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President Joe Biden is the first president since the Cold War to begin his term not seeking closer relations with Russia; there will be no “reset.”
The White House Executive Order comes on the same day that CISA and CNMF issue SolarWinds-related malware analysis and NSA-CISA-FBI issue a joint advisory warning of ongoing SVR exploitation of known vulnerabilities in common products. Herb Lin comments.
Nord Stream 2 is an almost-finished natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. The Biden administration opposes it and has come under congressional pressure to invoke sanctions to prevent its completion, in large part because the pipeline seems a geopolitical project targeted at Ukraine.
Steven Pifer: An important trip to Paris
President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly will soon travel to Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron. That is a trip very much worth making.
Europe and the United States must ensure that Moscow does not underestimate the costs of a military assault.
Nuclear Arms Control in the 2020s
As the United States, Russia and others figure out how to maintain and enhance strategic stability in a multi-player, multi-domain world, Washington and Moscow will continue to have a central role, writes Steven Pifer, a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy and a retired US Foreign Service officer.
China’s Dangerous Double Game in North Korea
Biden must force Beijing to cooperate fully with Washington or pivot to obvious obstruction writes FSI Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro in her latest op-ed for Foreign Affairs.
Putin may not like being called a killer—who would? However, when he sees engagement with Biden can advance his goals, he will engage.
Stanford University’s Herb Lin, a member of the Aspen Institute’s new Commission on Information Disorder, says “cyber-enabled information warfare” poses an existential threat that in many ways defies current government and private-sector structures organized to protect digital systems from cyber attack.
The German government and many Germans breathed a sigh of relief when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in November. Mr. Trump damaged U.S. relations with its trans-Atlantic allies, and he often targeted Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel for particular ire. Berlin has welcomed President Biden’s readiness to rebuild U.S.-German and U.S.-European ties.
The U.S. government is still managing the fallout from two separate, massive cyberattacks linked to Russian and Chinese hackers, with a White House task force meeting this past Monday to probe the most recent attack, which involved Microsoft’s (MSFT) e-mail software. Herb Lin said, “Nobody knows how to make a system that is usable and perfectly secure.
Biden's Afghanistan Decision
President Biden has inherited America’s longest war—the war in Afghanistan—at a critical moment. Under the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, the US government is supposed to withdraw forces from the country by May 2021. But the Taliban hasn’t taken the steps required in the deal against international terrorists, like Al Qaeda.
On the World Class Podcast, experts discuss how the Biden Administration should navigate three of America’s most challenging bilateral relationships.
![[Left] Oriana Skylar Mastro; [Right] Logo for 'Policy, Guns, and Money: The ASPI Podcast'](https://fsi9-prod.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/styles/328x223_x2/public/hero/oriana_aspi_podcast_hero.png?h=c4d9845d&itok=wuts28E9)
FSI Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro joins the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's podcast to discuss how she sees China's strategy towards Taiwan and reunification changing as Beijing continues to gain confidence in its military capability and international influence.
A decade after a powerful earthquake and tsunami set off the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown in Japan, Stanford experts discuss revelations about radiation from the disaster, advances in earthquake science related to the event and how its devastating impact has influenced strategies for tsunami defense and local warning systems.
Stanford faculty and guest speakers from around the country examine issues of race in STEM fields
A new three-quarter sequence of courses provides insights from scholars around the nation on research related to race in the fields of science, technology and medicine, as well as their own lived experiences.
CISAC Co-Director Rod Ewing tells National Geographic that, “In some cases, as we become more sophisticated, we’ve lost the ability to see what’s most obvious.”
How Biden’s Cyber Strategy Echoes Trump’s
The Biden administration released its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. One would expect a final guidance document to be roughly consistent with the it while also containing more substantial elaboration. To get a sense of relative priorities, I found it interesting to compare the interim guidance to the Trump National Cyber Strategy published in 2018.
Genomic data could benefit population health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the US has to overcome several barriers before it can fully leverage this information.
Hoover Institution panelists say women face significant barriers in national security, academia
Former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller made no bones about the challenges of being a woman in foreign policy and national security. “You have to have a tough hide,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”
French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a report aimed at “reconciliation of memories between France and Algeria,” which France ruled as the jewel of its colonial empire for more than 130 years. The Stora Report addressed several scars from the Algerian War for Independence and still comes up short of a clear path toward nuclear reconciliation.
How to solve the Nord Stream 2 dilemma
If Gazprom could be persuaded to increase gas transit revenues for Ukraine, that would give the Biden administration a reason not to impose sanctions to block Nord Stream 2’s completion and ammunition to fend off criticism from those who want the pipeline to remain unfinished, writes Steven Pifer.
Ukraine finally has a chance to create a strong counterintelligence service and shed the Soviet standards of the old KGB. Are Ukrainian MPs ready to take responsibility and vote for such a security service?