Russia
-
Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), famously remarked in the early 1950s that the purpose of the nascent alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The conclusion of the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, provides a propitious opportunity to…
-
I was asked by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) to contribute a short piece for inclusion in a compilation of expert opinion on the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. The longer article, in which my analysis of the Czech participation at the summit is included, can be found here.
-
I have recently been working on a longer, analytic piece for the think tank world. The subject, highlighted in the title above, has been percolating in my Central European-centric brain for some time. The article went live yesterday at Delphi Global Research Center, a new think tank out of Wilmington, DE that was founded by…
-
Barbara Tuchman, one of America’s preeminent historians of the 20th century, wrote an analysis of some of the most consequential failures of leadership in world history. The March of Folly, published in 1984, deconstructs the egregious errors made by rulers, popes, kings, and presidents in four specific situations. The final chapter of the book, detailing…
-
Sitting in a comfortable rental apartment in Liptovský Mikuláš, looking out on the majestic Vysoké Tatry (High Tatras) mountains in north central Slovakia, it is hard to imagine that less than two hundred miles to the east, a savage, and at this stage seemingly pointless, war continues to engulf Ukraine. Currently on a short “sabbatical”…
-
I write this post from Terminal E of Boston’s Logan Airport, awaiting my flight to Copenhagen and then on to Prague. Before starting my European adventure, I wanted to share my latest analytic piece for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), which was published online earlier today. The article addresses the recent elections in Bulgaria,…
-
The rapturous celebrations on the banks of the Danube in central Budapest on the night of April 12, 2026 were testament to the political earthquake that the small Central Europe nation had just experienced. After 16 years of increasingly autocratic rule by Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, the Hungarian populace voted overwhelmingly to move…
-
Given the significance of the recent (April 12) Hungarian elections, I put together a quick analysis for the Foreign Policy Research Institute of their ramifications for Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The piece went live today and can be accessed here. I will also be posting a second article—for the local papers—on this blog…
-
As the Persian Gulf war enters its second month, President Trump continues to frequently vacillate between threatening more “fire and brimstone” on the Iranians and proclaiming that the two sides are on the cusp of a major agreement to end the fighting. As of this writing (29 March), hostilities persist between the primary combatants in…
-
The Foreign Policy Research Institute published this morning another of my analytic pieces on Central Europe, this time on the Czech Republic. If interested, the article can be found here. I had not planned to write another newspaper article for a few weeks but the Middle East war certainly deserves my attention. Consequently, I may…
Bob Beck's Foreign Policy Blog 