Tarptautinei sistemai esant anarchiškai, dominuoja šalys turinčios didžiausią galią ir Lietuvos, kaip mažos ir turinčios mažai galios, šliejimasis prie supervalstybės JAV yra visiškai logiškas elgesys. Tuo pačiu Lietuvą su JAV sieja ir bendras identitetas, susiformavęs JAV nuosekliai nepripažįstant Lietuvos okupacijos 1940 ir 1944 metais, remiant Lietuvos nepriklausomybės atgavimą, puoselėjant ir padedant lietuvių emigrantus. Todėl Lietuvos atveju reiktų taikyti abi šias teorijas norint nagrinėti paramą JAV, NATO ir dalyvavimą jų rengiamose karinėse užsienio misijose. Kadangi po šaltojo karo pasaulis iš bipoliarinio, vienų autorių nuomone tapo multipoliariniu, o kitų – unipoliariniu (jame dominuoja JAV), todėl toks Lietuvos šliejimasis prie didžiausią galia turinčio polio (abiem atvejais tai yra JAV) tampa suprantamu ir atspindinčiu neorealizmo idėjas, todėl iš daugelio egzistuojančių tarptautinių santykių teorijų mano manymu tinkamiausios paaiškinti Lietuvos dalyvavimą tarptautinėse misijose yra Neorealizmas ir Konstruktyvizmas. Nors jos savo pagrindinėmis koncepcijomis prieštarauja viena kitai, bet Lietuvos atveju papildo viena kitą. Lietuvos šliejimasis prie JAV galios yra Neorealizmo teorijos veikimo lauke, o bendra vertybių sistema su Vakarų šalimis (labiausiai su JAV) – konstruktyvizmo ir istorinės patirties santykiuose su Rusija. Nagrinėjant karines Lietuvos užsienio misijas negalima apsiriboti tik tarptautinių santykių teorijomis, taip pat reikia suvokti geopolitinį... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / It has been known for several decades that a constantly growing asymmetry of the military power between the US and their NATO allies complicates transatlantic security relations. If allies cannot communicate in military terms, the risk of political split appears. Therefore one of the main priorities is the necessity to ensure that the allies are able to make their substantial military contribution. Lithuania also contributes to it by taking part in missions together with its allies. Missions are of military (using weapons, executing military operations and performing police functions) and civil character (providing help in case of natural disasters, sending humanitarian aid to voluntary soldiers). This paper focuses mainly on military missions. The subject of the paper: The participation of Lithuania in foreign military missions. The relevance of the topic: More and more often articles appear in Lithuania and abroad criticising the participation of the Western countries in peace missions, including Afghanistan; casualties, moral validity of these missions and heavy expenses are questioned; a more and more prevailing idea of Neorealism is mentioned. The goals of the paper: • To introduce the main trends of the theories of international relations; • To analyse the participation of Lithuania in foreign military missions with reference to the theories; • To introduce a geopolitical context of the participation of Lithuania in foreign missions; • To review Lithuanian foreign... [to full text]

The end of the Cold War marks the beginning of the policy shift from strategic stability (the policy that guided U.S. and Soviet nuclear doctrine and acquisition strategies throughout the Cold War) to a new strategy privileging ballistic missile defence (BMD). Prior to this shift BMD programs were considered by both sides to be financially untenable, technologically unreliable, and dangerously destabilising and potentially catastrophic, primarily because they risked undermining the stability of a second strike capability and other stabilizing features of mutually assured destruction (MAD). I argue that this new environment is making missile defence a viable alternative to massive nuclear arsenals. In this new security environment Canada remains an anomaly. Canadian officials support NATO BMD programs but reject any bilateral and/or bi-national negotiations with Washington on continental BMD for North America. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that Canada, through the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) agreement on early warning radars, is in fact part of missile defence.

Technology and innovation offer a unique opportunity for an allied small state to influence the United States. The changing security environment and increased great power competition leads the United States to rely more on its allies, which the latter may use to increase their value to defence cooperation with the U.S. and gain influence on security-oriented decision making. Since, a large part of modern defence strategy is aimed at arriving at innovative, technology-based solutions for complex problems, even system-ineffectual states in alliances may be valuable to the United States and can devise an influencing strategy through an established field of defence research and development paired with other unique selling points they might have. This thesis looks at the Netherlands, a small state with a traditionally strong relationship to the United States, with defence industry potential and proven willingness to contribute to acute defence challenges. The fast evolving, widely carried and technology based field of defence selected is that of Integrated Air and Missile defence (IAMD). Through careful analysis of two regional threats within the great power competition framework and the state of the global missile defence infrastructure that the United States is contributor to, this thesis identifies...

Megan Ouellette Abstract Abstract This study constitutes an analysis of American conceptualizations of the Czech Republic as presented in presidential materials from 1989 to 2009 and American media reporting the cancellation of the Third Site of ballistic missile defence from 14-25 September 2009. It draws on the previous research offered by constructivist interpretations of international relations and the field of critical geopolitics to explore how, and for what purpose, certain American sources of geopolitical reasoning have portrayed the Czech Republic. By comparing and contrasting the ways in which the Czech Republic has been conceptualised in presidential materials over a period of twenty years and in media sources over a two-week period relative to a particular event, the study identifies trends and thematic (in)consistencies in American "mental maps" of the Czech Republic. It shows the extent to which media reporting on President Obama's ballistic missile defence policy shift recycled pre-existing conceptualizations of the Czech Republic broadcasted on the presidential level over the twenty years prior to the policy shift. The results of content analyses of each set of texts reveal that the Czech Republic holds specific symbolic and strategic value that ultimately points back to a particular...

