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2 weeks ago | 
theamericanconservative.com | Mark Episkopos
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... When debating grand strategy, it pays to consult the whiskered sages and practitioners of yesteryear. One finds the near total unanimity of view among everyone from Thucydides and Otto von Bismarck through Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that, everything else being equal, it’s better to balance with other great powers against your competitors than to have your competitors balance against you.
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3 weeks ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
Alexander Vindman’s recent book, “The Folly of Realism,”throws down the gauntlet, as the name suggests, at the “realists” he thinks were responsible for failing to deter Russia and seize opportunities for defense cooperation with Ukraine.
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4 weeks ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
The EU appears to have put a stick in the spokes of a beleaguered Black Sea ceasefire agreement between Russia and the U.S. U.S. and Russian negotiators, after 12-hour long talks in Riyadh, coalesced on Tuesday around an expanded partial ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine covering the Black Sea and energy infrastructure.
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1 month ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
If the diplomatic overtures of the past several months were seen by some as opaque, then today’s phone call between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot be taken as anything but proof positive that the rubber has hit the road on serious, substantive U.S.-Russia negotiations over a Ukraine peace deal. The White House has been pushing for an all-encompassing ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine as the first step on the long road to a durable settlement.
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1 month ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
The Ukraine war, in addition to all the other ways in which one can describe it, has been a strangely humbling exercise for the foreign policy and military commentariat.
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1 month ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
Transatlanticism’s sternest critics all too often fail to reckon with the paradox that this ideology has commanded fervent devotion since the mid-20th century not because it correctly reflects the substance of U.S.-European relations or U.S. grand strategy but precisely because it exists in a permanent state of unreality. We were told that America’s alliances have “never been stronger” even as the Ukraine war stretched them to a breaking point.
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2 months ago | 
quincyinst.org | George Beebe |Mark Episkopos |Anatol Lieven
The key to American success in ending the war in Ukraine is to broaden, rather than narrow, the issues under negotiation. If American negotiators treat the war as a bilateral dispute between Russia and Ukraine and press both sides to agree to an immediate ceasefire, they are likely to fail.
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2 months ago | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
Proponents of a maximalist battlefield program in Ukraine on both sides of the Atlantic are now somewhere between bargaining and depression in the five stages of grief. Concurrent statements by President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and Vice President Vance have upended the Biden-era Ukraine consensus in the most fundamental ways.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
theamericanconservative.com | Mark Episkopos
Foreign Affairs
How Trump Can Leverage Russian Energy for Peace in Europe
The postwar framework can end Europe’s artificial energy scarcity while giving Americans an edge.
The incoming administration has offered strong indications in recent weeks that it is serious about pursuing a settlement to finally end the calamitous war in Ukraine, now entering its third year.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
responsiblestatecraft.org | Mark Episkopos
Contemporary neoconservatism is, in its guiding precepts and policy manifestations, a profoundly ahistorical ideology. It is a millenarian project that not just eschews but explicitly rejects much of the inheritance of pre-1991 American statecraft and many generations of accumulated civilizational wisdom from Thucydides to Kissinger in its bid to remake the world.
