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Departures with Robert Amsterdam

Jun 30, 2020

So much of the peace and prosperity achieved following the end of World War II and past the end of the Cold War was rooted in a common civilizational grammar driving foreign policy, an imagined community of nations referred to as "The West" based on a set of Enlightenment ideas. But then we lost confidence in that...


Jun 23, 2020

There are few other countries in the world that have wielded money and influence as well as the modern Russian state, to the point of purchasing impunity and acquiescence to their status quo. And this is not all simply because of a "master strategy" by Vladimir Putin, but instead a vast and complex system of...


Jun 19, 2020

For experts who spend their careers studying modern authoritarianism, it has only recently become prudent to apply their analytical skillset to talking about political developments in the United States.

Journalist and author Sarah Kendzior, who stood out in 2015 as one of the lone voices warning that Donald Trump was...


Jun 15, 2020

Earlier this month marked the 31st anniversary of Tiannanmen Square, while during this same period, the same Chinese Communist Party solidified its grip on Hong Kong with the passage of a new national security law that would subject Hong Kongers to extradition and Chinese legal jurisdiction.

These events are just...


Jun 12, 2020

There is really no shared political ideology, there is no general set of policies, that are common among populists like Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump, or Viktor Orban, or Jair Bolsonaro and so on. What unites them is that they are all nostalgists, that they have mobilized an imagined version of each...