of limbo of undefined status”. That would leave it, he wrote in a blogpost, like Trans Dnestr, which broke away from Moldova in the early 1990s, and allow Ukraine to keep alive “a thin glimmer of hope that [it] might some day recover Crimea”. “But the near-term prospects of recovery would be zero,” he added.

U.S. Lawmakers Call For Quick Economic Retaliation Against Russia
March 16, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Gary Fields and William Mauldin
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said the level of sanctions will depend on Russia. “The bigger question is, where does Russia go and does Putin do?” said Mr. Pifer, now with the Brookings Institution think tank. Sanctions would be imposed on a sliding scale of severity depending on Russia’s response, he said. Already, the threat has led economic forecasters at Goldman Sachs to downgrade their expectations for Russia’s economic growth this year to 1% from 3%.

European defence cuts, U.S. withdraws questioned
March 16, 2014, Reuters 
By Peter Apps and Adrian Croft
While Moscow lacks its Cold War-era strength to overrun much of Europe, President Vladimir Putin seems increasingly confident in intervening in his neighbourhood. “This requires a complete reappraisal of how we approach Russia,” says Fiona Hill, U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia from 2006-9, who now heads the Europe program at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Putin has made it very clear he intends to reassert Russia’s sphere of influence … We don’t have a strategy to deal with that.”

Why Kazakhstan and Belarus are watching Crimea very, very carefully
March 11, 2014, The Washington Post
By Adam Taylor
Russia’s actions in Crimea, however, are sure to make both Kazakhstan and Belarus worried. “It’s this whole issue of Russian speakers,” Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, says in an e-mail. “In each case they’ve got something to be concerned about.” The Kremlin has justified the use of force in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine with a vow to protect ethnic Russians, an excuse that’s easily applied in other places. In Kazakhstan, there’s a significant minority of ethnic Russians in the north of the country, Hill points out – some 24 percent of the country is said to be ethnically Russian, and the language is widely spoken.

The Ukraine blame-game
March 8, 2014, The Economist
Mr Putin is not deterred by even the toughest Western rhetoric when he sees a chance to advance national interests, says Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, who led government intelligence analysis of Russia during the Georgian crisis. The only way now to slow his march into Ukraine, she suggests, is for America to work in lockstep with Europe, preventing Mr Putin from exploiting Western divisions.

Ukraine’s fraught relationship with Russia: A brief history
March 8, 2014, The Week
By Theunis Bates
When Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms in the 1930s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin orchestrated mass executions and a famine that killed up to 10 million people. Afterward, Stalin imported millions of Russians and other Soviet citizens to help repopulate the coal- and iron-ore-rich east. This mass migration, said former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, helps explain why “the sense of Ukrainian nationalism is not as deep in the east as it is in the west.” World War II exacerbated this divide.

Putin’s Top 10 Ukraine ‘Fictions’ Cited by U.S.
March 6, 2014, Bloomberg 
By Nicole Gaouette
The list said Putin has distorted the facts about Russian troops in Crimea, Ukraine’s interim government and threats to ethnic Russians. It also revealed the Obama administration’s rising frustration with the Kremlin, according to Clifford Gaddy, a Putin biographer. “Putin has really got the goat of the Obama crowd, it seems,” said Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research group in Washington. While they’re aiming gibes at Putin, “he’ll never deign to personally engage with a bunch of nobodies at State.”

Mysterious and ‘arrogant’ Vladimir Putin seeks Russia’s return to status of world superpower
March 4, 2014, The National Post
By Tom Blackwell
But it is his 15-year career in the KGB — the feared Soviet spy agency and the job he dreamed of as a child — that perhaps most defines the man who has ruled Russia directly or indirectly since 2000, said Clifford Gaddy, co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin published last year. “His whole training, his whole identity is as a KGB field officer, a recruiter,” said the Brookings Institution economist Tuesday. “That required what Putin himself has described as his ultimate skill, which is dealing with people … That spans the gamut from being very persuasive to just reminding people that if you don’t work with me, the alternative is pretty bad.”

Obama: Russia’s actions in Ukraine put Putin on the ‘wrong side of history’
March 3, 2014, The Guardian
By Paul Lewis, Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts
Fiona Hill, a long-time expert on eastern Europe who directs the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution thinktank, said Putin had been preparing for this moment for years, and effectively inoculated the Russian economy from western sanctions. “Putin has successfully spent years reducing Russia’s vulnerabilities to western pressure and leverage,” she said. “At the same time, he has increased Russian leverage abroad, with investments in Europe and the US. And he has pretty much guaranteed we won’t introduce major sanctions because of the harm it will cause to all of our companies now doing business with Russia.”

As China Looks On, Putin Poses Risky Dilemma For The West
March 3, 2014, Reuters
By: David Rohde
Fiona Hill, a former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, credited Putin with strengthening Russia economically since gaining power in 2000. Though Russia still has economic challenges, Europe’s dependence on Russian gas supplies gives Russia a trump card that did not exist during the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s, she said. “In the years since Putin has come to power,” she said, “he has removed our leverage.” Putin has also increased the capabilities of the Russian military; crushed or co-opted dissent; and gained iron control of Russia’s media.

Putin Takes Economic Gamble With Ukraine Intervention
March 2, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Lukas I. Alpert
“If you look at how the Russians have done things in places like Moldova and Georgia, it seems they calculate that keeping neighbors on edge and off-balance is a good thing,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “Russia would much rather keep the new government in Kiev destabilized than have them become an independent force in the region.”

Making Russia Pay? It’s Not So Simple
March 1, 2014, The New York Times
By Peter Baker
“What can we do?” asked Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar who was the government’s top intelligence officer on Russia during the Georgia war when Mr. Putin deflected Western agitation. “We’ll talk about sanctions. We’ll talk about red lines. We’ll basically drive ourselves into a frenzy. And he’ll stand back and just watch it. He just knows that none of the rest of us want a war.”

For Putin, Ukraine Is Too Important To ‘Lose’
February 25, 2014, Radio Free Europe
By Robert Coalson
Former U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv Steven Pifer speaks in similar terms: “The Russian have very strong motivations. I think this is a big deal for Vladimir Putin. He wants to build a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. A big part of that would be the customs union. If Ukraine is moving towards the European Union, there’s a big hole in that sphere. And I think it’s also important for Vladimir Putin, for his domestic political constituency. Pulling Ukraine back is popular at home. Losing Ukraine would not be popular.”

After the Revolution
February 24, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Jamila Trindle and Keith Johnson
“If the Russians choose to make life difficult for Kiev, they have lots of tools. They could raise the price of gas back to pre-December levels, they could boycott Ukrainian goods, they could even go so far as to shut off shipments of natural gas,” said Steve Pifer, a Ukraine expert at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “Putin is going to be tempted to use some of the pressure levers at his disposal to make life difficult for the new leaders. I suspect Russia will be part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Pifer said.

U.S. calls for peaceful change in Ukraine
February 22, 2014, Reuters 
By Lesley Wroughton and Mark Felsenthal
Putin sees any move to align Ukraine closer with Western Europe as undermining his efforts to build a Eurasian sphere of influence, but Europeans do not see the issue in such stark geopolitical terms, said former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer.” Russia cares more about losing Ukraine than Europe cares about gaining it,” he said. Many in Washington expect Putin to focus more closely on the issue after Sunday’s closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, to which he has devoted much time and resources.

Russia Stung By Ally Yanukovych’s Defeat in Ukraine
February 22, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By Gregory L. White
A pro-European government in Kiev, however, could find itself under heavy economic pressure from the Russians, who are a major fuel supplier and trade partner. “They have a lot of economic levers they can pull,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Kiev. Analysts also warned that a major setback in Ukraine could provoke the Kremlin to crack down further on opponents at home, as it did after the Orange Revolution, which Russian officials perceived as a western-orchestrated takeover.

Putin’s Dictators
February 21, 2014, Philadelphia Inquirer
By Trudy Rubin
Yanukovych appears to be going for “the full Assad” says the Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, co-author of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. “The idea is to have no compromise, even though there could have been a way out with the demonstrators.” A team of Russian “crowd control” experts is said to be aiding the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

The Loan That Launched a Crisis
February 20, 2014, Foreign Policy
By Jamila Trindle
Yanukovych didn’t want to make any changes to that system for fear of weakening his grip on the country. Wealthy businessmen and people close to Yanukovych have grown wealthy, even as the rest of the economy slipped into recession. “There’s a reason that Yanukovych’s son, a dentist by training, is now one of the most successful businessmen in Ukraine,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp
February 13, 2014, The New York Times
By Mac McClelland
Many thought the fighting in Syria wouldn’t last very long. That’s one reason, says Kemal Kirisci, director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution, that the Turks may have invested in such elaborate camps. “It needs to be seen in the context of Turkey’s policy to create one integrated market in the Middle East. The Syrians were going to come, and they were going to stay in these camps, and every single one was going to go home and become grand ambassadors of Turkey.” As Turkey’s economy has grown, so has its hope of being a significant actor on the geopolitical stage. “The Turks have a burning desire to show the external world how great they’re doing. These camps are a very visible way of doing it. With the assumption that it wouldn’t last long, the cost was worth the benefit.”

In Ukraine standoff, echoes of U.S.-Russia Cold War tensions
February 12, 2014, Reuters
By Warren Strobel and Matt Spetalnick
But he and others said the United States is not in a strong position to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis. “The strength of motivation is on the Russian side,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank. “It’s a hard problem,” Pifer said. If the United States and EU promised cash-strapped Ukraine $15 billion, “Putin would say fine, here’s $25 billion. He’s in a position to outbid us on this one.”

US, Russia maneuver to influence Ukraine’s political future
November 11, 2014, Deutsche Welle
By Spencer Kimball
According to Steven Pifer, former US ambassador to Ukraine, sanctions should also target President Viktor Yanukovych’s inner-circle, which includes government officials and business people. “Rinat Akhmetov, the wealthiest oligarch, has been fairly close to Mr. Yanukovych,” Pifer told DW. “I think it would be useful if Mr. Akhmetov was using his influence with President Yanukovych to encourage him to negotiate in a serious way to find a solution. “If there was some threat that there might be financial or travel sanctions on Mr. Akhmetov, that could be a useful lever,” he said.

Beyond Sochi — Putin, Russia losing battle with radical Islam
February 7, 2014, FoxNews.com
By Anna Borshchevskaya
In no small part, the problem stems from Russia’s own policies that tend to rely on crude “crushing” rather than a more sophisticated approach. As Brookings scholar Fiona Hill wrote in 2002, “Russia is not so much being targeted by terrorism as inadvertently spawning it. State failure, not success, is the root of Russia’s terrorist threat.”

“Russland ist tatsächlich eine Demokratie”
February 7, 2014, Hamburger Abendblatt
By Thomas Frankenfeld
Der britische Kriegspremier Winston Churchill sah Russland als “ein Rätsel, gehüllt in ein Mysterium, innerhalb eines Geheimnisses”. Das Gastgeberland der Spiele von Sotschi ist selbst für Experten wie Fiona Hill “nicht einfach zu kategorisieren”. Die gebürtige Nordengländerin ist Direktorin des Centers on the United States and Europe an der Brookings Institution in Washington, einer der renommiertesten Denkfabriken der Welt.

US brings memories of Boston to Sochi
February 7, 2014, Deutsche Welle
By Conor Dillon
Russian expert Pavel K. Baev, whose career began in the Soviet Union’s defense ministry and has led to his current nonresident senior post with the Brookings Institute think tank in Washington D.C, considers the warships an “overreaction.” “I think it is really going too far in the risk assessments,” he told DW. Moving combat ships in the Black Sea, he added, doesn’t look good in the context of the Olympic spirit. “Even if Sochi goes perfectly smoothly, the aftertaste will still be there. The spoilers, many of them, have already done their damage.”

Leaked Ukraine Phone Call Puts U.S. Credibility On The Line
February 6, 2014, NPR
By Michele Kelemen
Former ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution, is sounding hopeful that she will be able to put this embarrassing recording behind her. “What’s going on in Ukraine in my view is being driven first and foremost by Ukrainians. I think the United States and the EU have some ability to influence the margins. But the idea that the Americans and the Europeans are directing this is just silly.”

Scottish independence: UK risks losing geopolitical pull says US
February 6, 2014, Financial Times
By Geoff Dyer
Given that the Scottish National party is opposed to housing the British nuclear deterrent, the future of British nuclear policy would face serious questions if the independence vote passes. It could also mean a smaller British army. “Given that the UK has been a linchpin of cross-Atlantic relations, its break-up is bound to have an impact on the future of Nato,” says Fiona Hill, director of the Brookings Institution Center on the United States and Europe.

Der Mann mit den vielen Gesichtern
February 5, 2014, Frankfurter Neue Presse
By Sven Weidlich
Fiona Hill, gebürtig aus Großbritannien, hat in Russland gelebt und Putin mehrere Male zu Gesprächen getroffen. Sie arbeitet in Washington bei einer sogenannten Denkfabrik, der Brookings Institution, und beschäftigt sich dort mit internationaler Politik. „Putin ist ein klassischer konservativer Politiker“, sagt Hill am Montagabend in der Villa Rothschild Kempinski in Königstein, wo sie auf Einladung der Montagsgesellschaft spricht.

Frosty points in post-cold war politics
February 2, 2014, Financial Times
By Neil Buckley
The anecdote could be a metaphor for the US and Russia’s often fumbled attempts to establish a more co-operative relationship since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The two countries no longer stare coldly across a deep ideological divide. So why, asks Angela Stent, an American academic and former national intelligence officer, has it been so hard for them to create a “productive post-cold war partnership”? Her compelling book provides perhaps the most comprehensive and sober – as well as sobering – assessment of relations across the past two decades.

Sochi or Bust
February 1, 2014, The Economist
As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two American economists, have argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy, based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the result is stagnation.

Экс-посол США на Украине: Янукович предложил оппозиции слишком мало и слишком поздно
January 29 2014, ITAR-TASS
Президент Украины Виктор Янукович предложил оппозиции “слишком мало и слишком поздно”. Такое мнение высказал в интервью корр. ИТАР-ТАСС старший научный сотрудник политологического Института Брукингса в Вашингтоне, бывший посол США в Киеве Стивен Пайфер. “Меня несколько беспокоит, что положение (на Украине), кажется, на грани выхода из-под контроля. Если прежде демонстрации и акции протеста по большей части происходили в Киеве, то в последние дни происходят по всей стране”, – отметил политолог.

Pressure Mounts on Ukraine Leader
January 26, 2014, The Wall Street Journal
By James Marson
But the crackdown and the laws triggered uprisings across Ukraine in recent days that appear to have thwarted Mr. Yanukovych’s attempt to take a more authoritarian grip on this country of some 46 million. The Kremlin, which has endorsed the crackdown and Mr. Yanukovych’s labeling of protesters as radicals, must now be worried, said Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It is hard to see how they can influence the situation now. It has gotten out of hand and they don’t have any levers to pull,” said Mr. Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

Kerry Fights ‘Myth’ of U.S. Fading Globally Under Obama
January 24, 2014, Bloomberg
By Terry Atlas
“As you go around the world, the demand for American involvement has actually gone up tremendously in East Asia, in the Middle East,” Robert Kagan, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and European Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said at the conference. At the same time, he said, the U.S. is experiencing a cycle in which the public wants less overseas involvement.

Photo Archive Is Said to Show Widespread Torture in Syria
January 21, 2014, The New York Times
By: Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick
“I feel like we have had at least one or two Srebrenica moments in Syria already,” said Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has pushed for American action. “The White House has completely hardened itself to whatever horrendous news might come out of Syria because the president doesn’t want to get involved.”

From Breadseller To Prime Minister: The Rise Of Recep Tayyip Erdogan
January 18, 2014, GlobalPost
By: Stephen Starr
Kemal Kirişci, a Turkey expert at the Brookings Institution, said that the 1970s was a time when Turkish politics became diversified. “One person who led to the opening of political space was Erbakan. He had an important electoral base then,” he said. “And that’s what was happening in Turkey when Erdogan began taking an interest in politics.”

Experts: Ukraine-Russia Deal Will Provide Little Relief 
January 15, 2014, Washington Free Beacon
By Daniel Wiser
However, recent events suggest Putin does not feel the same way. “The Russian president has sought to strengthen influence in the former Soviet territories as part of a strategy to bolster domestic support among conservative Russians,” said Steven Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Those efforts include the creation of the Eurasian Customs Union, Russia’s economically weaker alternative to the EU that has admitted Belarus and Kazakhstan as members. Ukraine has so far resisted membership.

Is 2014 the Year Scotland Finally Gains Independence?
January 2, 2013, Foreign Policy
By John Hudson
A lifelong Scotsman, Mundell is the only Conservative MP who represents a Scottish constituency, making him an ideal courier for David Cameron’s anti-independence message. “He’s a rare bird,” said the Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, “And perhaps more effective than having some British official who doesn’t have the same cachet. The odds are against independence, but as we know from many previous instances of polling and elections, there’s always a chance for a surprise outcome due to external events,” said Hill. “The Scottish government just released the white papers on independence so they’re now in full-court press mode.”

Second suicide bomber hits Russian city; 14 killed
December 30, 2013, USA TODAY
By Larry Copeland, and Andria Yu
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but they came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for attacks against civilian targets in Russia. Umarov, leader of a terrorist group that calls itself the Caucasus Emirate, has called on Muslims to disrupt the Olympics, which will be held in Sochi in February. “If you are a terrorist group in the Caucasus, the Sochi Olympics are going to be a very inviting target,” said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative.

Turkey’s Economic Enemies: Corrupt Politicians and the U.S. Fed
December 27, 2013, Foreign Policy
By Jamila Trindle
“If the instability and this crisis continues, then I suspect there’s also going to be pressure on the country’s growth prospects as business people from Turkey or outside Turkey will become less willing to invest,” said Kemal Kirisci, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. Kirisci said the investigation is recognition of what many people had suspected behind closed doors — companies with close government ties were more likely to benefit from large development projects than companies without them. He said the extent of the damage to Turkey’s economy will depend a lot on how deeply democratic institutions like the separation of powers and rule of law are damaged as the political scandal unfolds.

Ukraine President Eyes Own Future as He Pivots
December 26, 2013, The Wall Street Journal
By James Marson
“This is about Yanukovych and his re-election prospects,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “I don’t think you buy Yanukovych,” said Mr. Pifer. “Maybe you rent him, but he’s always going to be looking for that next deal.” Since taking office in 2010, Mr. Yanukovych has rewritten the rules of Ukrainian politics, which was long a careful balancing act between powerful business and political clans as well as a European-oriented West and an East and South that feel closer to Russia.

