Articles and Essays

Throughout the history of the modern world, domestic regime change - be it democratization, autocratization, decolonization, decommunization, federal dissolution, coups, or revolutions - has often triggered international conflict and war. (...) The protracted regime transformation under way in Russia seems like a probably precipitant of international conflict. 

In January 1992 Russia's first postcommunist government launched a comprehensive economic program to transform the Soviet command system into a market economy. Privatization was and remains the heart of this plan. The original program had a clearly defined objective, namely, to create profit-seeking corporations, privately owned by outside shareholders and not dependent on government subsidies for their survival. Two years later, this objective had not been achieved. 

The results of Russia's first post-communist election in December 1993 sent a shock wave through the world. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalist demagogue of the Liberal Democratic Party, captured almost a quarter of the vote. The pro-reform bloc, Russia's Choice, came away with 15 percent. Provoked by this dramatic outcome, Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin promised a new economic course, declaring that the election market "the end of market romanticism". 

With James M. Goldgeier | As the world moves away from the familiar bipolar cold war era, many international relations theorists have renewed and old debate about which is more stable: a world with two great power or a world with many great powers. Based on the chief assumptions of structural realism (...), some security analysts are predicting that a world of several great powers will return to the shifting alliances and instabilities of the multipolar era that existed prior to World War II.