This week, NATO and Russian officials met over Ukraine tensions, North Korea claimed a successful hypersonic missile test, and the UN launched its largest request ever for a single country in humanitarian distress, Afghanistan.
Read more below.
This Week’s Content Highlights
Features from Aspen Strategy Group Members
Elizabeth Economy on CNN: “What to Expect from China in the New Year”
Kay Bailey Hutchison discusses the NATO-Russia talks on Bloomberg's Balance of Power
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in Project Syndicate: “Whatever Happened to Soft Power?"
David H. Petraeus and James Cartwright in an Atlantic Council panel discussion: “The Next National Defense Strategy and the Imperative of Closer Cooperation with Allies”
David Rubenstein discusses inflation on Fox 5 On The Hill
David Sanger and Anton Troianovski in The New York Times: “In Talks on Ukraine, U.S. and Russia Deadlock Over NATO Expansion”
Anne-Marie Slaughter in Foreign Policy: “To Secure Democracy, Face Up to the Past”
Lawrence Summers and David Rubenstein on Bloomberg's Wall Street Week
Rising Leaders in the News
"[T]he Biden administration may seek to continue some of the Trump administration’s successful policies aimed at deepening ties with Taiwan as a part of a broader free and open Indo-Pacific strategy. Importantly, these moves show a continuation of policies aimed at corralling Chinese influence and strength across all aspects of critical and emerging technologies, with a special emphasis on supply chains."
Read ASG Rising Leader Erik Jacobs' new piece “What’s Next in U.S.-Taiwan Technology Relations?” for the Global Taiwan Institute.
Tweet of the Week
Things to Know
Content Relevant to Aspen Security Forum Discussions
Nick Cumming-Bruce in The New York Times: "U.N. Seeks Huge Aid Increase to Prevent ‘Catastrophe’ in Afghanistan"
Toby Dalton and Ariel Levite in Foreign Affairs: "The Nonproliferation Regime is Breaking"
Vanessa Guinan-Bank and Loveday Morris in The Washington Post: "Syrian Intelligence
Officer Convicted of Crimes Against Humanity, Gets Life in Prison in Landmark German Trial"
Barack Obama in USA Today: “Former President Barack Obama: We Need to Follow John Lewis' Example and Fight for Our Democracy”
Nidhi Subbaraman in The Wall Street Journal: “2021 Was Earth’s Sixth-Hottest Year on Record, Temperature Reports Say”
Kim Tong-Hyung in AP News: "North Korea Claims Successful Test of Hypersonic Missile"
Book of the Week
By Mary Elise Sarotte
"Based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House–Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how the United States successfully overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO to more than 900 million people. But it also reveals how Washington’s hardball tactics transformed the era between the Cold War and the present day, undermining what could have become a lasting partnership. Vladimir Putin swears that Washington betrayed a promise that NATO would move 'not one inch' eastward and justifies renewed confrontation as a necessary response to the alliance’s illegitimate 'deployment of military infrastructure to our borders.' But the United States insists that neither President George H.W. Bush, nor any other leader made such a promise. Pulling back the curtain on U.S.–Russian relations in the critical years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Putin’s rise to power, prize-winning Cold War historian M. E. Sarotte reveals the bitter clashes over NATO behind the facade of friendship and comes to a sobering conclusion: the damage did not have to happen. In this deeply researched and compellingly written book, Sarotte shows what went wrong."
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