The Biggest Overlooked Trends of 2013
December 23, 2013, POLITICO Magazine
Robert Kagan: “The year 2013 has been a good one for autocrats. In Egypt, a military dictatorship seized power from a democratically elected government and has been crushing opposition. In Syria, the Assad regime survived probably its greatest challenge and may continue in power indefinitely. In Burma, a potential political opening has been left dangling, while in Thailand, a fledgling democracy is under siege. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega is consolidating his hold on power, while the Venezuelan dictatorship has seemingly outlived its founder. Events in 2014 will tell us whether this was coincidence or a trend. If the latter, it may be a foretaste of the much-anticipated ‘post-American world.’”

Poll: Most in ex-Soviet states say USSR breakup harmful
December 19, 2013, Al-Jazeera America
By Michael Pizzi
“Most people see more harm than good that came out of the collapse of the integrated larger state,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia specialist and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. “I don’t think anyone’s really bemoaning the loss of communism – no one’s saying ‘bring back the 5-year plans – but I don’t know anyone who feels they reaped massive personal benefit from the collapse.” The two states most skewed toward a “harmful” assessment of Soviet dissolution – Armenia and Kyrgyzstan – both lost subsidies due to the sudden breakup and were plunged into poverty, from which they have yet to recover. “You had the massive disintegration of an integrated economic entity,” Hill said. “Those two countries were both really jolted by the collapse. They were very much propped up by Moscow.”

Back in the USSR
December 13, 2013, Foreign Policy
By Michael Weiss
“You have in Ukraine a country that for 20 years has really suffered a lot from corruption, lack of democratic practice and — for I think a large portion of the Ukrainian people — it’s not just E.U. living standards that are sought but the boring, regulatory rule of law,” said Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now the director of the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “The Russians offer nothing to compete with that.”

As Pro-European Protests Seize Ukraine, Oligarch Victor Pinchuk Is a Bridge to the West
December 13, 2013, Tablet
By Maria Danilova
It’s an evolution that people who know Pinchuk say makes sense: The experience of nearly losing his business empire after the Orange Revolution made clear that the post-Soviet system he helped create, in which fortunes could crumble with a change of political winds, was flawed. “He would like to be in a situation where it doesn’t matter to him who the next president of Ukraine is going to be,” said Steven Pifer, who has known Pinchuk since serving as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. (Pifer now works at the Brookings Institution in Washington, which receives funding from Pinchuk.) “The advantage for him of Ukraine becoming a rule-of-law society is that it doesn’t matter.”

New Battle Looms in US-Russian ‘War of Blacklists’
December 9, 2013, RIA Novosti
By Carl Schreck
The report is almost certain to irritate Moscow if the blacklist is expanded and could prompt Russia to add to its own list of US officials hit with analogous sanctions after Washington published the names of 18 Russians on the Magnitsky List in April, experts said. “If the administration comes out with a huge list, which I do not expect, the Russians might react more vigorously,” Steven Pifer, former US ambassador to Ukraine, told RIA Novosti. “But I guess it will be such that the Russians will retaliate by announcing that they’ve added some names to their list.”

Rough Ride For US-Russia Copter Deal
December 7, 2013, Associated Press
Nothing has changed, but figuring out who is personally profiting is nearly impossible, said Russia expert Clifford Gaddy. Only a small circle of investigators close to the Kremlin know who is involved in various schemes. “Since the information they have is one of the most powerful instruments Putin has to control the individuals who run Russia on a day-to-day basis, they protect that information,” said Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.”

From Kiev to Kabul, the promise of prosperity
December 5, 2013, Reuters
By David Rohde
In Ukraine, many motives are driving the young demonstrators, who have been protesting since President Viktor Yanukovich abruptly announced that he would not sign an association agreement with the European Union. But a key belief voiced by protesters is that adopting EU-mandated judicial reforms would reduce the country’s staggering levels of corruption. “They get access to the European rule of law,” Steven Pifer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “They don’t have worry about the corruption and the arbitrary seizure of property.”

Russia looms over Ukrainian unrest
December 3, 2013, USA TODAY
By Olga Rudenko and Jesse Singal
Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said that Putin’s interest in the region boiled down to the alluring idea of Russia as a major global player – an idea that persists even as Russia’s influence has waned in certain areas. “For Vladimir Putin, his image of Russia is as a superpower, and a superpower has a sphere of influence,” he said. “He doesn’t want to rebuild the Soviet Union but he does want former Soviet states to pay heed to Russia’s main interests.” Were Ukraine to become an E.U. member, it would move the country “out of Moscow’s geopolitical orbit,” he explained, greatly reducing its influence there.

Reversal of Europe Deal Jolts Ukraine
December 2, 2013, The Wall Street Journal
By James Marson and Katya Gorchinskaya
Officials from both Russia and the West—which had been trading angry barbs over Ukraine in the weeks leading up to Mr. Yanukovych’s sudden reversal on the EU deal last month to improve ties with Russia—seemed taken aback by the scale of the protests but had few obvious levers to influence the situation in a country that had become the object of a Cold War-style geopolitical battle. “The Russians are now spectators to what is going on,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Kiev and now an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It’s something that’ll take place between the street and Yanukovych.”

Пятеро участников Евромайдана госпитализированы из Шевченковского райотдела милиции
November 30, 2013, День
Правоохранители при разгоне Евромайдана активно использовали дубинки и звукошумовые гранаты. Позднее бывший посол США в Украине Стивен Пайфер заявил, что применение силы украинских властей в отношении демонстрантов приведет к изоляции президента Украины Виктора Януковича со стороны США и ЕС.

Demonstrators gather in Ukraine
November 30, 2013, FT
By Roman Olearchyk
The EU embassy in Kiev said on Friday it had taken “note of the pro-European aspirations shared by a vast part of Ukrainian citizens” but urged “all sides to continue to remain calm and to refrain from any use of force.” Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Kiev tweeted: “Sad to see Ukraine authorities use force to break up peaceful demonstrations. Yanukovich use of force against protesters is a dangerous turn in events that will further isolate him from the EU and US.”

Why Ukraine is staying in Russia’s orbit instead of turning West
November 27, 2013, The Los Angeles Times
By Carol J. Williams
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now with the Brookings Institution, sees Putin’s quest to keep Ukraine in its sphere of influence as “trying to recapture something that [harks] back to Moscow’s status as a great power.” Ukraine’s future would clearly be more promising in alignment with the EU, Pifer said, and even Yanukovich has said he remains supportive of eventual European integration.

American primacy: If I ruled the world
November 23, 2013, The Economist
Along with a dissident religious tradition, this has meant that in peacetime the United States is in an almost constant state of turmoil, which is evident even when it ventures abroad. “Americans, in foreign policy, are torn,” writes Robert Kagan, an American historian. “Reluctant, then aggressive; asleep at the switch, then quick on the trigger; indifferent, then obsessed, then indifferent again. They are a revolutionary power, but think they are a status-quo power.”

Economic success has given China greater weight, but not nearly enough to tip the balance
November 23, 2013, The Economist
If China really wanted to challenge America, Russia would probably take fright. For now, they vote together in the UN Security Council and sign energy deals to develop eastern Siberia together. But, observes Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution in Washington, there are limits to how far Mr Putin will make trouble at the UN. He does not want to drive diplomacy away from the Security Council, because that is the forum in which Russia holds most power. In addition, the Sino-Russian border is an abiding source of tension: heavily populated on the Chinese side, empty on the resource-rich Russian side. Mr Putin has already seen Central Asia drift towards China. He and his successors are bound to fear Chinese designs on Russia’s far east.

Putin’s Snowden Strategy: Three Views
November 12, 2013, Deutsche Welle
By Roman Goncharenko
It’s still unclear when and if German representatives will meet Snowden in Moscow. Former US diplomat Steven Pifer, now of eminent think tank the Brookings Institution, hopes that it will not “make the situation worse.” “There is a possibility that the Russians are going to try to use Snowden to drive wedges between Washington and Berlin. Certainly, the damage has been done and the Russians wouldn’t be disappointed if Snowden would do further damage,” he told DW.

How The 2003 Arrest Of The Richest Man In Russia Changed Everything — And What Happens Next
October 24, 2013, Business Insider
By Adam Taylor
“When you go back to ’99-2000, [Mikhail Khodorkovsky] didn’t have a very good reputation at all,” says Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia with the Brookings Institute. … “In his efforts to make Yukos more transparent, he was moving to international suppliers, moving towards a way of doing business that was kind of like an alien virus in the old sclerotic Russian economic system,” Hill says. “He didn’t want to order piping and other things from old, moribund Soviet enterprises, but that was part of the game.” Putin’s government wanted an oil giant, but it had to be one that played by their rules, Hill says.

Russia’s Shrinking Leverage With China
October 23, 2013, Businessweek
By Matthew Philips
Steven Pifer, a Russia expert at Brookings and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, says that Gazprom is becoming increasingly wary of the changes taking place around it in the global energy market. “I think Gazprom is nervous because they see all the unconventional gas production ramping up in the U.S.,” says Pifer. Not only does Gazprom want to lock in China as a natural gas customer before the U.S. arrives on the scene, it is also worried about losing its grip on Europe, says Pifer.

Inside Israel’s Frenemy Diplomacy With Turkey
October 21, 2013, The Daily Beast
By Eli Lake
But the two countries’ relations weren’t severed altogether. “There were always contacts between the Turkish and Israeli side as part of the Palmer Report process and after this process. There are diplomats who unofficially interact with other diplomats and business people with close links to both governments. It is not that relations were completely ruptured after September 2011,” Kemal Kirisci, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and an expert on Turkey, said.

Marx, Methodism and Mecca
October 18, 2013, The Economist
Across western Europe, parties of the centre-left have struggled to make sense of the fact that Islam is a growing cultural force in their continent. At times, the relationship has veered between close embrace and secularist recoil. But parties of the left will lose out politically unless they can find a way to give Muslims the opportunities to participate in public life that other religious groups already enjoy. That, in a nutshell, is the argument laid out by Jonathan Laurence… in the latest issue of Dissent, a quarterly journal. As one of the most thoughtful observers of the politics of European Islam, he makes some important, paradoxical points.

Türkiye’nin Çin füzelerini seçmesi entegrasyon sorunları yaratabilir
October 9, 2013, Wall Street Journal Turkey
By Fercan Yalınkılıç
Brookings Enstitü’sünden Kemal Kirişci, NATO içerisinde önemli bir ülkenin, üye olmayan kilit bir ülkeden bu çeşit bir silah sistemi alıyor olmasının soru işaretleri yarattığına dikkat çekti. … “Türkiye her ne kadar böyle bir sistemin kendi yazılımlarıyla NATO’nun radar sistemlerine entegre edeceğini söylese de, Çin’den gelen siber saldırı haberleri de göz önüne alındığında, bu karar endüstriyel ve askeri casusluk konularını gündeme getirebilir” diyen Kirişci, Batı’nın Türkiye’yi bu karara iten sebeplerin farkında olduğunu da belirtti.

Westerwelle winds up his career in New York
September 29, 2013, Deutsche Welle
By Gero Schliess
The contrast could hardly have been starker than four years ago when Westerwelle was a ‘nobody’ in the US, and negative perceptions preceded him. “I am aware that the expectations within and outside of Germany at that time were quite low,” admits Fiona Hill, director of the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But he has really grown and acquired a reputation for himself.” Hill told DW of one of her meetings with the then freshly appointed minister in the midst of the euro and financial crisis: “He gave an impressive performance in English and held the audience here in Washington in thrall with his account of the role of Germany in Europe.”

EU lawmaker: ‘TTIP is not a monster’ 
September 27, 2013, EurActiv
Kemal Kirişci, a Brookings Institute fellow, argued in favour of Turkey’s inclusion in the agreement. “Countries left outside TTIP and TPP would either have to accept less favorable access to these markets, or would have to adopt the standards laid down by these two partnerships,” he wrote in a recent report. “Geo-strategically, this means that emerging economies would be left at a disadvantage. Ironically, Turkey, a long standing member of this Western-led international economic order, would also be disadvantaged if not included in TTIP,” he added.

Turks may be the swing vote in German poll
September 18, 2013, Al-Jazeera
By Sam Bollier
More than half of voters with a Turkish background used to back the SPD. But a survey conducted this summer found that only 43 percent would vote for them this time around. Another 22 percent support the Greens, whose chairman Cem Ozdemir was the first ethnic Turk to be elected to the Bundestag. Another 20 percent plan to vote for the CDU. Jonathan Laurence, a professor of political science at Boston College, said the SPD has not done ” a particularly good job communicating with [Turkish voters], or viewing them as anything else but a liability”.

On Syria, Lavrov stays on Russian message
September 18, 2013, The Washington Post
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, stayed on task after a meeting here with his French counterpart, Laurent Fabius. He always does. “We have very serious reasons to believe that this was an act of provocation,” Lavrov told reporters, asserting once again that someone was trying to make the Syrian government look bad to prompt an attack against it. “He knows his script and sticks to it,” said Fiona Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She calls him the consummate Russian-Soviet diplomat — his first posting was in 1972 — and one who clearly and formidably advances Russia’s interests. Don’t forget repeatedly. “Central casting couldn’t have done better,” she said. “He has the looks, the gravelly voice, the imposing figure, the hair. You expect to see him in smoke-filled corridors maneuvering everyone into a corner. He knows what his job is.”

Russia Gains Clout With Syria Initiative
September 15, 2013, The Wall Street Journal
By Gregory L. White
The idea of pushing Damascus to give up its chemical weapons had been discussed by U.S. and Russian officials for at least a year, diplomats say, but Moscow appeared unwilling or unable to force the Assad regime to comply. The current deal has changed that. “The agreement reached [Saturday] is a win for both Moscow and Washington—provided that it is implemented, which remains far from certain,” said Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former ambassador. “Implementation could well require the Russians to lean on Damascus if the Syrians drag their feet. Is Moscow prepared to do that?”

Vladimir Putin: Arch Manipulator With a Mission to Check US Will
September 14, 2013, The Observer 
By Peter Beaumont
This is particularly true when he is speaking to his constituency, an alliance of nationalists, conservatives and a vast, sprawling middle ground. According to Clifford Gaddy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Putin interposed himself as a key political fixer under the patronage of Yeltsin-era figure Anatoly Chubais in the mid-1990s. Putin, he says, “understood the principles of the British intelligence chief John Masterman’s double-cross system: don’t destroy your enemies. Manipulate them and use them for your own goals”. Putin did, and continues to do, precisely that.

Analysis: Putin scores diplomatic win on Syria
September 12, 2013, CNN 
By Jill Dougherty
“It absolutely is a diplomatic win by Putin right now,” said Fiona Hill, expert on Putin and director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “If we think about this as judo, which is of course Mr. Putin’s favorite sport, this is just one set of moves,” she said. “And right now, he’s managed to get Obama off the mat, at least, and get the terms set down that play to his advantage.”

Social Media Erupts Over Putin Article
September 12, 2013, Voice of America
But Brookings Institution Russia analyst Clifford Gaddy disagreed. The co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” said the Russian leader made a compelling case for his country’s priorities and took advantage of U.S. indecisiveness on Syria. “He is just really taking advantage of the opening that U.S. policy on the wavering now, and public sentiment worldwide against U.S. military strikes has offered him. I think he did it pretty well,” Gaddy said.

Why France is willing to go to war
September 11, 2013, Macleans
By Michael Petrou
That’s not entirely the case. Hollande has taken a political hit over Syria, says Clara O’Donnell, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. France pushed early for a robust response. But it now has to wait for the United States, and the American Congress, to decide on its course of action before France can realistically do anything. A French comedy show recently portrayed Hollande asking Obama for permission to use the bathroom.

Is Putin, a Big Assad Supplier, Seriously Going to Disarm Him?
September 11, 2013, The Daily Beast
By Eli Lake
Regardless, Moscow’s move has given the superpower “wonderful leverage” said Fiona Hill, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Hill said that Putin has gained control of the media narrative and created momentum for diplomacy. But she also said that Russia shares America’s interest in keeping chemical weapons out of the hands of terrorists. “I think you have to be careful at painting this in black and white terms,” she said. “The Russians know there is a whole world of grief if Syria collapses.”

How Vladimir Putin Became the Chuck Norris Of International Politics
September 9, 2013, Business Insider
By Adam Taylor
Economist Clifford Gaddy, co-author of “Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” says the past few weeks have actually revealed just how complex Putin really is. “He’s probably the most formidable adversary America has seen in quite a while,” Gaddy says. “He’s clever and duplicitous, very skilled at playing people’s own weaknesses and blunders against them — skills he honed as a KGB case officer.”

Russian Proposal Could Offer Obama Escape From Bind
September 9, 2013, The New York Times
By Peter Baker
“Putin knows that everyone wants an out, so he’s providing one,” said Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence officer and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “It seems like a bold idea that will get everyone, including Obama, out of a bind that they don’t want to be in.” But, she said, it may be an idea that derails a strike for now without solving the underlying problem. Indeed, the Senate quickly postponed plans for a vote authorizing an attack.

At G-20, No Obama-Putin Sidebar So Far
September 6, 2013, The Wall Street Journal
By Peter Nicholas
After taking office in 2009, Mr. Obama had hoped to “reset” relations with Russia. But with his second term well under way, ties have frayed. Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said recently that relations are now as poor as at any time since the fall of communism in Russia. “I think the relationship now is really very bad,” Mr. Gaddy said. “And I think the way to gauge it is in terms of what are the prospects for dealing with major issues that still remain between the two countries and that may emerge. And I think it’s very poor, because we simply don’t have any sense of trust in the relationship, especially at the highest level, which is the most important, between the two presidents.”

USA’s lille hjælper vil selv
September 5, 2013, Dagbladet
By Mette Rodgers
”Konflikten i Syrien er et eksempel på, hvor svært det er at blive enig om en fælles politik i Europa – men selv hvis der var enighed, kunne vi så gå ind? Faktum er, at mange europæiske lande ikke har de våben, der skal til, og dem, der har sofisti-kerede missiler, har langt mindre wbeholdninger end amerikanerne,” siger Clara Marina O’Donnell, der er seniorforsker i London-tænketanken European Centre for Reform samt tilknyttet den amerikanske Brookings Institution. ”Europa kan yde militær støtte, hvis der er tale om et begrænset, præcisionsbombardement. Vi kan tilbyde logistisk hjælp, baser osv., hvilket ville være en hjælp, men Europa har ikke det sofistikerede udstyr,” tilføjer hun.

