When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the United States and NATO were losing the Cold War. The USSR had superiority in conventional weapons and manpower in Europe, and had embarked on a ...

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be ...

This essential book offers a compelling and original interpretation of the rise of military aviation. Jeremy Black, one of the world’s finest scholars of military history, provides a lucid analysis of ...

Ten years ago in 2014, Baltic defense was paltry. The defense budgets of the three Baltic states, but especially Latvia and Lithuania, were suffering from the financial crisis of 2008, and their ...

The title of this essay would have been a little bit different if I had spent five more days in Odesa as planned. “50 days in ...

Bruce Pannier is a Central Asia Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a longtime journalist and correspondent covering Central Asia. He currently writes Radio Free ...

In strategic studies and international relations, grand strategy is a frequently-invoked concept. Yet, despite its popularity, it is not well understood and it has many definitions, some of which are ...

Virtually all of the commentary on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has focused on those two states to the exclusion of the vital importance of this war for the neighboring regions of Belarus and ...

All articles from Orbis are available at the Orbis website on Elsevier’s Science Direct. Please see the Orbis Archive for a full archive of articles from 1993.

Since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and invited the largest international sanctions regime against Russia since the Second World War, Central Asia and the Caucasus have ...

James Olson is the former Chief of Counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency. He served for more than thirty years, mostly overseas in clandestine operations. He is a professor at Texas A ...