Conflict & Conflict Resolution

From July 11-12, 2023, NATO leaders gathered in Vilnius, Lithuania for one of the most significant NATO summits in history. This timely brief by Eric Rosenbach, Grace Jones, and Olivia Leiwant serves as a background piece on Ukraine’s history with NATO, potential future pathways for accession, and the operational impact Ukraine’s NATO membership could have on the alliance. 

A Better Peace welcomes Nate Moir to discuss his book, Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, which analyses Fall's life to understand what drove his thinking and understanding of the situation. He joins host John Nagl to explain how Fall was consistently ahead of the conventional wisdom.

Nathaniel L. Moir explains why, given the U.S. military’s recent prioritization of large-scale combat operations, Howard University Professor and former French Resistance fighter Bernard Fall's thoughts about a similar prioritization of conventional warfare in Vietnam seem prescient. 

Stephen Walt analyzes why China's foreign-policy reset will—or won't—work out.

 Stephen Walt decided to look back to see if 2022 had gone according to his expectations. In his last column of 2021, he had described "Biden’s 2022 Foreign-Policy To-Do List." What did he get right, what did he get wrong, and how well did the Biden administration perform?

Stephen Walt provides A realist POV on the war in Ukraine, competition with China, COVID, and more in the second part of an interview with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal.

Stephen Walt writes that because warfare is inherently destructive and often uncertain, realists tend to be wary of idealistic crusades and mindful of the danger of threatening what others regard—justifiably or not—as vital interests.

Ivan Arreguin-Toft analyzes the West's information technology asymmetry of capability, which has given way to asymmetry of vulnerability. While democracies worldwide remain threatened, they also contain the means to restore themselves.

Stephen M. Walt describes a "gnawing fear that we are living through a series of disruptions that are overwhelming our collective ability to respond." What does this mean for public confidence in the entire political system, and is there any cause for optimism?

In his review of The Saigon Sisters by Patricia D. Norland, Nathaniel L. Moir writes, "In this informative collection of oral histories, nine women provided Norland with their personal stories and comprehensive thoughts; the author conducted the interviews in French, beginning in 1989.