Transatlantic alliance to cost Turkey ‘$20 billion’
September 5, 2013, Hurriyet 
Turkey, which will be one of the main losers in the U.S.-EU trade alliance, should engage in a parallel deal with the U.S., Kemal Kirişci, the author of the study, said in research published by the U.S. Brookings Institute and the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD). The research demonstrates that Turkey’s potential income loss would be 2.5 percent, which would amount roughly to a $20 billion loss based on Turkey’s GDP last year.

Frosty ties between Obama, Putin deepen policy clashes
September 3, 2013, Agence France Presse
By Tangi Quemener
Clifford Gaddy, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, agreed that the Obama-Putin relationship was toxic. “I think the way to gauge it is in terms of what are the prospects for dealing with major issues that still remain between the two countries and that may emerge,” he said. “I think it’s very poor, because we simply don’t have any sense of trust in the relationship, especially at the highest level, which is the most important, between the two presidents.”

“Moscou joue gros dans la crise syrienne”
September 3, 2013, L’Express
By Axel Gyldén
“Une intervention militaire montrera de manière évidente que Vladimir Poutine et la Russie n’ont pas les moyens d’empêcher les Etats-Unis d’agir, souligne Stefen Pifer, expert en relations internationales et spécialiste de l’ex-empire soviétique à l’institut Brookings de Washington. En pratique, Moscou va apparaitre comme incapable de protéger Bachar el-Assad. Ce qui contredit l’image que Vladimir Poutine veut projeter dans son pays: celle d’une grand puissance restaurée qui compte sur la scène mondiale et possède toujours une influence majeure.”

Obama Syria decision adds a twist to G-20 summit
September 2, 2013, USA Today
By Aamer Madhani
By delaying any military action until he has congressional approval, Obama has avoided having to defend the aftermath of a strike in a summit setting, notes Angela Stent, a Russia analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Syria might still come up, but it won’t dominate the G-20 agenda as it might have had there been a military strike,” Stent said.

On World Stage, Obama Faces Risks Over War Strategy 
September 2, 2013,The Wall Street Journal
By: Peter Nicholas
“That was the unfortunate thing about the president’s announcement,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The signal to many is going to be hesitance and indecision. If he was going to ask Congress, it would have made sense to bring Congress into the game a week ago.”

Путин и сирийский кризис: оценки вашингтонских экспертов
August 29, 2013, Voice of America
“Не думаю, что Россия сделает ради Сирии что-либо, что подвергнет ее риску, – тем более для того, чтобы просто что-то доказать. Это бессмысленно,” – считает Клиффорд Гэдди, эксперт из Институт Брукингса. “Думаю, что до сих пор вся российская политика в отношении Асада и Сирии основывалась на стремлении защитить Россию от возможных негативных последствий всего, что там происходит.”

Azerbaijani Opposition Chooses Backup Presidential Candidate 
August 23, 2013, RFE/RL
Richard Kauzlarich, U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan from 1994 to 1997, told RFE/RL that there was no question as to whether Aliyev, whose family has ruled Azerbaijan for more than two decades, will win on October 9. “The fix is in for the elections. Ilham’s going to win. I don’t know that there’s any question here,” Kauzlarich said. “The real question is will the government conduct these elections as they always have, where it’s so blatant that the elections are manipulated, or will they be concerned enough to begin to show a different sign of at least movement toward a more democratic future.”

U.S.-Russia relationship turns chilly, again
August 8, 2013, The Washington Post
By Kathy Lally
Undoubtedly there will be spirited debate in the weeks ahead about which is the bigger loser. Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine and a Brookings Institution fellow, suspects that Russia and Putin have more at stake. “The question of who needs who now has a whole different dynamic,” Pifer said. “Putin wants to be seen as being the head of a superpower. I don’t think Putin minds being disliked in the U.S., but it would matter to him if he was ignored.”

Obama scraps Moscow summit with Putin
August 7, 2013, AFP
Steven Pifer, a Russia specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the cancellation of the summit, while rare, was hardly surprising. The Americans “just didn’t see the value of a summit meeting in terms of moving the ball forward on big issues,” Pifer told AFP, though he held out hope for improvements in relations in the long term. “It’s a serious bump on the road, but the fact that the administration is saying ‘let’s go ahead and have the ministers meet’ — my impression is that they’re ready to cooperate where cooperation is possible.”

Обама отменил встречу с Путиным
August 7, 2013, Voice of America (Russian) 
By Natasha Mozgovaya and Alexei Berezin
Доктор Клиффорд Гэдди – эксперт Брукингского института и соавтор книги «Путин: оперативник в Кремле», сказал в интервью Русской службе «Голоса Америки», что, несомненно, речь идет об эскалации напряженности в отношениях. По его словам, стоит ожидать дальнейшего ухудшения отношений между странами. Но главная проблема Вашингтона, по его мнению, заключается в отсутствии стратегии в отношении Кремля.

Barack Obama cancels meeting with Vladimir Putin over Edward Snowden
August 7, 2013, The Daily Telegraph
By: Raf Sanchez
Steve Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the White House had long sensed that the meeting would not lead to progress on Syria or US plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe. “The calculation at the end of the day was going to Moscow would have yielded no benefit to the President’s agenda and he would have paid a political price over Snowden and human rights in Russia,” Mr Pifer told The Daily Telegraph. “Looking at the cost-benefit analysis, this trip didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Obama cancels meetings with Putin over Snowden 
August 7, 2013, The Hindu
By: Narayan Lakshman
Speaking to The Hindu, Clifford Gaddy, a Senior Fellow and Russia specialist at the Brookings Institution, however, said that since the collapse of the so-called “reset” in U.S.-Russia ties that Mr. Obama initiated in his first term, “The administration has no real strategy towards Russia and so there is no way to explain the decision [to postpone the summit] in terms of why it does not fit U.S. strategic interests.”

Obama’s Russia reset unravels
August 7, 2013, Politico
By Josh Gerstein
“The question the White House has been asking is not about whether Russia is going to give us anything on Snowden…but what will come out of a summit in Moscow that will be useful to the president’s agenda on arms control, missile defense and our economic relationship,” said Steven Pifer, a longtime U.S. diplomat who served in Russia, Ukraine and at the White House. “What I’m hearing from administration officials is that over the last month they’ve had no resonance, no response back from the Russians.”

Erdogan’s presidential plans linked to Turkey’s economic fortunes
August 7, 2013, The Sofia Globe 
By David Arnold
Political and economic analyst Kemal Kirisci said declaring oneself a “looter” has become something of a badge of honor in recent weeks among a certain segment of the Turkish political spectrum.“It’s a term the prime minister used in a denigrating fashion against the protesters,” said Kirisci, director of the Turkey project at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe. “Now, I think there is a broadly supported consensus that this particular usage of the term did fuel the protest and led to its aggravation.

Snowden Asylum Sets Back ‘Re-Set’ US-Russian Relations
August 1, 2013, AFP
By Tangi Quemener
“This is not good news,” said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Pifer, for one, suggested a moderate response was the best way forward. “I’m not sure that pushing back really hard is going to help,” said Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine. “We don’t know what motivated this particular decision by the Russians now, but Putin has shown that he reacts very badly to threats.” While Obama is sure to be criticized if he does make the trip, “the real question is, is Putin prepared to make that summit productive enough so at the end of the day there are results that would justify the political cost that the president’s going to pay at home,” he added.

Edward Snowden asylum ‘insignificant’ to Russia — but not to U.S.
August 1, 2013, The Los Angeles Times
By Carol J. Williams and Paul Richter
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. diplomat now at Brookings Institution, said he saw a growing likelihood that the White House would disengage from Russia. With the administration in its second term, and needing less help on issues like the war in Afghanistan, “the dynamic is different,” Pifer said. The Russian government may be trying to force the White House to play along with the Kremlin’s view that the standoff over Snowden is a back-burner issue rather than publicly protesting a decision it was impotent to prevent.

Snowden Dispute Sparks Deeper Fallout in U.S.-Russia Relationship
July 26, 2013, The Daily Beast
By Josh Rogin
With all that going on, there’s not much positive that could come out of these meetings anyway, said Fiona Hill, a former national intelligence official on Russia, now at the Brookings Institution. For years, the Obama administration pursued a “reset” policy with Russia, with some results; now the relationship is reverting back to the more familiar pattern of mutual antagonism and suspicion from the Cold War. In the end, the Obama administration may see very little upside in continuing to press for engagement with a Russian government that doesn’t seem to be interested in working to pursue a positive and aggressive bilateral agenda, she said. “These guys are basically giving us the finger, so we are saying ‘Why are we going out there and doing these things?’” she said. “You could say that by standing up to Russia, the U.S. is finally getting some balls.”

Bce contro la tempesta finanziaria L’occasione sprecata dagli Stati
July 26, 2013, Corriere della Serra
Ma la Germania temporeggia anche per una errata comprensione della crisi su cui pesa il sospetto della convenienza politica. Carlo Bastasin sul Sole 24 Ore ha notato una forte correlazione tra i sondaggi elettorali in Germania e la lettura che vi si fa della crisi. Nel 2009, quando la crisi era addebitata agli errori dei banchieri e alle regole sbagliate, i socialdemocratici, ritenuti più capaci di imporre regole nuove alla finanza, rubavano consensi ai cristiano democratici. Ma da quando, grazie alla Grecia, la crisi è invece addebitata a regole infrante, la signora Merkel, ritenuta più severa nel farle rispettare, guadagna consensi.

Behind the Mask
July 25, 2013, European Voice
By Andrew Gardner
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, both fellows at the US-based Brookings Institution, opt for a format akin to popular psychology, but produce what may, with caveats, come to be seen as the best study of Putin and his system: they present Putin’s six dominant traits as individual personae, and attempt to show how they come together in his system. Putin is the Statist, anxious to make the Russian state strong again. He is the History Man, a man of destiny who fits into Russia’s past. He is the Survivalist, intent on limiting threats to the state’s territory, sovereignty, and national identity.

Activist presses Ukraine for release of Tymoshenko
July 24, 2013, The Washington Times
By Ashish Kumar Sen
Western governments and human rights groups have described the charges against Mrs. Tymoshenko as politically motivated. “Pretty much everybody who followed the trial in December of 2011, at least everybody in the West, regards it as a judicial farce,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now with the Brookings Institution.

Worldview: It’s time for Obama to tell Putin ‘nyet’
July 21, 2013, The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Trudy Rubin
“There is nothing on the [Moscow summit] agenda that they can make progress on,” says the Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. “Why would Obama bother going?” Indeed, when the two men met at a G-8 summit last month in Northern Ireland, Putin’s demeanor was so frigid that video clips of the scene became grist for TV comics. A summit in Moscow, says Hill, “would be just another exercise in parody and disillusionment.”

Obama could accept limited relations with Putin: Analysts
July 21, 2013, AFP
But his colleague at the Brookings Institution, Steven Pifer, argued the Snowden affair is merely the latest of a number of issues that have poisoned the relationship between the two former Cold War rivals, and is not by itself a dealbreaker. … Obama “clearly would like to do something more on arms control, so one question is, are the Russians prepared to respond to the proposals that he made in Berlin in June for reducing the new START limits by a third?” Pifer asked.

Ex-CIA officer tied to abduction of Egyptian cleric allowed to flee Panama for U.S.
July 19, 2013, The Sacramento Bee
By Tim Johnson
Panama on Friday allowed a retired CIA station chief wanted in Italy for his role in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian Muslim cleric to leave for the United States, permitting the former U.S. intelligence agent to avoid an Italian jail cell. Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, had been arrested earlier in the week as he attempted to cross into Costa Rica from Panama. “It’s a sensitive issue, and it is a source of embarrassment to the two countries. We cooperate on all kinds of things,” said Michael Calingaert, a visiting scholar and expert on U.S.-Italian relations at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

How Putin Uses Money Laundering Charges to Control His Opponents
July 17, 2013, The Atlantic
Andrew S. Bowen
A silent agreement between Putin and business elites was reached in the aftermath of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky being thrown into jail in 2003 for attempting to challenge Putin politically. As William Partlett of Columbia University and the Brookings Institution said about the incident, “The message to other oligarchs was clear: follow the rules or face devastating legal consequences.” … “His (Putin’s) plan was to use reformed formal legal institutions to complement his personalized rule,” Partlett notes, “In fact, strong legal institutions were a means to an end–a tool for ensuring that he could punish those who did not comply with his informal rules of the game through selective prosecution.”

Snowden Affair: Your Move, Moscow
July 13, 2013, Global Post
According to Pavel Baev, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, the “political calculations change” the longer Snowden remains in Moscow, turning the fugitive whistleblower from a one-time trophy into a liability. “This hot potato is good fun for a while, but Putin is definitely looking for an elegant way to throw it to somebody else’s lap,” he said.

Catherine Ashton Emerges as a Key Player in the European Union
July 13, 2013, The Daily Beast
By Eleanor Clift
Fiona Hill with the Brookings Institution, watching them interact at various events, says Ashton “really bonded with Hillary Clinton. They’re both no nonsense women with a bit of steel.” Those qualities helped produce the breakthrough in the Balkans and quieted much of the sniping that she experienced early in her term. “She got a lot of flack, much of it sexist, about how she looks—she doesn’t have a glamorous persona. She’s very substantive, and she didn’t look for style over substance,” says Hill, recalling that even the iconic Margaret Thatcher got a makeover to change her voice and hair when she entered political life. “Catherine Ashton hasn’t done any of that stuff.”

Obama Speaks With Putin On Snowden, But No Sign Of Movement
July 12, 2013, Reuters
By Steve Holland and Arshad Mohammed
The drama has tested U.S.-Russian relations, although no lasting damage has been apparent so far.
“My sense is that both Washington and Moscow have lots of experience in compartmentalizing these kinds of issues when you’ve got spies or … defectors,” saidSteven Pifer, a Russia expert who is director of the Brookings Institution’s Arms Control Initiative. “They can fence that off from the rest of the relationship.”

Europe’s economy has its groove back
July 8, 2013, Macleans
By Tamsin McMahon
But although politicians are keen to paint a picture of a resurgent Europe, problems remain that could yet trample the green shoots of economic growth. While it has helped bring investment back to Europe, the ECB’s generous monetary policy has taken the heat off leaders to tackle the larger issues facing Europe, says Carlo Bastasin, an Italian economist and fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington. “There is a complacency that brings us to say things are better now,” he says. “But that complacency is exactly the problem, because it prevents us from taking the necessary steps.”

Can Europe shoulder its military burden on its own?
July 2, 2013, Christian Science Monitor
By Sara Miller Llana
The American message that Europe needs to uphold its end of the bargain is not simply about sharing the burden, says Clara O’Donnell, a senior fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London who is currently at the Brookings Institution in Washington. It’s also about ensuring a peaceful Europe that won’t demand American military attention. “NATO has meant that countries, historically, that had been at war have put those animosities aside and committed to mutual security,” she says, “It means that at least there is one part of the world that the US had to worry about before that it now doesn’t have to worry about.”

From ethnic slaughter to stability in two decades: Former war zone Croatia joins EU
June 28, 2013, NBCNews.com
By Alastair Jamieson
Former U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina Richard Kauzlarich called Croatia’s entrance into the EU a “positive step” for both the country and the region as a whole. “I can remember the bad old days,” he said. “Croatia experienced a great deal of loss during the war, but the West, the U.S., the EU supported Croatia’s evolution and did everything we could to encourage the kind of leadership that would be necessary to undertake the EU process.” Now a fellow at the Brookings public policy organization, Kauzlarich said that the country had resolved a lot of issues in order to join.

With social media, middle classes in Brazil, Turkey grow stronger, angrier
June 26, 2013, The Washington Times
By Ashish Kumar Sen
The protests turned into an “expression of frustration with a prime minister who has become increasingly paternalistic and authoritarian,” said Kemal Kirisci, director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “In an ironic way, [the protests are] a product of the success of this government in helping to develop a stronger middle class, especially the highly educated section of the middle class that lives in the cities. … The government’s failure to hear their voice and the adoption of policies that these people feel are strangling their individualistic liberties,” Mr. Kirisci said.

Putin: No grounds to extradite Snowden
June 25, 2013, The Washington Post 
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund
Of course, Russia is trying to extract maximum advantage and mount some of the “moral high ground” it often accuses the United States of considering its divine right, said Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution. Putin, who detests the U.S. support for human rights groups in his country and accuses it of financing opposition, alluded to Snowden as an activist who hardly deserved jail.

Obama Hit by Snowden Setbacks With China, Russia 
June 25, 2013, The Associated Press
By Julie Pace
Russia’s ultimate response to U.S. pressure remains unclear. Putin could still agree to return Snowden to the U.S. But he may also let him stay in Russia or head elsewhere, perhaps to Ecuador or Venezuela – both options certain to earn the ire of the White House. Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said she expected Putin to take advantage of a “golden opportunity” to publicly defy the White House. “This is one of those opportunities to score points against the United States that I would be surprised if Russia passed up,” Hill said.

US-China Relations Chill Over Snowden
June 24, 2013, The Hill
By Julian Pecquet
Fiona Hill, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Russia and China see the Snowden affair as a way to get back at the United States for its criticism on human rights. “Where we are now is the Russians making everything they can of this opportunity to show the United States up in the global field of public relations,” Hill said.

Details of Snowden’s Hong Kong Stay Emerge
June 24, 2013, The Washington Post
By Jia Lynn Yang, Peter Finn and Sari Horwitz
Fiona Hill, the co-author of a biography of Putin and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the Russians, who have been frustrated in their attempts to get opponents of the government extradited from the West, are likely to let the United States “stew in its own juices.” There were contradictory reports about Snowden’s exact location in Moscow on Monday. … And it is unclear whether Russia is secretly negotiating with the United States or interviewing him before they allow his departure. “They don’t want to waste this opportunity to extract what they can,” Hill said, “so they don’t want Mr. Snowden to fly off too quickly.”

Extending a Hand Abroad, Obama Often Finds a Cold Shoulder
June 18, 2013, The New York Times
By Mark Landler and Peter Baker
“Obama doesn’t really take kindly to being harangued, so we knew from the beginning that he and Putin weren’t going to have a good basis together,” said Fiona Hill… co-author of a book on Mr. Putin. As Ms. Hill noted, even Mr. Bush’s friendship did not stop Mr. Putin from crossing him. “With Obama,” she said, “there’s no pretense of personal chemistry, and the results may be the same.”

