Foreign Affairs is an interesting periodical, but it might be worth bearing in mind that it's something of a talking shop between various International Relations academics and policy wonks. It's not uncommon to see people completely contradicting each other in successive issues or even the same one - which is not altogether unreasonable since International Relations is far from an exact science and seeing the different viewpoints is educational in itself. However individual articles can often come off as tendentious - sources are not required and arguments are often implicitly based on a worldview that is expected to be known to regular readers, whether or not it is agreed with. It's not a scholarly journal, despite the scholarly affiliations of many contributors.
This article strikes me as unusually shallow - while I agree with the basic premise that Vladimir Putin finds western encroachment on Russia's borders intolerable, the author argues as if he had little choice other than to annex Crimea or to announce a referendum and then move it to an earlier date, twice. One might ask why Putin didn't go through the motions of presenting his complaints to an international body like the UNSC or levying sanctions, even if only as a fig leaf for his eventual strategy.
Lastly, I think it's quite reasonable to have some articles about this complex topic here on HN, even quite partisan ones. It's not just that it's generally newsworthy, but the strong possibility of international conflict casts a long shadow over topics that hackers care about, from network security to surveillance to path-dependent technology trends. If, as seems likely, we are headed for a new and protracted cold war, or worse, some sort of hot one, there will be major feedback effects in the sphere of technology - which is, after all, where the West's major comparative advantage lies.
This article strikes me as unusually shallow - while I agree with the basic premise that Vladimir Putin finds western encroachment on Russia's borders intolerable, the author argues as if he had little choice other than to annex Crimea or to announce a referendum and then move it to an earlier date, twice. One might ask why Putin didn't go through the motions of presenting his complaints to an international body like the UNSC or levying sanctions, even if only as a fig leaf for his eventual strategy.
Lastly, I think it's quite reasonable to have some articles about this complex topic here on HN, even quite partisan ones. It's not just that it's generally newsworthy, but the strong possibility of international conflict casts a long shadow over topics that hackers care about, from network security to surveillance to path-dependent technology trends. If, as seems likely, we are headed for a new and protracted cold war, or worse, some sort of hot one, there will be major feedback effects in the sphere of technology - which is, after all, where the West's major comparative advantage lies.