Defense & Security
Reports
Michael E. O’Hanlon
Director of Research - Foreign Policy
Co-Director - Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, Africa Security Initiative
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
The Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair
Bruce Riedel
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for Middle East Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Director - The Intelligence Project
A power-sharing deal [between the Afghan government and the Taliban] is “very unlikely” and the Taliban’s recent territorial gains all point to a “forceful takeover.”
The Russians have effectively already declared war quite a long time ago in the information sphere. They’ve been trying to prove that they are a major cyber force — they want to create a wartime scenario so then they can sit down and agree some kind of truce with us.
[Putin] wants to have a relationship that is essentially a managed confrontation right now with the United States because Putin is mobilizing at home ahead of his own election season. And he's trying to explain to the Russian people why he, Vladimir Putin, should stay in power indefinitely. And it's because there's an external adversary who is up. That's the United States in their depiction. So if we kind of disappeared from the scene and all was normal and we were having a nonconfrontational relationship, it would be very difficult to justify the mobilization that requires keeping people like Alexei Navalny in jail and generally having a rather militarized posture in the international arena.