Why Siberia Could Be Russia’s Secret Economic Weapon
June 18, 2013, CNBC.com 
By Holly Ellyatt
“True, Siberia has more natural wealth than any other place in the world. But it also has unequaled disadvantages of cold and remoteness,” Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the U.S. think tank the Brookings Institution told CNBC. He pointed out that the government also needs to consider a particular problem Russia faces: its shrinking labor force. … “Russia’s most critical bottleneck in the next 20-30 years is its shrinking labor force. Under those circumstances it makes no sense to have policies to attract more people to Siberia – that weakens the national economy,” he told CNBC.

America, Russia and Syria: So Much for the Reset
June 14, 2013, Macleans
By Michael Petrou
Russia also has particular worries about secessionist movements interlaced with Sunni Islamic extremism. As Fiona Hill writes, he looks at Syria and sees Chechnya, a Russian region where Russia fought two brutal wars against secessionist and Islamist militias. Putin what the precedent set by a successful Islamist uprising in Syria might mean for the Muslim regions of Russia.

Vladimir Putin’s Man Crush on Steven Seagal
June 13, 2013, Businessweek
By Claire Suddath
The state-owned RIA Novosti news service reported Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin asked [actor Steven] Seagal to press lawmakers on Capitol Hill to remove barriers to the sale of Russian-made guns in the U.S. “Bizarre is the word that comes to mind,” Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the Brookings Institution who focuses on Russia, said in an e-mail.

Latvia Wants To Join The Eurozone. Why?
June 5, 2013, Marketplace
By Krissy Clark
“It’s very easy to say the euro area is experiencing a crisis, and so joining the club is surprising,” says Carlo Bastasin, a global economist with the Brookings Institution. But there are good reasons to join “Club Eurozone”, Bastasin says. For one, the eurozone crisis is probably going to affect you whether you’re in the club or not. So, he says, you may as well reap the membership benefits: more trading partners, a shared currency that makes it easier for people and products to cross borders, and what Bastasin calls “monetary credibility that a smaller country may find desirable.”

Anti-Government Protests Target Obama Ally in Turkey
June 4, 2013, ABC News
By Abby D. Phillip
Yet in pursuit of a stronger alliance with Turkey, the U.S. has ignored Erdogan’s growing conservatism and his tendency to govern with a strong arm, said Kemal Kirisci, a senior fellow and Director of the Center on the United States and Europe’s Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution. “For some time people had become critical of the American administration’s reluctance in bringing up these problems in Turkey,” he added. “I suspect now the U.S. is going to try to make up for it; to try to raise these issues in a much more conspicuous and forceful manner, but I wonder if this is not somewhat late.”

Playing Moscow’s Game
June 1, 2013, The New York Review of Books
By Amy Knight
In fact, the parallels between Chechnya and Syria cannot be lost on Putin. As Russia expert Fiona Hill observed in March: “For Putin, Syria is all too reminiscent of Chechnya. Both conflicts pitted the state against disparate and leaderless opposition forces, which over time came to include extremist Sunni Islamist groups. In Putin’s view—one that he stresses repeatedly in meetings with his U.S. and European counterparts—Syria is the latest battleground in a global, multi-decade struggle between secular states and Sunni Islamism…”

Russia Sends Arms to Syria As It Tries To Reassert Its Role in Region
May 30, 2013, The Washington Post
By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick
Russian policy “is not insane or irrational from [Russia’s] point of view,” said Fiona Hill, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They’re just waiting to see how it plays out.” The Russians, Hill and other experts said, see the United States as the irrational player in the region, upsetting the status quo and adding fuel to sectarian conflicts in Russia’s own neighborhood. Recent territorial gains by Assad’s forces — and the Americans’ reluctance to supply their own arms — have only hardened the Russians’ resolve.

US, Turkey Project United Front on Syria
May 23, 2013, AP
“Over the last couple of months, it seemed they were drifting away from each other, and Erdogan was, to put it mildly, disappointed with Obama for not extending the support he thought would come once the U.S. elections were over,” said Kemal Kirisci, an expert on Turkish foreign policy at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “Today, they seemed to want to project an image to the public that they are on the same wavelength.”

Closing doors: Three books paint a bleak picture of Russia under Vladimir Putin
May 11, 2013, The Economist
Now three very different new books illustrate how misguided such hope in Mr Putin’s modernisation turned out to be. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy both work for the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank. Mr Gaddy has been a prolific writer, first about the Soviet economy and now about the Russian one. In the 1990s he advised the Russian government on fiscal federalism. British-born Ms Hill oversaw Russia at America’s National Intelligence Council in Washington, DC. The authors have met and talked with Mr Putin, and they respect him up to a point.

Mr Putin, Operative in the Kremlin by Fiona Hill and Clifford G Gaddy – Review
May 10, 2013, The Guardian
By David Hearst
The many sources of the system he has created are amply and brilliantly clarified in this book. Mr Putin, Operative in the Kremlin (note the mister, not comrade) is a readable and informed portrait painted by two students of Russian history who had, at various times in their careers, a front-row view. Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution academic, spent 2006-9 as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the US National Intelligence Council. The economist Clifford Gaddy once advised the Russian finance ministry on regional tax and has investigated how Putin’s financial dealings relate to his KGB past.

Decades of Distrust Restrain Cooperation Between FBI and Russia’s FSB
May 8, 2013 , The Washington Post
By Peter Finn
Putin once named the United States as the “main opponent,” and the United States and Europe are the targets of aggressive high-tech and industrial espionage by Russia, according to intelligence officials.  “There is a broad culture of mistrust that is going to be very hard to change,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “That’s a huge obstacle to moving forward on counterterrorism. It’s the same sets of people who have to cooperate.” Hill said that “for real counterterrorism cooperation, as you have with the Brits or the Europeans, you have to be able to share operational information.”

Kerry aims to calm tensions in first Moscow visit
May 5, 2013, Agence France Presse
By Jo Biddle
Analysts cautioned little concrete progress is likely to emerge, although there were expectations Kerry would meet Tuesday with Putin, in a rare break with diplomatic protocol by Moscow. “Obviously one of the main points of the trip is to try to take the edge off all of the rhetoric, and try to find some way of figuring out if there are some concrete areas where we can go forward,” [Dr. Fiona] Hill…director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution…said. “If there’s just a glimmer that they are in the mood, at least for now, to try to put things on a more cordial level, that in itself would be an achievement.”

U.S. Needs To Help Muslims, Others Assimilate To American Life
April 30, 2013, Investor’s Business Daily
By Fareed Zakaria
Jonathan Laurence of Boston College found that before 1990, European countries largely ignored their Muslim populations and let the embassies of countries such as Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia cater to them by building mosques and training imams. “This wasn’t multiculturalism so much as indifference,” Laurence wrote recently. Those countries had little interest in helping migrants assimilate; in fact, their efforts were to do the opposite.

French Plan to Cut Military Causes Concern
April 30, 2013, Medill News Service
By David Kashi
The U.S. has always spearheaded NATO actions from the conflict in Kosovo to Afghanistan and is encouraging NATO to take more responsibility. “We are definitely seeing retrenchment cuts in number of personnel that could be deployed abroad and we are seeing them [France] buying fewer fighter aircraft and so forth,” saidClara O’Donnell, a non-resident fellow at the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “This means we will have less capability…but the news could have been much worse.” O’Donnell said U.S. concerns may be “overblown,” and that defense cuts could have been much worse. She pointed to France taking the lead in recent action in Mali.

Can Europe Teach U.S. Something About Engaging Islam?
April 28, 2013, Fareed Zakaria GPS
By Fareed Zakaria
Jonathan Laurence of Boston College, who’s done extensive research of Muslim communities in Europe, found that before 1990 European countries were largely indifferent towards their Muslim populations – letting foreign embassies, like Saudi Arabia, set up the mosques and meeting centers for these groups. They realized that this produced a radicalized and unassimilated migrant community.

Last Days of Boris Berezovsky
April 25, 2013, London Review of Books
By Peter Pomerantsev
A few couldn’t cope with the polyphony and went on to become full-blown dissidents with arrests and jail terms to show for it. A new book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy attempts to draw a psychological portrait of Putin and finds at least six personas in him, from the ‘history man’ to the ‘free marketeer’ (I would add several more to their list). The condition has made for a generation of leaders who excel at simulation and mind-games but are incapable of fashioning any meaningful politics because they themselves grew up without them.

Boston Tragedy Offers US, Russia Chance To Mend Ties
April 22, 2013, Associated Press
“Putin has been making the point for 14 years that Chechnya affects all of us,” said Fiona Hill, formerly the White House’s national intelligence officer for Russia under Obama and President George W. Bush.
But, she said, Russia seldom showed interest in threats specific to the United States. “That’s always been the frustration of our counterterrorism officials — that the Russians have always wanted us to focus on their issue.”

Attentats de Boston : les zones d’ombre russes
April 22, 2013, Liberation
By Lorraine Millot
Lors de son séjour, Tamerlan a certainement été «suivi de près» par les services russes, qui ont aussi «infiltré les groupes extrémistes» au Caucase, «comme tous les services de renseignement le font
d’ailleurs pour tous les groupes extrémistes», observe Fiona Hill, experte de la Russie à la Brookings Institution.

Bombers’ Path To Boston May Have Begun Online
April 21, 2013, Agence France Presse
By Chantal Valery
Fiona Hill, a Caucasus specialist at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the conflict in Chechnya is used as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda. “Videos from Chechnya are all over the Internet. They’re constantly packaged as part of the Al-Qaeda network recruitment,” she said. Dzhokhar used Twitter and VKontakte — the Russian equivalent of Facebook — where his profile identifies “Islam” as his world view, lists information about Chechnya and Islam, and relates jokes about the unfair treatment of Muslims in the Caucasus.

Boston Bombing Could Have U.S.-Russia Implications
April 19, 2013, USA Today
By Aamer Madhani
Fiona Hill, a Russia analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that Putin may angle to “reset the reset” and argue that Obama needs to be more concerned about the Chechen separatists, some of whom have made their way to fighting with Taliban in Afghanistan and the Syrian opposition. …
“Where the U.S. wanted to talk about Afghanistan, he wanted to talk about Chechnya and have the U.S. turn a blind eye to the human-rights abuses there,” Hill said.

Were motives of Boston bombing suspects embedded in Chechen heritage – or not?
April 19, 2013, Christian Science Monitor
By Howard LaFranchi
However the young men’s roots in a violent region can’t be dismissed, some experts say. “Chechnya has a very brutal history. You can just imagine two young Chechen boys growing up [in that violence] and then being dropped in the United States,” says Fiona Hill, an expert in Russia and its regional conflicts at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Noting how that could be “incredibly disorienting,” she adds, “And here they are in their 20s, a classic time for people to search for identity.”

What You Need to Know About Chechnya
April 19, 2013, National Journal
By Matt Vasilogambros, Cory Bennett and Niraj Chokshi
The attack by Chechen militants was widely criticized by the international community and turned the tide of support against the Chechens’ cause. Up until the siege and the second Chechen war, sympathy was on their side, said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. This wasn’t the first time the Chechen militants used this tactic. In a similar attack in the late 1990s, Chechen militants took a maternity hospital to get Moscow to negotiate. Unlike the siege in Beslan, Moscow agreed to negotiate with the Chechens, preventing mass casualties.

Magnitsky Fallout May Harm Missile Progress as U.S. Talks To Putin
April 12, 2013, Reuters
By Gabriela Baczynska
A gauge of whether Putin wants to improve ties will be whether he limits Moscow’s response to naming Americans barred from Russia in retaliation, or if he goes further. “If it stops there, then that is a tit-for-tat and it’s OK,” Steven Pifer, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But if Moscow wants to use it for something else, then it’s going to make it harder to focus on work in areas where…

Events in Rada Reduce Kyiv’s Chances to Sign Agreement With EU, Says Pifer
April 5, 2013, Interfax-Ukraine
The events that took place on April 4 taint the image of the Verkhovna Rada and Ukraine as a whole, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and now senior fellow of the Brookings Institution Steven Pifer said in an interview with the Voice of America. “The fact that the parliament is not working brings discredit to it. Unfortunately, the image of the Verkhovna Rada in Europe and the United States is not very good: fighting, MPs who vote for a few ones, and now a split. The Rada does not give the impression of the state body which is trying to solve serious problems in the country,” he said.

Turkey Has Become More Visible Due To Activities of ‘Non-State’ Actors
April 4, 2013, GlobalPost
For Dr. Omer Taspinar from the Brookings Institution, economic success, institutionalization of social and economic services, secularism and democracy, pursuit of EU membership and Muslim identity combined are the elements of Turkey’s soft power.

Book Review: ‘Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin’
March 31, 2013, Financial Times
By Neil Buckley
For Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy… this is not just another Putin biography. It is a psychological portrait, a handbook providing sometimes speculative but well-informed answers to the question that has trailed the ex-KGB colonel from St Petersburg ever since he stepped out of the shadows and on to the international stage when he became Russia’s prime minister in 1999: “Who is Mr Putin?”

Obama’s Reset With Netanyahu Faces Test in Future Diplomacy
March 23, 2013, BusinessWeek
By Margaret Talev and Julianna Goldman
Netanyahu’s phone call with his Turkish counterpart was facilitated by Obama, and the U.S. president was on the line as the Israeli apologized to Turkey for the deaths in 2010 of nine Turks taking part in an aid flotilla to Gaza that was intercepted by Israeli security forces. The incident damaged relations between the two nations. Obama “pulled it off — this is a black-and-white measure of his success,” said Kemal Kirisci, head of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution, a policy center in Washington.

Desperate For Bailout, Cyprus Plays Risky Geopolitical Game
March 20, 2013, Reuters
By Peter Apps and Henning Gloystein
Earlier this week, one London-based fund described the Cyprus bailout as the euro zone’s “Franz Ferdinand moment”, comparing it to the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo that sparked world war in 1914. “That might be an overstatement,” said Fiona Hill, a former senior official on the U.S. National Intelligence Council and now head of the Europe Programme at the Brookings Institution. “But it’s a very serious situation. You went to bed on Friday night thinking that the Eurozone would survive and woke up on Saturday (after the bailout) wondering how it can.”

U.S. Cancels Part of Missile Defense That Russia Opposed
March 16, 2013, The New York Times
By David M. Herszenhorn and Michael R. Gordon
“There is no threat to Russian missiles now,” said Steven Pifer, an arms control expert who has managed Russia policy from top positions at the State Department and the National Security Council. “If you listen to what the Russians have been saying for the last two years, this has been the biggest obstacle to things like cooperation with NATO.” “Potentially this is very big,” said Mr. Pifer, now of the Brookings Institution. “And it’s going to be very interesting seeing how the Russians react once they digest it.”

Two years on, fate of Syria in Russian and Turkish hands
March 15, 2013, The National
By Alan Philips
Fiona Hill, author of a new biography, Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, believes that the Russian leader’s plan has been to give Mr Assad all the time he needs to crush the opposition, just as Mr Putin was able to overcome the Chechen separatists. “Putin is the kind of person who thinks any sacrifice is worth it,” she writes. “But Erdogan is a retail politician. He cannot afford to see people dying at home or even abroad. Particularly people for whom there is a degree of kinship. “Erdogan is desperately trying to figure out some form of solution in Syria … Putin has all the patience to see events play out. What worries him is not the bloodshed but the collapse of Syria, and the knock-on effects of that further afield.”

Putin’s Ph.D.: Can a Plagiarism Probe Upend Russian Politics?
February 28, 2013, TIME
By Simon Shuster
State TV networks did not cover the story, even though Russian bloggers were going berserk and a respected independent weekly, Kommersant Vlast, published a cover story, which extensively quoted Clifford Gaddy, one of the Brookings researchers. It also quoted the head of Putin’s alma mater, Vladimir Litvinenko, who said he had “no doubts” Putin wrote the work himself. Since the scandal broke, Putin has repeatedly declined to comment, as did his spokesman when I reached him last week. “The approach has been to simply ignore it,” Gaddy says by phone from Washington. “It’s the elephant in the room. Everybody knows about it, but nobody wants to bring it up.”

El éxito de la antipolítica
February 26, 2013, La Gaceta
By Jose Carlos Rodriguez
Beppe Grillo no es ni el único líder anti sistema ni el único cómico. Silvio Berlusconi tiene algo de ambas cosas. El analista de Brookings Carlo Bastasin señala que “Berlusconi representa ambas realidades: la política y la antipolítica. Por lo que cuando falla como político promueve los sentimientos antipolíticos que él mismo recoge. Él está en una posición de ‘siempre gana’, incluso cuando pierde”.

The Continent without a Military
February 25, 2013, The National Interest
By Doug Bandow
Clara M. O’Donnell, a European scholar with the Brookings Institution, explained that “what we’re seeing is basically cuts in capability and little thought on what to replace them with.” … So far, figures O’Donnell, “smart defense” initiatives have saved less than 1 percent of the spending cuts imposed since 2008

In Russia, Dmitry Medvedev is targeted by campaign of insults
February 23, 2013, The Washington Post
By Will Englund
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, both at the Brookings Institution, have just published a book that analyzes Putin’s presidency, and they pointed out at a recent forum that Medvedev, who is 13 years younger than Putin, would have been a law student during the years of the great pro-democracy demonstrations before the Soviet collapse and probably took part in some. Putin, at that time, was a KGB officer in isolated Dresden, East Germany.

The dread of the other: The leading role played by anti-Americanism in today’s Russia
February 16, 2013, The Economist
Russia’s obsession with America is countered with a broad indifference on the American side. The “reset” policy, which has helped bring about some American wishes, including a transport corridor to Afghanistan and co-operation on Iran, has now been exhausted. “There are no big deals to be had with Putin,” Fiona Hilland Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, argued recently in the New York Times. Mr Pushkov retorts that America has not understood how important Russia is for its security.

North Korean Actions Raise Stakes for US Missile Defense
February 14, 2013, Voice of America
By Mike Richman
“These interceptors in Alaska and California are believed to have some capability against a rudimentary intercontinental ballistic missile warhead of the kind that you would expect North Korea to have initially,” said Steven Pifer, head of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “But how good they would actually be, we don’t know. But there is some capability to protect America already deployed.”

Les auteurs d’un livre sur Poutine publié aux USA tentent de détruire les stéréotypes
February 14, 2013, RIA Novosti
“Avec le prisme de la réflexion occidentale et en voulant coller une étiquette sur tout, certains chercheurs et médias occidentaux qualifient Poutine d’autocrate et de néo-soviétique, disent que toutes ses décisions peuvent être expliquées par son passé d’agent secret, etc. C’est une vision très réductrice. Nous voulions offrir une compréhension plus complexe de sa personnalité en expliquant ce qu’il pense et surtout pourquoi”, a déclaré Clifford Gaddy dans une interview accordée à RIA Novosti.

