So far the risks of the horrific Gaza crisis escalating to a wider war remain low – but they can’t be ruled out entirely.
Rajan Menon is no longer with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Rajan Menon was a nonresident scholar in the Russia and Eurasia Program and director of the Grand Strategy Program at Defense Priorities. He holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York and is a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University.
He has been a fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and the New America Foundation, academic fellow at the Carnegie Corporation, research scholar at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His books include Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986), The End of Alliances (Oxford University Press, 2007), Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, coauthored with Eugene Rumer (MIT Press, 2015), and The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2016). His next book, Russia After Putin, coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer, is under contract to Oxford University Press.
In addition to publications in numerous academic journals, Menon has written for Foreign Affairs, the Boston Review, Foreign Policy, National Interest, the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Financial Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, US News & World Report, CNN, the Nation, and the Washington Post. He has appeared as a commentator on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, NPR, France 24 Television, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Radio Australia.
In 1989-90, while an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, he served as special assistant for national security (focusing on arms control) on the staff of Representative Stephen J. Solarz (D-NY), chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia-Pacific Subcommittee.
So far the risks of the horrific Gaza crisis escalating to a wider war remain low – but they can’t be ruled out entirely.
What the U.S. government may or may not do in one region of the world tells the world next to nothing about what it might do in another.
Defense Priorities (DEFP) organized this symposium to stimulate thinking about the most important lessons learned from this ongoing war. Top experts, writing from a range of perspectives, share their insights in an effort to inform and improve U.S. policy.
The U.S.-European security relationship has therefore become progressively divorced from reality. If it is to change, what Europe needs is not more resources but greater political will and self-confidence.
Transatlantic disputes on aid to Ukraine could emerge at a delicate moment. The EU and the U.K. now face economic problems that will get worse before they get better and will therefore be hard-pressed to remove the imbalance in nonmilitary assistance to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s biggest problem may not be the military threat posed by Mr. Putin’s army, significant though that will remain, but rather coping with the destruction Russia’s attacks wreak on its economy.
Broaching the subject of peace negotiations invites accusations of helping Putin – but that’s misguided.
Political scientist Rajan Menon from Columbia University and ANU's Mathew Sussex, expert in Russian foreign policy discuss with Philip Clark what the future holds as the Russian-Ukrainian war escalates.
The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. But what can be said with reasonable certainty is that the hypothetical downfall of Putin, as morally satisfying as it would be, is unlikely to be simple and straightforward. Nor should anyone assume that a Russia without Putin would make the west more secure.
The balance in Russian-Indian relations is shifting decidedly toward New Delhi. Russia’s break with the West and ever closer ties with China as a result of the war against Ukraine will make sustaining its partnership with India more challenging.