So, the Second Balkan War.
Unless you’re a history buff, or Bulgarian, you probably don’t know about this. And that’s fine. Unless you’re a history buff, or Bulgarian, there’s no reason to. Still, I think it might have some relevance to recent events.
Short version: back in 1912, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece teamed up [...]

So, Georgia Georgia Georgia. Yet there’s one name I’ve hardly seen mentioned: the late Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of independent Georgia.
That’s sort of strange. Because if there’s one man who’s responsible for the current mess in Georgia — more than Saakashvili, more than Putin — it’s Gamsakhurdia.
Why?

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We’re back after a happily uneventful, if hot and a bit long, drive from Yerevan. Went past one of the air bases that was bombed, and saw what looked like a burned field, but otherwise no damage visible from the public road.
The city itself is more difficult to judge, and I’ve been too preoccupied with [...]

In Crawford Texas today for a meeting about the Georgian crisis at George Bush’s home, here’s Condoleezza Rice yet again using an analogy of the Georgian situation with the USSR period –
Now, I think the behavior recently suggests that perhaps Russia has not taken that route [international integration], and either that they have not taken [...]

Right, so I started writing something about Ukraine, Russia and Nato. There wasn’t an issue of time and energy for once, but I discovered couldn’t quite decide what I thought. I see some problems with this concept, but will soldier on…
Bob and SK wonders about Croatia’s EU prospects. Croatia is closer than other prospect countries [...]

For a while now I’ve had a private theory about the way our world used to work. It goes like this: although communism may have been bad for the people of Russia (and of the Soviet satellite states), it did a useful job in keeping the west honest through negative example. Free speech? Yes, we [...]

Dutch military analyst Ingo Piepers is doing some extremely interesting research on the dynamics of international systems and… war. If his theories are correct, then another world conflagration at some point in the future may well be more or less inevitable. I am going to let Piepers explain and point our readers to [...]

It seems clear they done it; for God knows what reason - arrogance, hoping beyond hope, misjudgment - Georgia started something it couldn’t finish. The Russians, for their part, were playing for it for years; the harassment campaign, the motor-rifle regiments parked up on the southern road. But however wrong they were, I’m saddened by [...]

The Russian-Georgian war should remind everyone of a very important point regarding NATO and the European Union. Specifically, just as John Lewis Gaddis said about the Cold War, reassurance was as important as deterrence, and this made self-deterrence very important indeed.
NATO members benefited from a common deterrent towards the Soviet Union, but also from reassurance [...]

It’s strange, really; looking back at Radovan Karadzic’s career, the thing that strikes me is how he seems to have recapped most of Europe’s 20th century in his own life, barking his shins on the bits that didn’t fit.
First of all, he wanted to be a romantic poet, itself a dated idea. According to Tim [...]