North Korea Nuclear Test Should Prompt New Arms Reductions, Expert Says
February 12, 2013, Huffington Post
By David Wood
But others said this is precisely the moment to talk nuclear arms reductions. Steven Pifer, a former ambassador and senior arms control official, said that while rhetoric and sanctions would have limited effect on North Korea, a new U.S. arms reductions initiative would provide diplomatic cover for others — specifically China — to join new international pressure on Pyongyang. … But he noted that, “if we cut our nuclear arsenal in half,” the U.S. would still have roughly 300 times as many weapons as North Korea.

Options Open for Obama to Slash Nukes
February 12, 2013, RIA Novosti
By Carl Schreck
But securing the needed number of votes could prove difficult for Obama given Republican lawmakers’ considerable resistance to his push for the New START reductions, which the US Senate ultimately approved in a 71-26 vote. “I think the administration was surprised at how tough it was to get New START ratified,”Steven Pifer, director of the arms control initiative at the Brookings Institution, told RIA Novosti on Monday.

State of the Union: Barack Obama to call for cull of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal
February 11, 2013, The Daily Telegraph
By Peter Foster
Although Mr Obama is not expected to give precise numbers in his speech, reports yesterday claimed that the number of warheads could be cut from 1,700 to as low as 1,000, if a mutual agreement can be secured with Russia. … “These numbers ring true, and the administration has signaled before that it wants to move forward on this issue,” Steven Pifer, a former State Department official and director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Telegraph.

Russia Expects Olympics to Retool Its Image
February 9, 2013, The Washington Post
By Kathy Lally
Putin has made Sochi his personal monument, just as Peter the Great did with the city of St. Petersburg, Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution, said in a Washington Post video interview last week. “This is Putin himself on the line,” she said.

Uncivil Liberties
February 7, 2013, Kyiv Post
Western leaders are clear in their criticism. At a recent roundtable at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said that in order to improve relations with the West, “Ukraine must foremost improve its democratic ratings because the U.S. government won’t close its eyes to human rights abuses and rollback in democratic practices…” Pifer was upbeat though, stating Ukraine can make a quick turnaround “and once again become of interest to the West.”

U.S. troops in Mali unlikely, experts say
February 6, 2013, Medill News Service
By Gideon Resnick
Justin Vaisse, senior fellow and director of research at Brookings’ Center on the United States and Europe, said it is unlikely that radical Islamism will overwhelm Mali in the coming months because it does not have deep enough roots in the country and an Islamist group has little chance to win in the upcoming presidential election in July.

Владимир Путин в шести лицах
February 6, 2013, Voice of America
By Natasha Mozgovaya
Политики нередко меняют обличья, но Владимир Путин перещеголял всех, утверждают сотрудники вашингтонского Института Брукингса Клиффорд Гэддии Фиона Хилл в новой книге «Путин: оперативник в Кремле» (Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin). Третий президентский срок Путина озадачил – не только Госдепартамент, но и вашингтонских экспертов по России – заставив их задуматься над вопросом: как повлияет эта новая «рокировка» на американо-российские отношения?

Clinton Leaves Without Big Breakthroughs
February 1, 2013, Financial Times
By Geoff Dyer and Richard McGregor
Mrs. Clinton also demonstrated she could be a loyal team player in an administration with a tendency to micromanage foreign policy from the White House. “This has been a very White House-centric foreign policy,” said Robert Kagan, an author and foreign policy commentator. “You have to actually give cabinet officers some room to work.”

As Mali Exposes Europe’s Defense Frailties, Leaders Gather in Munich
January 31, 2013, Stars and Stripes
By Steven Beardsley
Most middle-size European countries slashed defense spending by 10 percent to 15 percent between 2009 and 2011, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis that cites a European Parliament study. “Here what we’re seeing is basically cuts in capability and little thought on what to replace them with,” Clara M. O’Donnell, author of the analysis, said.

McCain Warns Of ‘Spillover’ In Syrian Conflict
January 30, 2013, The Washington Times
By Ashish Kumar Sen
“Syria is unquestionably a place where humanitarian issues and [U.S.] strategic interests converge,” Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said while advocating a greater U.S. role at a debate at the McCain Institute.

Could Scottish, Catalan Independence Votes Reshape Europe?
January 29, 2013, Reuters
By Peter Apps
Fiona Hill, a former official at the US National Intelligence Council and now head of the Europe programme at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says London and Madrid don’t seem to realise how important this is seen to be beyond their borders. “We are talking about two of the oldest states in Europe,” Hill said. “I had a senior Balkan official ask me if it was the end of the multi-ethnic state.”

Hagel Supports Nuclear Arms Cuts, Then Elimination
January 29, 2013, Associated Press
By Robert Burns
“Sen. Hagel certainly would bring to office a more ambitious view on nuclear reductions than his predecessors,” said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “While he would likely take a less dramatic position in office, it might not be a bad thing to have a secretary of defense question what nuclear deterrence requires today.”

Interview: Richard Kauzlarich
January 26, 2013, Contact.az
By Alakbar Raufoglu
“The rioting in Ismayilli — as the rioting in Guba last year — is an indication of popular concern about continuing human rights abuses and corruption in Azerbaijan… It is similar to incidents in China where local abuses and corruption have led to similar riots”, Amb. Kauzlarich… said.

Need for a pragmatic arms-control treaty
January 26, 2013, GulfNews
By David E. Hoffman
For a road map of the possibilities, see The Opportunity: Next Steps in Reducing Nuclear Arms, by Steven Pifer and Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. The book is a sober, fact-filled assessment of the choices that Obama now faces. “Why pursue nuclear arms control when the Cold War is more than 20 years in the past?” they ask.

Obama veut rester dans l’histoire
January 21, 2013, Le Parisien
By Alix Bouilhaguet
Là aussi, il sera jugé sur ses actes. Sur le plan international, nul doute qu’il rêverait d’être le président de la normalisation avec l’Iran. « S’il a une chance de laisser une marque sur un dossier, c’est celui-là », analyse Justin Vaïsse, de la Brookings Institution.

The French Way of War
January 19, 2013, The New York Times
By Steven Erlanger
In the interview, and later to me, [Robert] Kagan praised the French for their willingness to use force in the pursuit of legitimate goals, even if they may not always have sufficient means to accomplish them. “Nobody asks France to be at the forefront of military interventions, but the willingness of the French to take the initiative is positive,” he said. “I have a new philosophy: If the French are ready to go, we should go.”

The Price of Deterrence
January 9, 2013, Financial Times
By James Blitz
The Pentagon is clearly enthusiastic about a British renewal of Trident, built by Lockheed Martin of the US, because it shares the costs of the missile system with the UK. But Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador and director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative, questions the logic of the UK continuing to plough a large part of its budget into nuclear weapons when so much of its conventional spending is being pared back in budget cuts. … “The British debate is being followed here. If the UK Trident programme sucks up so much money that the British military is denuded of expeditionary capabilities that are far more likely to be used than nuclear weapons, the US military will not be happy about that,” Mr Pifer says.

L’affaire Magnitski accroît les dissensions entre Moscou et Washington
December 29, 2012, Le Monde
By Sylvain Cypel
L’affaire Magnitski constitue-t-elle une escalade supplémentaire? Fiona Hill, ex-haut responsable du renseignement américain pour la zone Russie-Eurasie et directrice du Centre Etats-Unis-Europe de l’institution Brookings, ne le pense pas. Pour l’auteure d’un ouvrage sur le président russe à paraître le 2 janvier 2013 (Mr Putin, Operative in the Kremlin, Brookings Press), la tension actuelle est essentiellement “conjoncturelle”. Elle résulte d’abord des enjeux électoraux récents dans les deux pays. “Aux Etats-Unis, la loi a été promue au Congrès pour soutenir la candidature républicaine de Mitt Romney à la présidence. Barack Obama ne l’a signée qu’avec réticence.”

Russian Ban on U.S. Adoptions Reflects Strained Relations
December 28, 2012, Bloomberg
By Nicole Gaouette & Flavia Krause-Jackson
There’s little chance that the crisis in Syria will end in anything but chaos if the U.S. and Russia — both of which worry about the rise of Islamic extremism in the country — can’t find a way to cooperate on the issue, said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group. “We can’t really avoid the Russians,” Hill said in a telephone interview. “In the global sweep of things, we have a lot of common concerns, but we approach each issue from very different perspectives.”

Contre Obama, Moscou prend les enfants en otages
December 27, 2012, Liberation
By Lorraine Millot
«Les Américains n’aiment pas les rencontres qui n’ont pas de résultats tangibles, rappelle Fiona Hill, experte à la Brookings Institution. Et Obama peut aussi faire valoir que Poutine n’est pas venu au dernier sommet du G8 [en mai dernier à Camp David, ndlr], en expliquant qu’il devait former son gouvernement. Obama peut dire aujourd’hui qu’il doit d’abord former son gouvernement…» Le président américain a besoin de Poutine, pour limiter les dégâts en Syrie ou en Iran, mais ne veut pas paraître lui faire trop de charme, au moment où il le sent plutôt affaibli, au Proche-Orient comme sur le plan intérieur.

Glass half empty on progress in euro crisis
December 19, 2012, MarketWatch
By Darrell Delamaide
In fact, the “alert” last week from the Brookings Institution announcing its first “Survey of Eurozone Progress” in creating a more stable currency union spins it positively. The survey, Brookings says, “evaluates the strides European leaders have taken toward that goal, ultimately concluding that the euro zone is moving toward viable long-term structures, with the most progress achieved in central banking.”

Russian Politics: A New Ideology for Political Ends
December 15, 2012, The Economist
Mr Putin must now cast about for a definition of Russianness that fits his political needs. Judging from his speech, this may be a mishmash of patriotism, the cult of the mother, sport, the church, and the revitalisation of a “provincial intelligentsia”. This experimentation with ideology fits Mr Putin’s identity as a “case officer” says Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank; a man who “finds out what people want” and “cleverly tries to manipulate them”.

American Intelligence Report Predicts China will be World’s Leading Economic Power by 2030
December 14, 2012, Voice of America
Robert Kagan is with the Brookings Institution in Washington: “What the world is looking for from the United States – and it’s not the world – individual states look for protection, they look – in some cases – for the ability to organize. I mean if you take the Syria issue which is before us right now, what people are waiting for is for the United States to step up and start pulling everyone together. And what’s been missing has been the United States playing that role.”

L’inconcludente politica (europea) fa tribolare gli operosi banchieri centrali
December 13, 2012, Il Foglio
By Marco Valerio Lo Prete
Non appena i mercati si placano, insomma, il processo di integrazione arranca. E, alla vigilia del vertice di oggi e domani dei capi di governo dell’Ue, la politica torna a mostrarsi esitante di fronte alle sfide della crisi. “Per fortuna c’è il presidente della Bce, Mario Draghi”, è in estrema sintesi la conclusione di uno studio della Brookings Institution pubblicato ieri e curato da quattro economisti (Justin Vaïsse, Douglas J. Elliott, Domenico Lombardi e Thomas Wright). Secondo il think tank americano, l’Ue merita un voto medio di 45 punti su cento per i progressi compiuti nell’affrontare la crisi: soltanto 37 su 100 però per i progressi dell’“unione politica” e invece 67 su 100 per l’operato della Banca centrale.

Ukraine flirts with Russian-led Customs Union
December 11, 2012, The Kyiv Post
By Katya Gorchinskaya
Some Western analysts are amazed that Ukraine would favor the Customs Union over a free-trade pact with the European Union. “The Customs Union will kill EU free trade: Do you want a Customs Union with a $2 trillion a year economy or do you want to go to the largest economy in the world, (representing) some $15 trillion to $16 trillion a year?” asked former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer at the Kyiv Post Tiger Conference.

Nobel Prize win spurs debate on EU’s role as security provider
December 11, 2012, Europolitics
By Brian Beary
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU (see separate article) did not go unnoticed in Washington, serving as a springboard for several debates on the EU and US’ role in promoting peace and security in the world. “We will need to be more capable of adding to soft power bits of hard power,” said EU Ambassador to the US Joao Vale de Almeida, on 7 December, sharing a platform at the Brookings Institution with renowned US author and foreign policy expert Robert Kagan. Kagan, a senior fellow at Brookings, argued that Europe’s main contribution should be to remain “an oasis of peace, democracy and stability” rather than trying to emulate the US by dispatching troops all over the world. “What you are doing is important enough,” Kagan said.

World leaders face big challenges in 2013
December 10, 2012, Agence France Presse
By Nicolas Revise
Eurozone GDP is forecast to contract by 0.3 percent next year, but Justin Vaisse, director of research on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said he believed that the worst of the euro crisis is behind us. “The Americans and the markets have concluded that the euro will not explode, otherwise it would have fallen and there would have been a flight of capital,” he told AFP.

Под занавес «холодной войны»: похороны «пионеров» и «першингов»
December 7, 2012, Voice of America
By Алекс Григорьев
Еще один участник переговорного процесса – Стивен Пайфер (Steven Pifer), ныне старший научный сотрудник Института Брукингса – заметил, что в финальной части этих переговоров он впервые обнаружил, что советские дипломаты перестали слепо следовать инструкциям, а стали проявлять творческий подход для решения возникающих проблем.

Best Books of 2012
December 4, 2012, Bloomberg
By Simon Kennedy
Olli Rehn, European Union Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner: On economics, my favorite is Carlo Bastasin’s “Saving Europe: How National Politics Nearly Destroyed the Euro.” It’s based on a very sound understanding of the economics and politics of the euro, and is well-researched.

Obama Seeks Renewal of Nuclear Arms Control Deal With Russia
December 3, 2012, Los Angeles Times
By Christi Parsons and Paul Richter
“I assume the president has a more ambitious arms control agenda for his second term,” said Steven Pifer, a veteran State Department and National Security Council staffer who is now director of the Arms Control Initiative at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “He needs to set out his agenda sooner rather than later,” Pifer said. “If he wants another treaty as part of his legacy, it has to be done in time for a ratification debate in 2015, not in the 2016 election year.”

Saakashvili Talks Up EU Integration Path
November 29, 2012, Kyiv Post
Steven Pifer, the American ambassador in Kyiv from 1997 to 2000, sounded the alarm about Ukraine returning to a “gray zone” geopolitically because of democratic regression under President Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine, Pifer said, has gone from being a darling of American foreign policy in the 1990s… to one in which all 100 U.S. senators in September unanimously passed a resolution that mentions the possibility of visa bans and financial sanctions against those responsible for the imprisonment of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other incidents the West regards as abuses of human rights.

As Others See Us: The View from Nagorno-Karabakh
November 26, 2012, The Herald
By David Leask
Fiona Hill from the Brookings Institute in Washington DC has long watched ethnic tensions in the Caucasus. She explained: “At one point under the Bush administration a ‘Scottish solution’ to Nagorno-Karabakh was being touted about – although not in Alex Salmond’s earshot. What they meant by that was maximum autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh but inside Azerbaijan with Scotland being set up as a standard. Scotland, like Nagorno-Karabakh, was seen as an ancient country of fiercely independent people with a long history of antagonism, but able to find a modern 21st century solution. That option has now disappeared for those who were advocating it for NK.”

El pivote asiático de Obama
November 25, 2012, El País
By Lluis Bassets
Justin Vaïsse, de la Brookings Institution de Washington, explica así la nueva política internacional de Barack Obama: “El pivote, concebido no solo en el estrecho sentido geográfico como un giro desde Oriente Medio hacia Asia, sino en un sentido más amplio, como un redespliegue de la política exterior estadounidense desde las cuestiones de seguridad y terrorismo hacia las económicas y globales; desde las viejas naciones hacia el mundo emergente, o incluso, desde el unilateralismo hacia la cooperación, no es ni más ni menos que un cambio de actitud hacia el mundo, una reformulación y una actualización del liderazgo de Estados Unidos” (Barack Obama y su política extranjera, 2008-2012).

West Not Yet Ready to Slap Sanctions on Yanukovych
November 22, 2012, The Kyiv Post
By Taras Kuzio
Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, now at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., wrote: “Part of Mr. Yanukovych’s obstinacy may result from an inflated sense of Ukraine’s geopolitical weight.” This month, a BBC HardTalk presenter quoted Pifer’s observation to Yanukovych foreign policy adviser Leonid Kozhara. Instead of answering the question, Kozhara dismissed the former ambassador as a “supporter of the [2004] Orange Revolution” that favored Yushchenko and went against Yanukovych.

Gaza Truce Could Pave Way for New US Peace Push
November 21, 2012, Agence France Presse
By Jo Biddle and Tangi Quemener
Meanwhile, Egypt, which has a vital peace treaty with Israel, is basking in praise and has burnished its credentials for any future talks. “If Egypt emerges strengthened because the ceasefire holds… that could reverse the existing conditions and at that point (Obama) could decide to invest himself” in a new Middle East peace bid, Justin Vaisse, a director of research at the Brookings Institution told AFP.

Making of Magnitsky List a Murky Affair
November 21, 2012, RIA Novosti
By Carl Schreck
In any case, the State Department will likely be the key player in determining which Russian officials to include in the Magnitsky list, former State Department officials told RIA Novosti. But US diplomats on the ground in Russia don’t have the resources to thoroughly vet every single allegation of rights abuses committed by Russian officials, noted Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It’s not like the embassy in Moscow has an army of private detectives to go out and track this stuff down,” Pifer said.

As Others See Us: The View From The United States
November 12, 2012, The Herald
By David Leask
Fiona Hill is director of the Centre on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute –one of America’s most prestigious think tanks. She has been flagging up the rise of the SNP for years. “When I first raised Scottish independence in Washington DC, people just laughed,” she explains. “I think they were haunted by the spectre of William Wallace aka Mel Gibson going around in a kilt yelling ‘Freedom’. Whenever I raised the prospect of a referendum there would be an audible giggle. You could tell people were just not taking independence seriously and were looking at anybody who raised it as being, in their view, a member of the lunatic fringe. That has totally shifted.”

Price of war: future generations shoulder Bush legacy
November 10, 2012, Sydney Morning Herald
By Paul McGeough
The historian Robert Kagan dismisses such arguments, and more detailed analysis of the causes of the financial crisis, as “rather loose analysis” – what he describes as “impressions that the US has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past and that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces”. In The World America Made, he concedes a perception of decline is understandable because of the dismal economic circumstances of the US and the rise of other economies – China, India, Brazil and Turkey among them. “Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the US has lost favour, and therefore influence, in much of the world because of its various responses to the September 11 attacks,” Kagan says.

