Brazil Faces Environmental Disaster: President Dilma Rousseff Does a Fly-By

11/24/2015
2015-11-23 By Kenneth Maxwell Last week, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, released a digital text of a newly discovered poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in London anonymously in 1811.  Shelley was 18 years old at the time. The poem was long lost. It has now been made public for the first time in…

Russian Information Ops: Up Close and Personal

11/23/2015
2015-11-23 By Richard Weitz Second Line of Defense had the opportunity to attend this year’s 12th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, where more than one hundred foreign and Russian participants heard President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials and various international experts discussed recent international developments.…

The Russian Intervention In Syria: Amatzia Baram Discusses Strategic Shifts in the Middle East

10/26/2015
2015-10-26 by Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake The Russian intervention in Syria is a strategic turning point in the Middle East. The intervention alters the conflict and affects the alliances playing out in a fluid and dynamic situation. To get beyond the Inside the Beltway discussions, and get a sense…