EU/US : With Election Over, Eyes Turn To Fiscal Cliff Threat
November 9, 2012, Europolitics
By Brian Beary
With the New York Stock Exchange losing more than 300 points the day after the election in anticipation of a crisis and the continuing bad news from Greece, there is heightened awareness in Washington of the global implications of this crisis. Robert Kagan, senior fellow at Brookings Centre on the US and Europe, said “we have to show the world that we are capable of getting our house in order”. Going over the fiscal cliff would likely cause a 4% of GDP contraction in the US economy, a scenario that International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde has warned would jeopardise global economic recovery.

Europe Gets a Low Profile in US Presidential Duel
November 6, 2012, EurActiv
By Daniela Vicenti
“Whoever wins the elections will increase its calls for Europeans to do more to uphold international security and continue refocusing America’s attention towards the Pacific,” said Clara Marina O’ Donnell… Both Obama and Romney support closer European defence co-operation. Such a consensus is a significant change from previous administrations, which feared EU defence efforts would undermine NATO, but it is also accompanied by heavy scepticism, said O’Donnell.

A Tale of Two Mitts
November 5, 2012, Foreign Policy
By Joe Cirincione
On that front, Obama is also likely to seek a new round of negotiations with Moscow on a cooperative approach to missile defense and on a treaty to spell out deeper reductions in each country’s nuclear arsenal. The missile talks could take months; the new treaty talks, two or three years. Brookings scholars Steve Pifer and Michael O’Hanlon believe the new treaty should “limit each country to no more than 2,000-2,500 total nuclear warheads,” down from the 8,000-10,000 that each side now possesses.

Hollande privilégie une victoire d’Obama
November 5, 2012, Le Figaro
By Alain Barluet
«Obama réélu, il aura moins de contraintes, mais il ne prendra sans doute pas de grandes initiatives structurelles», estime Justin Vaïsse, directeur de recherche à la Brookings Institution de Washington. … Une poursuite du «pivot» qui aura des incidences nettes pour l’Europe et la France. «Pour Obama, l’essentiel est de consacrer les atouts de l’Amérique à ce qu’il juge important et ne pas se laisser happer par les crises, au Moyen-Orient, ou de nouvelles guerres…», souligne Justin Vaïsse.

USA 2012: Ankara hopes new President will defeat Assad
November 5, 2012, ANSAmed
According to analyst Omer Taspinar, one of the biggest fears regarding the Syrian rebels, a growing number of which have linked to Al Qaeda, is a repeat of Afghanistan. There the US initially supported Islamist insurgents in overthrowing the pro-Soviet government, only to pave the way much later for the Taliban.

Hillary Clinton: Rock-Star Diplomat or Future Head of State?
November 2, 2012, Agence France Presse
“Clinton has been a loyal, very effective secretary of state, who has used her star power in a useful way for Obama, and has left her mark on minor issues such as the Internet or integrating development policies better into foreign policy,” Justin Vaisse, from the Brookings Institution, told AFP. “But she has always been dominated, because that’s Obama’s natural tendency, by a White House which wants to decide on absolutely everything. “That doesn’t take anything away from Clinton. She is truly remarkable, full of energy, intelligent, possessing subtlety and finesse. But the political situation has been such that she has largely been kept on a leash.”

Europe still favours Obama despite disappointments
October 31, 2012, Agence France Presse
By Jean-Luc Bardet
“Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, the eurozone crisis will be a source of major US concern,” Clara Marina O’Donnell of … The Brookings Institution said in a recent article. Obama and his officials have identified the debt crisis as “their biggest frustation with Europe. For them, EU institutions have shown themselves incapable of addressing the crisis,” O’Donnell wrote.

US pivot to Asia puts onus on Europe to boost capability
October 28, 2012, Europolitics
By Brian Beary
According to transatlantic defence expert Clara O’Donnell, non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, “there is a bipartisan consensus in Washington on the pivot”. Indeed, Obama’s Republican opponent in the presidential election, Mitt Romney, has promised to implement the policy even more forcefully than Obama by pledging to reverse Obama’s proposed cuts in overall military spending.

Time for U.S. to prod Ukraine
October 26, 2012, CNN.com
By Anna Borschevskaya
As Brookings Institution scholar Steven Pifer has noted, the West should not be afraid to call Yanukovych on the Russia bluff. Yanukovych’s relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin is complicated, and infused with mistrust. Putin has, for his part, humiliated Yanukovych. During one recent visit to Moscow, Putin reportedly made Yanukovych wait for four hours.

Final Presidential Debate: Why Obama Needs A Clear Win In Round 3
October 22, 2012, International Business Times
By Laura Matthews
Romney’s challenge tonight is to provide millions of Americans the details of his foreign policy without alienating many of them, while Obama will need to address long-standing criticism that he hasn’t delivered on his foreign policy promises. “Any exchange through which one candidate can be seen as losing credibility can carry weight,” said Clara O’Donnell, non-resident fellow at Brookings Institution. “How they convey their issues can also have an effect.”

In Foreign Policy, Both Obama and Romney Face Fiscal Realities
October 22, 2012, NBC News
By Tom Curry
Former State Department official Steven Pifer who is now director of the Arms Control Initiative at Brookings Institution, the Washington think tank, argued that cost is one reason the next president ought to support a treaty with the Russians to further shrink both countries’ nuclear arsenals. “In the next several years the U.S. has to make some very expensive decisions about how to modernize the legs of the U.S. strategic triad (bombers, submarine and land-based missiles),” Pifer said. “For example, replacing the Trident submarine will cost, according to the Navy, $6 to $7 billion a piece.” An arms reduction treaty with the Russians would mean “you could save a big chunk of money,” said Pifer.

Obama, Romney au coude à coude s’affrontent sur la politique étrangère
October 22, 2012, Agence France Presse
Lundi, “Barack Obama va jouer la partition qui lui est donnée spontanément: c’est le commandant en chef des armées, il a ordonné le raid sur Ben Laden, les frappes de drones contre (l’imam yéménite Anwar) Al-Aulaqi et des milliers d’autres” suspects d’appartenance à la nébuleuse extrémiste, prédit Justin Vaïsse, du centre de réflexion Brookings.

US Shrugs Off Russian Rights Criticism
October 22, 2012, RIA Novosti
By Carl Schreck
But Steven Pifer, a former senior State Department official and White House adviser on the former Soviet Union, said the report is unlikely to earn much attention in Washington. “Most American officials concede that there are problems here,” Pifer said. “But the idea that the problems here on democracy, for example, equate with the problems that you see in Russia over the last 10 years, I don’t think people are going to take that as a serious suggestion.”

Mitt Romney, dans le sillage de Reagan
October 22, 2012, La Tribune
Mais selon les experts, il ne devrait pas y avoir de rupture majeure dans la politqiue étrangère des Etats-Unis s’il était élu. “Le monde de Romney, c’est le monde de Bush qui n’a pas beaucoup changé”, estime Justin Vaïsse, auteur de “Barack Obama et sa politique étrangère”, selon qui Mitt Romney “coche toutes les cases du néoconservatisme”. Le républicain s’est entouré de quelques vétérans de l’aile néoconservatrice du parti et de conseillers plus modérés. Mais il fait aussi souvent référence à la politique de “paix grâce à la force” de l’ancien président Ronald Reagan.

Israel and Iran: War now? Or war later?
October 9, 2012, Macleans
By Michael Petrou
The drawbacks of a unilateral attack from an Israeli perspective are serious. Most importantly, it likely wouldn’t be as effective as a joint strike. Israeli has fewer planes, and with no aircraft carriers, they would have to cross foreign airspace before reaching Iran. “They could probably do that once,” says Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. The United States, with aircraft carriers that can be deployed in the Persian Gulf and military bases throughout the region, has the option of launching multiple sorties over many days, hitting deeply buried targets again and again. The U.S. could “use bombs to dig way down to the underground facilities in a way the Israelis couldn’t,” says Pifer.

Mitt Romney’s Aggressive Foreign Policy Push: Big Mistake?
October 9, 2012, The Week
Republicans usually get mileage out of calling Democrats weak, says Justin Vaisse at the Brookings Institution, but that’s not the “best electoral strategy” for Romney. It calls attention to Obama’s tough reputation — remember “his decisive use of drones” and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden? And while Romney’s hawkish bluster might impress neoconservatives, it’s just as likely to scare the growing number of voters “who are tired of foreign interventions.”

Quand Romney fait du Bush dans le texte
October 9, 2012, Europe1
By Anne-Julie Contenay
Justin Vaïsse, spécialiste de la politique étrangère américaine, analyse pour le think-tank Brookings cette ligne politique “qui correspond en tous points à celle du néoconservatisme, l’école de pensée associée à l’administration Bush et à la guerre en Irak de 2003”. Les cinq “piliers” de cette doctrine, “internationalisme, suprématie, unilatéralisme, militarisme et démocratie” sont “tous présents sous une forme ou un autre dans le discours de Romney de lundi”, affirme Justin Vaïsse, citations à l’appui. “Nos amis et nos alliés à travers le monde ne veulent pas moins de leadership américain. Ils en veulent plus”, a ainsi martelé le candidat républicain.

Attack Operations For Iran Weighed
October 1, 2012, Aviation Weekly
By David Fulghum
Probably the only nation to profit from an attack on Iran would be Russia, where declining oil prices are slowing the economy. “The price of oil goes up if there is an attack on Iran,” says Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Institute arms control initiative. And while Russia’s sale of its long-range SA-20 (S-300) surface-to-air missile to Iran remains a “dead issue,” Moscow has “not seen a precautionary tale” in the fact that its advanced-capability, man-portable SA-18s and SA-24s have migrated from military customers into the black market and into the hands of militants in Somalia, South Lebanon and Gaza, says Pifer. He predicts such sales will continue.

Next Cold War? Gas Drilling Boom Rattles Russia
September 30, 2012, Associated Press
By Kevin Begos
Like falling dominoes, the drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is shaking up world energy markets from Washington to Moscow to Beijing. Some predict what was once unthinkable: that the U.S. won’t need to import natural gas in the near future, and that Russia could be the big loser.
“This is where everything is being turned on its head,” said Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. “Their days of dominating the European gas markets are gone.”

Did Yanukovych ‘s guys come back empty-handed from US?
September 27, 2012,The Kyiv Post
By Olena Tregub
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer, currently director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative, pointed out: “The Ukrainian delegation described a country that is open and eager for foreign business. But reports from foreign businessmen about problems such as growing corruption and complex tax and regulatory rules, plus the country’s low ranking in ratings like the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ survey, suggest that Ukraine still has much to do to build a business climate that truly welcomes foreign investment.”

EU Antitrust Review of BAE-EADS Deal May Face Legal Limit
September 27, 2012, Bloomberg
By Aoife White
A bigger regulatory obstacle to the deal may be the U.S., which is “sensitive about who is the owner” of defense- equipment suppliers, said [Clara] O’Donnell. Any requirement for BAE to sell off U.S. businesses would be a challenge because those units are a significant source of its earnings, she said.

Dick Lugar Burnishes Legacy As Richard Mourdock Struggles
September 26, 2012, Politico
By Scott Wong
Steven Pifer, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton who served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, is among many lamenting the departure of a senator who had almost unrivaled credibility in world affairs. During Ukraine’s election crisis in 2004, President George W. Bush asked Lugar to be his point man on the ground to pass messages to outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, he recalled. “When he goes away, I don’t know who picks up that mantle,” Pifer said in an interview. “Sen. Lugar was that person who would basically say, ‘Let’s put aside politics if that treaty is good for American interests.’”

Cumbersome Gazprom Losing Its Clout
September 23, 2012, The Washington Post
By Will Englund and Kathy Lally
Gazprom was set up in the Soviet era to export gas to Europe. After the collapse of communism in 1991, Russia broke up its oil monopoly — oil prices were very low at the time — but held on to Gazprom, its chief earner, and its chief spender. When Putin took the presidency in 2000, he told the oligarchs he would protect their businesses as long as they stayed out of politics. Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution calls this “Putin’s protection racket.”

Is the United States an Empire in Decline?
September 20, 2012, BBC News
By Mark Urban
Those who argue against the “declinist” proposition, such as historian Robert Kagan, believe the current situation mirrors some earlier periods of national introspection. In the 1920s or 1970s, for example, a combination of economic hardship and costly foreign wars, produced isolationism or faltering national confidence. “If it’s a neurotic superpower you’re looking for, then America’s your one,” Dr Kagan told me. Dr Kagan‘s confident assertions that the current mood is cyclical and does not portend a downward slide for America have been quoted by both candidates for the presidency.

USAID Mission in Russia to Close Following Moscow Decision
September 18, 2012, Reuters
By Arshad Mohammed
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Brookings Institution think tank, said he believed the decision reflected some reluctance by the Russian government to see foreign support for pro-democracy efforts in the country.”They see AID’s efforts in Russia as being a prime funder of the NGOs that are concerned about their elections and concerned about the regression of democracy in Russia,” Pifer said. He said the Russian government may also be “trying to make it more difficult” for the outside world to support pro-democracy NGOs in Russia.

Сам себе форум: Евросоюз и Украина не услышали друг друга в Ялте
September 17, 2012, Kommersant Ukraine
By Viktor Sidorenko
По завершении дискуссии Ренат Кузьмин покинул форум, оставив его участников обмениваться впечатлениями, которые оказались негативными. […] “Не представляю, зачем его сюда направили. Я не нашел ни одного человека, которого он убедил”,— добавил бывший посол США в Украине Стивен Пайфер.

BAE-EADS Merger Would Advance Europe’s Military Goals
September 16, 2012, Reuters
By Adrian Croft
The British government has said it is working with BAE and EADS to ensure the merger serves the public interest, but senior British lawmakers say Prime Minister David Cameron backs the deal. “In the broadest terms, this merger does enact what many European governments… have been saying for a long time – that in order for the European defense industry to remain competitive in the long term it needs to consolidate,” said Clara Marina O’Donnell, a defense expert…

Les attaques au Moyen-Orient s’invitent dans la campagne présidentielle américaine
September 14, 2012, Les Echos
By Virginie Robert
Si la Maison Blanche a réagi avec sang-froid et promis que « justice serait faite », cette situation explosive a été l’occasion d’un nouveau faux pas pour Mitt Romney. « Il est intervenu trop tôt en reprenant une ligne d’attaque coutumière qui est qu’Obama présente en permanence ses excuses au monde entire [NDLR : en faisant référence à un communiqué de l’ambassade du Caire qui prenait ses distance avec la fameuse vidéo] et il n’a pas eu de chance parce qu’il y a eu ensuite l’attaque tragique de Benghazi », observe Justin Vaisse, chercheur à la Brookings Institution.

Seeking Kremlin Engagement, NATO Weighs Next Nuclear Posture Steps
September 13, 2012, National Journal
By Elaine M. Grossman
NATO nations have decided, though, that they will not publicize their proposed list ahead of sharing it with the Kremlin, said Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution. Rather than attempt to score political points, the intent is to discuss the list with Russian leaders in a quiet diplomatic effort to explore which, if any, specific initiatives might be feasible. The Atlantic partners have decided they do not want to “put the Russians in a corner,” but rather would pursue in good faith the potential for a new cooperative regime, Pifer said in a Tuesday interview.

Political Scientist Laurence Earns Berlin Prize
September 6, 2012, The Boston College Chronicle
…Jonathan Laurence is among this fall’s recipients of the prestigious Berlin Prize, awarded by The American Academy in Berlin, a private, nonprofit, non-partisan center for advanced research in a range of academic and cultural fields. Laurence… will use the fellowship to support a research project titled “Turkey and Morocco in Germany: European Muslims or Citizens Abroad?”

The Middle East: Goodbye to All That
September 5, 2012, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
By Jeffrey Goldberg
This effort to de-emphasize the region represents a significant departure in U.S. strategy, according to Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution. “After the entire collapse of international order and security 70 years ago, the way we established order and security was to take responsibility for three regions—Asia, Europe, and the Middle East,” Kagan says. “That is what the definition of a superpower is. We consciously adopted a global role.”

Romney Talks Tough on Russia in Acceptance Speech
August 31, 2012, RIA Novosti
By Carl Schreck
A failure by the next U.S. president to negotiate with Russia over the missile defense issue could not only alienate the Kremlin, but U.S. allies in Europe as well, saidSteven Pifer, an arms control expert and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “Allies are supportive of the American approach to missile defense in Europe in part, because they see that there is a desire on the part of Washington to engage with Russia cooperatively on missile defense,” said Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Obama, gendarme du monde malgré lui
August 31, 2012, Le Monde
By Corine Lesnes
Et l’administration a évolué. Après le tout-coopératif du début du mandat, avec priorité au G20, elle s’est aperçue que le reste du monde a encore envie du gendarme américain (et elle est revenue au G8). “Obama et Clinton se sont rendu compte que le langage de l’humilité ne rapporte pas de dividendes. Ils ont ajusté leur représentation du monde aux impératifs du leadership”, estime l’historien et spécialiste des Etats-Unis Justin Vaïsse, qui publie La Politique étrangère de Barack Obama (Odile Jacob).

Former Ukrainian PM Yuliya Tymoshenko Loses Court Appeal, Stays In Jail
August 29, 2012, International Business Times
By Maya Shwayder
The EU, US, and other major powers already condemned the Ukrainian government when Tymoshenko was convicted, and the whole trial process hurt President Yanukovych’s image in the West, according to Steven Pifer, senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute. When Tymoshenko was convicted in 2011, European Union stated that the trial “did not respect the international standards as regards fair, transparent and independent legal process.”

Defeat, Introspection, Reinvention, Nomination
August 29, 2012, The New York Times
By Michael Barbaro
With Robert Kagan, the historian and foreign policy expert, he reverse-engineered America’s relationship with Iran, searching for opportunities to avert the current standoff over its nuclear program through diplomacy, alliances and economics. “It was quite an impressive, extemporaneous discussion about how you go about dealing with problems before they get out of hand,” Mr. Kagan recalled.

Obama bien positionné malgré la reprise molle
August 29, 2012, Les Echos
By Karl de Meyer
Selon Justin Vaïsse, directeur de recherche à l’institut Brookings, « vous avez en 2012 une campagne comparable dans sa structure à celle de 2004, quand George Bush cherchait à se faire réélire. De même que le président sortant avait réussi, très tôt, à donner une image très négative de son rival, John Kerry, de même Barack Obama est parvenu assez tôt à peindre Mitt Romney comme un privilégié en dehors des réalités de la vie quotidienne, comme un prédateur qui a accumulé son patrimoine de manière douteuse ».

Saving Europe: How National Politics Nearly Destroyed the Euro
September/October 2012, Foreign Affairs
By Andrew Moravcsik
The euro hangs in limbo, and no one can be sure exactly how the current crisis will end. So one might be tempted to ignore a 400-page book written in midstream, most of which concerns the period — long ago, it seems — when Silvio Berlusconi still headed Italy, Nicolas Sarkozy still led France, and Greece still seemed salvageable. Yet [Carlo] Bastasin’s book is worth reading for its detailed political narrative of the crisis to date, drawn largely from journalistic sources and focusing on the interaction among decision-makers in Europe’s capitals.

As Greece Seeks More Help, Ireland and Portugal Press Ahead
August 25, 2012, The Washington Post
By Howard Schneider
Greece remains far from the point where citizens and politicians can expect a return from the sacrifices they are making. “When you impose deflation on an economy that cannot benefit because it is not that open to world markets, you just create more deflation,” said Carlo Bastasin, an Italian economist and analyst at the Brookings Institution.

La diplomatie française se cherche une nouvelle ligne
August 25, 2012, AFP
By Cecile Feuillatre
L’attitude de Paris convient cependant à Washington, souligne de son côté Justin Vaïsse, du centre de réflexion américain Brookings Institution. “Jouer les va-t-en-guerre maintenant serait mauvais pour (Barack) Obama. François Hollande ne veut rien faire qui puisse gêner le président américain dans sa quête de réélection”, souligne le chercheur.

The FP 50: The 50 Most Powerful Republicans on Foreign Policy
August 24, 2012, Foreign Policy
…Robert Kagan is the rare public intellectual simultaneously in vogue with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. A loud opponent of the “American decline” refrain, he seems to sit perpetually in the Washington spotlight, producing a stream of headline-grabbing essays and books. Now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, he was a leading supporter of the 2003 Iraq war and many say he is one of Romney’s closest foreign-policy advisors.

Lederhosen on Fire
August 13, 2012, Foreign Policy
By Joshua Keating
Putin has faced plagiarism charges himself. Brookings Institution economist Clifford Gaddy alleged in 2006 that the Russian president had ripped off large portions of his 1997 dissertation, “Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Resource Base,” from an American textbook. Gaddy thinks it’s quite possible that Putin — then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, simply paid someone to write the paper for him, a common practice in Russian universities at the time.

Turkey: Syria Crisis Causes Russian Relations to Suffer
July 19, 2012, EurasiaNet
By Yigal Schliefer
“There was always the hope in Moscow that they could somehow woo Turkey and exploit the rift between Turkey and the United States and the EU. I think Moscow was pretty shocked when Turkey came on board in Libya,” says Fiona Hill, an expert on Russia at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

As Squeeze Tightens on Iran, Fuel Prices—for Now—Reflect Calm
July 10, 2012, National Geographic News
By Marianne Lavelle
As of the end of May, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran has produced about 6,200 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 5 percent, and 146 kilograms enriched up to 20 percent. If Iran chose to further process that uranium to weapons grade (about 90 percent), it would be enough for four nuclear bombs, said Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution, during a June 29 forum at the think tank’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Egypt’s President Mursi Reinstates Parliament, Defies Military
July 9, 2012, Bloomberg News
By Ahmed A. Namatalla and Salma El Wardany
“We need to make clear to the new government and all the various powers in Egypt, including the military, that we have certain clear standards for what kind of democracy Egypt needs to be, including the respect for minorities,” Robert Kagan, senior fellow of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said by phone. “But in general, it’s a good thing to be reaching out to the president of Egypt.”

Is the US Caught in the Slow Lane?
July 4, 2012, BBC News
By Mark Mardell
Robert Kagan, author of The World America Made, says that the world would be a different – a worse place – without a strong America. But he feels the worries about decline have been overdone.
“I think at any time when you have a deep economic recession, which the US has been in, people tend to get pessimistic. The US has repeatedly gone through periods of declinism, concern that other countries were passing it, whether it was Japan, the Soviet Union, and now China.

Hegemony and After
July/August 2012, Foreign Affairs
By Robert O. Keohane
[Robert] Kagan’s gracefully written essay notes that the United States has played an essential role in creating the international system of the last 60 years, one in which large-scale warfare has been relatively rare, the global economy has grown at unprecedented rates, and the number of democracies has quadrupled.

NATO Condemns Syria Over Downed Turkish Plane
June 26, 2012, Reuters
By Justyna Pawlak and Sebastian Moffett
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are trying to suppress an uprising against his rule that broke out 16 months ago. Even defensive measures by NATO allies would risk sucking them into the conflict. “There is very little appetite from the alliance to undertake what we call a discretionary war,” said Clara Marina O’Donnell, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Turkey Turns to NATO After Syria Downs Jet
June 25, 2012, Reuters
By Jon Hemming
“Ankara itself has been averse to consider military action against Syria so far. So it is likely that the invocation of Article 4 is designed to put more diplomatic pressure on Assad,” said Clara Marina O’Donnell, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

West Cuts Nuclear Warheads as it Negotiates With Iran
June 18, 2012, The Washington Post
By Olga Khazan
Steven Pifer, director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told NPR that the treaty helped pave the way for international support for U.S. efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program and gives President Obama “moral authority” on nuclear nonproliferation.

Whatever Euro’s Fate, Europe’s Reputation Savaged
June 16, 2012, Reuters
By Peter Apps
“From almost every conversation I’ve had in the last year – with Chinese, with Indians, with just about anybody – the message is always the same,” says Fiona Hill, a former senior officer for the US National Intelligence Council and now head of the Europe program at Washington think tank the Brookings Institute. “Europe can no longer be trusted. It seems to be moving from being a source of stability to a driver of instability.”

Greece Could Exit Euro Zone in Weeks: Experts
June 14, 2012, MarketWatch
By Donald D. Orol
However, Daniel Speckhard, a fellow with the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, said that a significant majority of Greeks are for staying in the euro zone and that returning to the Drachma would a huge psychological blow. Speckhard said that many Greeks like the Syriza party because they are the party of change from the main traditional political parties in Greece who they believe have gotten the country into its current fiscal problems over the past 40 years.

Pifer: US to Impose Sanctions against Ukraine Should Backslide on Democracy Continue
June 7, 2012, Kyiv Post 
Should the backslide on democracy continue in Ukraine, the US will apply sanctions against the state, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer said during a meeting of a media club in Kyiv on Wednesday, June 6. The former ambassador also said that both Republicans and Democrats in the US share the same position as regards Ukraine.

Necessity, Not Inclination, Nudges Europeans Closer Fiscally and Politically
June 7, 2012, The New York Times
By Steven Erlanger
Though Mr. Sarkozy often gave in to the more powerful Germany, he resisted too much Brussels influence, holding to the traditional French idea of a Gaullist Europe, directed and controlled by nation-states and not by the unelected European Commission or the European Parliament. “So can the most structurally sovereigntist country in the euro zone, France, agree on the abandonment of sovereignty that Merkel is right to insist on?” asked Justin Vaïsse, a French scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Common debt liability in some form needs to be accompanied by greater political and economic integration; that’s just logical,” he said.

Congress Advances Bill to Pressure Russia on Human Rights
June 7, 2012, The Washington Post
By Kathy Lally
“I fear we’ll end up in an endless round of recriminations,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “What happened to Sergei Magnitsky is appalling, but the problem is all of the instruments we have are difficult to apply.”

Putin’s Propaganda Man
May 31, 2012, New York Review of Books
By Amy Knight
But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors.

Concerns of Racism Ahead of Euro 2012
May 30, 2012, The New York Times
By Jeré Longman
“When Ukraine got this (hosting role for Euro 2012), people were saying it would be a showcase, to show its democracy, that its economy was growing, that it was part of Europe,” said Steven Pifer, a former United States ambassador to Ukraine who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Now that it has arrived, the price gouging, corruption, the perception that Ukraine is going back on democracy and the decision by some European leaders to stay away is going to put a rain cloud over their parade.”

Syria: Diplomatic deadlock, deaths go on
May 28, 2012, CNN
By Ivan Watson
“The biggest problem is the regime in Syria is not that weak,” argued Omer Taspinar, a Washington-based analyst with the Brookings Institution. “They still have a critical mass supporting them: the Sunni merchants, who see the world is not doing anything and that Bashar al-Assad can get away with murder.”

Major Powers Seek Iran Concessions at Baghdad Talks
May 23, 2012, Reuters
By Justyna Pawlak and Patrick Markey
Clara O’Donnell, at Washington’s Brookings Institution, said: “The likelihood of an Israeli military strike will remain lower while the talks are ongoing. But they are likely to keep talking about it, to keep up the pressure.”

Analysis: Looming End of Afghan Mission Leaves NATO with Identity Crisis
May 22, 2012, Reuters
By David Brunnstrom and Adrian Croft
Clara O’Donnell, visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, said the fact that countries traditionally active in NATO operations, such as Poland and the Netherlands, chose not to take part in the Libya air strikes showed a dwindling desire to show solidarity with other NATO members, reflecting the unpopularity of foreign expeditions in many countries.

Leaders Stress Growth and Keeping Greece in Eurozone
May 21, 2012, EuroPolitics
By Brian Beary
However, Senior Fellow on Foreign Policy at Brookings Justin Vaisse asserted that “there is a very superficial consensus” among the G8 leaders in the growth versus fiscal consolidation debate. Vaisse argued that given Obama’s pro-growth orientation, Merkel risked being isolated if she continued stressing debt reduction.

Going to Extremes: Europe’s Voters Strike Back
May 20, 2012, The Sydney Morning Herald
By Martin Daly
Jonathan Laurence, associate professor of political science at Boston College and author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, believes the fact that one-fifth of the French electorate voted for Front National shows “serious fault lines” in terms of satisfaction with government, particularly as the front’s members “do not hesitate to play fast and loose with some pretty vile politics”.

Summits No Real Break From the Campaign
May 18, 2012, National Journal
By George E. Condon Jr.
And Romney has made things worse with public comments about Russia that were widely viewed — particularly in Moscow — as woefully outdated. “Romney’s positions on Iran and Russia (are) positions with which Europeans feel quite uncomfortable,” said Clara Marina O’Donnell, from Brookings’ Center on the United States and Europe. “This really brings a question mark in Europe about where exactly Romney will go.”

Obama accueille Hollande
May 18, 2012, Le Parisien
By Alix Bouilhaguet
Enfin, sur le plan de la personnalité, François Hollande, « le président normal », semble plus compatible avec Barack Obama que ne l’était Nicolas Sarkozy. « Hollande est plus réservé, plus posé, plus pondéré. Un peu à l’image du président américain, qui ne change pas d’avis et qui n’est pas un impulsif », analyse Justin Vaïsse, de la Brookings, un club de réflexion. Le président américain, dont la devise est « no drama with Obama » (pas de drame avec Obama), pourrait ainsi trouver un alter ego à son goût.

Ce qui les sépare: le dossier afghan
May 18, 2012, Le Parisien
By Alix Bouilhaguet
« Les Français peuvent faire un pas en acceptant le principe qu’une force de formation reste plus longtemps pour assurer la transition », décrypte Justin Vaïsse. Reste une question à plus long terme : Barack Obama s’est engagé à laisser environ 15000 hommes — troupes combattantes et formateurs — après 2014 pour accompagner le pays pendant dix ans.

Euro Crisis and Growth the Focus at G8 Summit
May 18, 2012, The Irish Times
By Lara Marlowe
Attention will focus on Mr. Hollande, who will meet Mr. Obama in the White House earlier in the day.“This will be Hollande’s first chance to interact with leaders who gave him the cold shoulder during his campaign,” said Justin Vaisse, an expert on the US and Europe at Brookings. “François Hollande met with hostility when he promised to renegotiate the fiscal treaty,” Mr. Vaisse noted. “Since then, that has become the consensus. There will be a package of growth measures to balance the fiscal compact treaty.[German chancellor Angela] Merkel runs the risk of being isolated [at the G-8 summit]. The US is clearly on the side of growth.”

Obama Otherwise Engaged in Run-up to G8, NATO Summits
May 18, 2012, Business Recorder
By Peer Meinart
“For the first time in the history of NATO, Washington refused last spring to take on a leading role,” says Clara O’Donnell, an expert in trans-Atlantic security issues. The Pentagon calls this taking a back seat in military operations. And O’Donnell warns that it could well happen again, given the current need for savings, whether or not Obama stays in the White House.

Chicago Summit Seeks to Deliver on Promises to Renew NATO
May 18, 2012, Xinhua
By Yi Aijun and Lin Yu
Steven Pifer, a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution think tank, agreed on the alliance’s indispensability to the security of the transatlantic community. However, “both the United States and Europe think NATO is going to remain relevant for the security of the transatlantic region,” said Pifer. “Although my guess is that after Afghanistan enthusiasm both in Europe and the United States for that kind of operation in the future is going to be pretty limited, I think within NATO countries there’s a sense that NATO is a useful tool, there is no organization in the world that is as good as NATO at organizing and conducting multinational military operations,” he told Xinhua.

UN Observers Face Daunting Challenges in Syria
May 17, 2012, Voice of America
By Margaret Besheer
Richard Kauzlarich was U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the late 1990s. He says one of the problems that plagued the Bosnian mission, known as UNPROFOR, was the parties’ unwillingness to stop fighting. “For whatever reasons, they saw war as the only solution to the political problem and UNPROFOR was given the impossible mission of trying to make peace in an environment where the people on the ground were not interested in peace,” he said.

Austerity to Strain Transatlantic Ties at NATO Chicago Summit
May 16, 2012, Reuters
By Adrian Croft and David Brunnstrom
“There is definitely going to be an effort to present things in the best light possible, but the fact remains that as soon as we are talking about more ambitious forms of defence cooperation, which require large budgetary investments, it’s really hard to progress and it’s going to remain so for the foreseeable future,” said Clara O’Donnell, a visiting scholar at Brookings.

Le camouflet de Poutine à Barack Obama
May 15, 2012, Le Figaro
By Laure Mandeville
À la Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill, directrice du centre sur les États-Unis et l’Europe, dit elle aussi «ne pas être surprise». «Pour Poutine, le G8 n’est pas vraiment une priorité et la relation avec l’Amérique non plus. Il est beaucoup plus confortable pour lui de faire sa rentrée de président au G20, où il est le leader informel des nouveaux pays émergents», explique-t-elle. «Cette surprise correspond à son style, mettre tout le monde sur la défensive et maintenir l’ambiguïté sur ses intentions», ajoute Fiona Hill.

Obama Hosts NATO, Focus on Afghanistan and Alliance Future Global Role
May 15, 2012, Voice of America
By Dan Robinson
Steven Pifer, at the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution in Washington, said, “The question with smart defense is how can NATO together spend money so that NATO as an entity has more capability than if countries make independent decisions.”

Economic Turmoil in Europe Could Be Key That Turns U.S. Elections
May 15, 2012, Public Radio International
“More (nations) could join (the recession), especially if François Hollande and Angela Merkel don’t find a way to stimulate growth in the next few weeks,” Justin Vaisse said. “A stronger recession in Europe would contaminate the U.S. economy by virtue of the very strong investment and trade links between the two sides of the Atlantic.”

France’s Hollande in Diplomatic Test With Obama
May 15, 2012, Reuters
By John Irish
Merkel, whose country has the third-largest troop contingent in Afghanistan, said on May 10 that NATO allies had joined the war at the same time and should leave together. “In the year running up to the election the last thing they (the Germans) want is to be maintaining an unpopular presence in Afghanistan when even France is withdrawing,” said Clara O’Donnell at the Brookings Institution.

Sunni-Shia Strife: The Sword and the Word
May 12, 2012, The Economist
European Shia-Sunni acrimony is part of a many-sided contest over the future of the continent’s tens of millions of Muslims, says Jonathan Laurence, a scholar at Boston College. The religious authorities in migrant-sending countries like Turkey and Morocco struggle to keep their people loyal to their own varieties of Sunni practice: they see Shia Islam and hardline Sunni groups like the Salafists as equally dangerous and insidious temptations for their sons and daughters in Europe.

Romney’s Adversarial View of Russia Stirs Debate
May 11, 2012, The New York Times
By Richard A. Oppel Jr.
A number of arms control specialists said they were startled by some of Mr. Romney’s assertions, like fretting about intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on bombers. “It would be really fun to watch a Russian bomber with an SS-25 strung to its stomach try to take off,” said Steve Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and now director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “Some of the arguments just left people scratching their heads.”

Putin’s No-Show at US Meeting Sets a Sour Tone
May 11, 2012, The Associated Press
By Anne Gearan
Putin has a variety of troubles at home and isn’t likely to pick a fight with the United States despite sharply negative rhetoric about Washington during his election campaign. But he also isn’t likely to welcome friendly ties for their own sake, said Steven Pifer, a Russia and arms control expert at the Brookings Institution. “I think you’ll see a more transactional relationship,” Pifer said. Putin will be prepared to cooperate with the U.S. where he sees fit, “but it will be, `If I do this for you, what do I get?’” Pifer said.

Putin Not Attending Camp David G8, Will Send Medvedev
May 10, 2012, Reuters
By Alister Bull
“The excuse could be legitimate,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But on the other hand, maybe neither Obama, nor Putin, wanted to have their first big meeting, with Putin back as the president, at the (White House),” she said. A White House bilateral could have had repercussions on the U.S. election campaign trail, where Obama’s likely Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, has already criticized the Democrat for not being tough enough in his dealings with Russia.

Not Normalizing Trade With Russia Could Hurt U.S.
May 9, 2012, National Journal Daily
By Kelsey Snell
As a WTO member, Russia can turn its irritation with the sanctions into a retributive policy when it gains the power to deny tariff rates and preferences to U.S. businesses, according to Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Once [Russia] joins the WTO, this is going to be a congressional sanction on U.S. companies,” Pifer said. “You may be unhappy with Russian behavior on other issues, but I can’t see anything that continued coverage by Jackson-Vanik is achieving for us.”

In Putin’s Third Term, US-Russian ‘Reset’ Revisited
May 9, 2012, Voice of America
By Jonas Bernstein
Pavel Baev, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, said a mounting showdown between the government and Russian opposition could exacerbate tensions with the United States and other Western countries. “This sort of development objectively puts Putin on the course of a kind of self-isolation [and] greater tension with the West, because, for the West, opposition forces in Russia [are] something very sympathetic,” he said. “For Putin, it is a mortal enemy with which he can fight, with which he will fight, tooth and nail. Putin will have to use every instrument at his disposal, including presenting the whole thing as a plot by the West and the United States in particular.”

Book Review: The World America Made
May/June, 2012, Foreign Affairs
By Walter Russell Mead
As usual, Kagan’s writing bristles with insights and ideas. His latest book aims to counter the view of many liberal internationalists that because the United States seeks a liberal order it must eschew traditional great-power diplomacy and power projection. Kagan believes in the value of a liberal, democratic world order and fears that anarchy and chaos will result if this order breaks down.

Change in Paris May Better Fit U.S. Economic Positions
May 7, 2012, The New York Times
By Annie Lowrey
Mr. Hollande seems “naturally more palatable to the administration,” said Justin Vaïsse, the director of research for the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. The administration seems to reason that “Europe probably has a better chance of avoiding a breakup or another renewed sovereign debt crisis by focusing on growth, rather than just sticking to austerity,” he said.

Putin Again Takes Reins of an Agitated Russia
May 6, 2012, USA Today
By Marc Bennetts
“Mr. Putin faces serious economic and political questions at home,” said Steven Pifer, senior fellow and Russia expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank. “He may need a different set of political skills than have been necessary in the past.”

Hollande Signals Return of France as Complicated Ally for West
May 6, 2012, Bloomberg
By Helene Fouquet
At the same time, he has fashioned a persona that may be familiar to the U.S. leader. “No drama, no surprise: the Obama recipe,” Justin Vaisse, an analyst at Washington-based Brookings Institution wrote on April 13.

The Ins and Outs of Russia’s Next Government
May 4, 2012, Reuters
By Douglas Busvine
“Elevations and falls from grace have become enmeshed in the hidden but acute rivalry between the two rulers, (and) clashes of interests between clans and ambitious newcomers,” analyst Pavel Baev wrote in a commentary for the Jamestown Foundation.

One Man Rule Bad for Russia – Medvedev
April 26, 2012, RIA Novosti
By Marc Bennetts
“Medvedev will be remembered as a softer face of Russian foreign policy,” said Steven Pifer, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank, in comments to RIA Novosti. “[But] Washington has always assumed that Putin as prime minister was closely involved in major foreign policy decisions,” he added.

The Rubio Doctrine
April 25, 2012, Foreign Policy
By Joshua Keating
Rubio’s foreign-policy views have evidently been recently shaped by a reading of Robert Kagan‘s The World America Made, a much-discussed refutation of the now-popular notion of American decline. He cited the author and Brookings scholar, who was sitting in the front row, repeatedly throughout the speech. (As a Romney advisor who has penned bedside reading for President Barack Obama, Kagan could plausibly claim to be the most prominently cited writer in Washington right now.) Rubio repeatedly echoed Kagan’s arguments for the necessity of U.S. involvement in solving international crises.

French Jews’ Fears Rising
April 24, 2012, The Jewish Week
By Stewart Ain
Justin Vaisse, director of research at the Center on the United States and Europe and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institute, pointed out that it is a “longstanding Socialist position to support a two-state solution [Palestinian and Israeli] dating back to the end of the ‘70s and early ‘80s – long before most other observers were in favor of it. (Hollande) does not have a distinctive take on it that would distinguish him from the Socialist mainstream.”

Beyond Freedom Fries: The Roots of American Francophobia
April 23, 2012, The Atlantic
By Max Fisher
Historian Justin Vaïsse thinks that the absence of a strong, unified French-American community means that there is little stigma against expressing Francophobia — compared to anti-Japanese or anti-German attitudes, for example — which over time has allowed Francophobia to flourish more freely than have other anti-national attitudes.

You Can Stop Being Scared Now
April 22, 2012, The Boston Globe
By Thanassis Cambanis,
Not everyone agrees. Robert Kagan, the most influential proponent of robust American power, argues that America is safe today precisely because it throws its military might around. President Obama said he relied for his most recent state of the union address on Kagan’s newest book, The World America Made.

When a Minority Population Rebels
April 20, 2012, The Washington Times
By Joshua Sinai
As stated in its title, Jonathan Laurence‘s “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration” sets out to present a “positive” spin on these issues. The book’s merit is as a reference volume on the policies that governments across Western Europe have adopted in their attempts to better integrate Muslim communities into their societies and the types of organizations, ranging from mainstream to extremist, established by the Muslim communities to express themselves politically on these issues.

Le match Sarkozy-Hollande vu d’Amérique
April 19, 2012, Les Echos
By Pierre de Gasquet
“En cas de victoire, François Hollande pourrait négocier un protocole additionnel sur la croissance européenne qui aurait toutes les chances d’obtenir le soutien des autres partenaires européens et de l’administration Obama, soucieuse de ne pas voir la reprise américaine menacée par une récession en Europe,” résume Justin Vaïsse, chercheur à la Brookings Institution.

Do Americans Love War?
April 17, 2012, Salon 
By Jefferson Morley
As a living embodiment of Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, Robert Kagan has few peers. The author of the best-selling book “The World America Made,” Kagan has pulled off the neat trick of impressing the only two men on the planet who have a realistic chance of serving as president of the United States any time soon.

Turks, Armenians Aim For Dialogue in Washington
April 13, 2012, Today’s Zaman
By Ali H. Aslan
Ömer Taşpınar, a member of HasNa executive board and an academic at the National War College in Washington delivered a speech at the event, saying that while Armenians suffered a trauma due to the 1915 incidents, Turks suffered a trauma due to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and he called on both Turks and Armenians to avoid acts which will recall their traumas.

Can the ‘Toulouse Effect’ Save Sarkozy From Defeat in France?
April 12, 2012, MSNBC.com
By Becky Bratu
Three opinion polls showed the incumbent’s narrow lead over challenger Francois Hollande is steady or shrinking for the April 22 first round, and Sarkozy is still expected to lose the subsequent May 6 runoff. “He’s been trailing Hollande in the second round pretty consistently,” Justin Vaïsse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told msnbc.com. “It’s hard to see where the reservoir of votes would come from to make him win.”

[…]

Polls show the electorate is growing weary of the rhetoric as well. A recent national survey found 32 percent of respondents don’t plan on hitting the polls, a figure that Jonathan Laurence, nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, says is atypical. The turnout in the 2007 elections was about 80 percent.

Freedom in Post-Democratic Europe
April 9, 2012, Commentary
By Seth Mandel
The democracy deficit–in this case forcing the single-currency suicide pact on disapproving commoners–has led to increasing actual deficits. Those financial debts, in turn, have a corrosive effect on freedom abroad. For example, as Justin Vaïsse wrote in February, European governments promised “money, markets access, mobility” to emerging Arab states, especially Tunisia and Libya, during the Arab Spring. But the debt crisis at home resulted in modest, and disappointing, results–just as those countries needed it the most.

Playing Missile Defense
April 5, 2012, National Journal
By Yochi J. Dreazen
That has left Russia feeling sure that it, not Iran, is the true target. “They don’t worry about what our missile defenses can do now. They worry about what they can do down the road,” says Steven Pifer of the Brookings Institution, who spent decades on arms-control issues at the State Department. “The Russians basically say, ‘Iran doesn’t have ICBMs, so this must really be about us.’ ”

The Big Bang
April 5, 2012, The New York Times
By Jonathan Freedland
The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that ”Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq.

Oil Prices Fueling Russia’s Disruption of U.S. Foreign Policy
April 3, 2012, U.S. News and World Report
By John T. Bennett
“Putin still aspires for Russia to be a superpower,” says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. “There are only two ways for Russia to achieve that: nuclear weapons, and oil and natural gas sales.”

Source Says White House Never Floated Cut to Only 300 Warheads
April 3, 2012, U.S. News and World Report
By John T. Bennett
The White House never asked for options about shrinking the U.S. nuclear arsenal to just 300 deployed warheads, a former senior official says. “The Pentagon was never asked to look at options for going to 300,” says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, citing conversations with Defense Department officials.

Power and Weakness… and Perspective
April 2, 2012, Foreign Policy
By Daniel Drezner
It’s hard to believe, but ten years ago Robert Kagan published “Power and Weakness” in the pages of Policy Review. Coming on the heels of the invasion of Afghanistan and the start of the Iraq debate, Kagan’s essay seemed to crystallize the state of the transatlantic relationship back in the day. To celebrate it’s 10th anniversary, Policy Review has come out with a special issue devoted to the essay, asking a variety of smart people to weigh in.

Russia and the US: Friend, Foe or It’s Complicated?
March 30, 2012, ABC News
By Dana Hughes
“Russia bashing plays well to a certain part of the American electorate,” Steven Pifer, the director of the arms control initiative at the Brookings Institute, told ABC News. “I find it hard to believe that the Romney foreign policy team really does see Russia as foe number one.”

A World of Uncertainty at Brussels Forum
March 29, 2012, The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Trudy Rubin
In the same vein, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan noted: “China is about to have a bigger military budget than Europe. Brazil and India are increasing their military capacity. Europe needs to be part of this game.” A decade ago Kagan famously coined the saying “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” After the Cold War, “Europe thought it could rule the world by economic power,” he explained.

German Effort to Save Euro Zone Comes at a Cost
March 28, 2012, The Washington Post
By Howard Schnieder
“It has not been cheap to get the consent of Germany,” said Carlo Bastasin, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He said the price included the ouster of Greek and Italian leaders who had not taken strong enough action to tackle their nations’ debts and harsh austerity measures, such as deep cuts in public spending, in several countries. “The brinksmanship was a precise strategy – and it worked pretty well in terms of results,” he said.

Emerging Markets Flex Collective Muscle At BRICS Summit
March 28, 2012, International Business Times
By Martin Baccardax
The BRICS “have benefited enormously from an international order that has an open economic system that allows them to trade with the United States and with other powers and they don’t have to spend a lot of money on their defense,” argued Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

Tibet, India, China, and the Yearning for Freedom
March 28, 2012, Forbes
By Kapil Komireddi
“If America’s future competitor in the world is likely to be China,” Robert Kagan recently wrote in a celebrated essay, “then a richer and more powerful India will be an asset, not a liability, to the United States.”

Barack Obama Caught Hinting at Concessions to Dmitry Medvedev
March 26, 2012, The Telegraph
By Jon Swaine
Steven Pifer, the director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative, said that a re-elected Obama administration might offer to share information on the project with Moscow or even effectively allow Russian officials to inspect the system. “Essentially you say ‘here are our plans, here are the number of things we have, and we will keep you updated’,” said Mr Pifer. “They could also permit official observations of testings. However Mr. Obama’s opponents would say these put the US on a slippery slope.”

Please Don’t Go
March 24, 2012, The Economist
To those who believe that a multipolar world could be at least as peaceful as the one dominated by America, Robert Kagan says history proves otherwise. Rules rarely outlast the powers that created them. Nations go to war when they are “in doubt about which is stronger,” he writes. The world is more stable when one nation dominates, especially when it is a nation like America.

NATO, Russia Look Headed for Conflict
March 24, 2012, Deutsche Welle
By Roman Goncharenko
And that, says Steven Pifer, a defense expert at the Brookings Institute in Washington, creates a political dilemma for US President Barack Obama. “Even if the Obama administration would like to do that, there is no chance that the American Senate would ratify that,” Pifer told DW. “Unfortunately missile defense has become very, very political.”

Sifting Through What We Know About the French Shootings Suspect
March 21, 2012, NPR
By Corey Flintoff
Jonathan Laurence, a professor of political science at Boston College, says that the profile of the case — with its Jewish and North Africa victims — at first suggested that the killer might be from the extreme right-wing. Some were drawing parallels to the Norwegian shooter involved in the attacks that killed dozens of people last summer in Norway.

Russia Warms to Syrian Ceasefire Plan, Says Red Cross
March 20, 2012, The National
By Dan Peleschuk
Moscow’s posture towards Damascus is “much more fluid” than it might appear, said the Russian foreign policy expert, Pavel Baev. When looking at which side deserves more support, Russia picks whoever is on top, Mr Baev said. For now, “there is no point” in helping the opposition “because they’re the forces of chaos, and in the Russian perception, revolution and chaos are pretty much synonymous”.

Second Mates
March 16, 2012, National Journal
By Charles Kupchan
Those of us who write about foreign policy—or any topic, for that matter—yearn for the day when the president of the United States lauds our work. That is exactly what happened in January to Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adviser to the Romney campaign. Just before delivering the State of the Union address, President Obama told a collection of news anchors that his thinking had been influenced by Kagan’s recent cover essay in The New Republic, “Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline.” It is not often that a president running for reelection praises his chief rival’s counselor.

Book Review: ‘The World America Made’ by Robert Kagan
March 9, 2012, The Washington Post
By James Mann
So what should we make of the fact that President Obama has recently been touting parts of Robert Kagan‘s new book, “The World America Made”? The president let it be known before his State of the Union address that he had been reading an essay adapted from the book, published by the New Republic under the title “The Myth of American Decline.”

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears
March 9, 2012, The Boston Globe
By Editorial Board
Although Putin remains popular for bringing order and prosperity to Russia after the chaos of the post-Soviet era, the urban middle class he helped create has grown disillusioned with corruption and authoritarianism. Some 4 million Russians – about 3 percent of the population – have left Russia to work elsewhere over the last 10 years. Now millions who have chosen to stay are more defiant than before. The big question now is how Putin will handle them. “They are not going to stick everyone in the gulag again,’’ says Fiona Hill of the Brookings Institution.

Sarkozy’s ‘Southern Strategy’: French President Says ‘Too Many Foreigners’ in France
March 7, 2012, Yahoo!News
By Laura Rozen
Sarkozy is trying to knock off the current third-place challenger, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, daughter of age-old right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen, before the first round of voting on April 22nd. “The biggest threat for Sarkozy is to go down in polls so much … that Le Pen goes to a second round,” Justin Vaïsse, a French expert at the Brookings Institution, told Yahoo News Wednesday.

Our Views: If Not Adored, Still Powerful
March 5, 2012, The Advocate
For a quick history lesson, Robert Kagan of The Brookings Institution wrote recently about the myth of American decline. His arguments are particularly relevant in an election year, when there is going to be much loose talk about America’s waning influence in the world. Kagan quoted many other doomsayers of the past who proved to be wrong, such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who in 1952 talked about our own relative decline. That was relative to the Soviet Union, which no longer exists.

America and the Middle East: An Explosive Mix
March 5, 2012, The Financial Times
By Geoff Dyer and Richard McGregor
Alternatively, some observers point out that, purely in terms of electoral politics, a US-led attack would yield big benefits. “If you ask anyone inside both of the campaigns, if Obama were to use force against Iran, then the election is over,” says Robert Kagan, the foreign policy scholar who has advised a number of Republican candidates. “This is what people think. He would win the election overwhelmingly.”

Vladimir Putin: The Man, the State, the Destiny
March 4, 2012, RIA Novosti
By Marc Bennets
“Putin is not generally well-disposed to the US. He is always touchy and distrustful on relations,” said Fiona Hill, director of the Centre on the United States and Europe at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “Forging a relationship with Putin will be difficult for [US President Barack] Obama, as well as for whoever else might come next in the US presidency.”

Russia’s Elections: Putin Makes U.S. Enemy #1
March 2, 2012, The Washington Post
By Allen McDuffee
With Vladimir Putin expected to win the Russian presidential elections set for Sunday, Brookings scholar Fiona Hill says the United States should be concerned that the U.S.-Russian relations reset under current president Dmitry Medvedev is at risk. “The rhetoric of [Putin’s] campaign has been very nasty,” says Hill. “Anti-Americanism is always an old tool in the toolkit for Russian politics,” she said, adding, “Now, during this campaign, Putin has put U.S. right back up top as enemy number one.”

Putin Power Play Casts Cloud Over Obama’s ‘Reset’ With Russia
March 2, 2012, FoxNews.com
By Judson Berger
Another six, possibly 12, years of Putin as the United States’ negotiating partner could make that relationship frostier still. Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at The Brookings Institution, said Putin’s anti-U.S. posture on the campaign trail is “not going to bode well for U.S. relations.” A second Putin presidency is likely to be far more “defensive” than the first, she said, because he faces serious opposition at home. This means “he’s more likely to play to the crowd, more likely to push harder-line policies,” Hill said.

Putin ‘Moving Into His Berlusconi Phase,’ Russia Scholar Says
March 2, 2012, Yahoo! News
By Laura Rozen
As polls universally predict victory for Vladimir Putin in Russian presidential elections Sunday, a prominent Washington Russia scholar likened the once and likely future Russian president to Italy’s disgraced former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was ousted from power last year during the European financial crisis. “Putin is now moving into his ‘Berlusconi phase,’” Fiona Hill, a Russia scholar at the Brookings Institution, said in an analysis prepared by the think tank and sent to journalists in advance of Sunday’s polls.

The Politics of Meat and Muslims in Election-Year France
March 2, 2012, The Christian Science Monitor
By Scott Baldauf
Jonathan Laurence, a political scientist at Boston College and author of the book “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims,” says that France is not alone in its concerns over its growing Muslim minorities.“The big picture is that in the last 20 years how much things have changed, and how governments have realized that people are here to stay,” says Professor Laurence, in a recent conversation with Monitor editors. But now, as the European economy is shrinking or staying flat, European politicians have “realized there is election gold in undoing the little they got done” in changing their laws to accommodate Muslim minorities.

July/August 2012, By Robert O. Keohane gracefully written essay notes that the United States has played an essential role in creating the international system of the last 60 years, one in which large-scale warfare has been relatively rare, the global economy has grown at unprecedented rates, and the number of democracies has quadrupled.  June 26, 2012, By Justyna Pawlak and Sebastian Moffett Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are trying to suppress an uprising against his rule that broke out 16 months ago. Even defensive measures by NATO allies would risk sucking them into the conflict. “There is very little appetite from the alliance to undertake what we call a discretionary war,” said , a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.  June 25, 2012, By Jon Hemming “Ankara itself has been averse to consider military action against Syria so far. So it is likely that the invocation of Article 4 is designed to put more diplomatic pressure on Assad,” said , a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. June 18, 2012, By Olga Khazan , director of the Arms Control Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told NPR that the treaty helped pave the way for international support for U.S. efforts to curtail Iran’s nuclear program and gives President Obama “moral authority” on nuclear nonproliferation. May 20, 2012, By Martin Daly , associate professor of political science at Boston College and author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, believes the fact that one-fifth of the French electorate voted for Front National shows “serious fault lines” in terms of satisfaction with government, particularly as the front’s members “do not hesitate to play fast and loose with some pretty vile politics”.