Våren 2007 offentliggjorde USA planerna på att upprätta ett missilförsvar i Polen och Tjeckien som ett skydd mot missilangrepp från Iran. Från Ryssland blev reaktionen mot planerna kraftfull. Retoriken från Moskva påminde om kalla krigets dagar. Vilka är de bakomliggande orsakerna till denna starka reaktion? Syftet med studien är att undersöka vilka orsaker, såväl externa som interna, det är som styr den ryska inställningen. Studien är teorianvändande med teorier inom den politiska realismen som verktyg. Analysen genomförs i två delar där först externa och därefter interna orsaker till motståndet kartläggs. Förklaringen till motståndet inom den externa dimensionen finns i att missilförsvaret med en framtida utbyggnad kan komma att utgöra ett hot mot rysk andraslagsförmåga och därmed hota Rysslands kapacitet till kärnvapenavskräckning. Interna orsaker till motståndet finns i att såväl den ryska makteliten som Rysslands befolkning anser att landet är utsatt för ett hot från USA. Då Ryssland är väl sammanhållet inom fyra avgörande interna områden ges möjligheten för den förda utrikespolitiken. / In the spring of 2007 the United States went public with its plans to build a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic as a protection to missile attacks from Iran. The Russian reaction to the plans was harsh. The Moscow rhetoric reminded of the Cold War days. What are the underlying reasons to this strong reaction? The purpose of this essay is to analyse what reasons there are, both external and domestic, that direct the Russian attitude. The essay uses theories from the political realism as tool. The analysis is done in two parts where first external and then domestic reasons to the attitude are surveyed. The reason to the attitude is in the external dimension to be found in the fact that the missile defence, if in the future extended, may poses a threat to Russian second strike capacity and by that poses a threat to Russian nuclear deterrence capacity. Domestic reasons to the attitude are to be found in the fact that both the ruling political elite in Russia as well as the Russian population believes that the country is subject to threat from the United States. As Russia is well united in four crucial domestic areas, the possibility for the current foreign policy is given.

This thesis asks why Japan decided to procure BMD if it meant building an infrastructure which, because of its technological nature, had the potential to disrupt Japan’s preferred security strategy of hedging, that is, maintaining ambiguity of commitment, vis-à-vis China and the US. The investigation was divided into three parts dealing with the following questions – Why did Japan's BMD procurement matter? Who mattered? Why were the BMD and related decisions made? Such a structure of research was informed by “neoclassical realism,” according to which the relative material power of a country sets the parameters of its foreign policy, but the policy choices within these international constraints are made by political elites. A range of policymaking heuristics were used to investigate the domestic element of the approach. In addition to the conventionally specified policymaking actors such as MOD, MOFA, Prime Ministers, an original attempt was made to identify the possible influences of several elite networks. On the basis of the notes from the Japan-US Security Strategy Conference, two elite networks were analysed, namely the Japan’s Congressional National Security Research Group and Japan-US Centre for Peace and Cultural Exchange. It was concluded that they have probably had some influence on shaping Japan's BMD decisions. The conclusion of this research is that BMD was procured despite its disruptive potential because it was a tool of shifting Japanese policy from one hedging policy to another, that is, from one based on self-imposed restraints toward one exercised from the position of military strength. An analysis of international relations in East Asia in 1994-2007 and an analysis of the views of the security elites make Japan's transition toward a military strength-based hedging appear rational and confirm BMD's utility as a tool in this transition. Some negative consequences of a possible disruption to hedging, induced by BMD, can be contained exactly because of such a reformatting of hedging.

Canada consistently balances competing inclinations for proximity and distance with the United States. Yet the extant literature on Canadian foreign policy has rarely focused on this particular behaviour trait or readily accepted that such an ambiguous stance is actually underpinned by a strategic logic, let alone the crux of a purported grand strategy. And the few that that are open to the notion of a Canadian grand strategy often overlook the domestic decision-making determinants of behaviour, are largely empirical-descriptive in content, or are chronologically limited to either the early Cold War or a few key foreign policy episodes. This dissertation rectifies these shortcomings by providing a theoretical-explanatory and empirically-informed account of Canada’s post-war grand strategy, in which its domestic origins, strategic policies, and cultural predispositions are all carefully explored. It does so by applying the cultural-cybernetic model of behaviour, which combines strategic cultural factors that guide policy-makers on security matters with cybernetic policy processes, through which beliefs, inclinations, and policy choices are standardized and regularized as distinct doctrines across a range of foreign, defence, and security policies. It tests this model on two key cases of Canadian grand strategy in the post-war period: (1) Canada’s policy responses to American preferences on strategic (air and missile) defence over some six decades, and (2) its policy responses to US – and to a lesser extent British – strategic preferences on NATO defence strategy during the Cold War. The findings reveal that Canada’s strategic policies fluctuated between the two Standing Operational Doctrines in its policy repertoire: continental soft-bandwagoning and defensive weak-multilateralism. These two doctrines span the range of feasible policy options – the “goldilocks zone” – required to ensure that any trade-offs between security and sovereignty, as the central values being pursued in the cybernetic process, are minimized. It is for this reason that Canada’s strategic behaviour has a high degree of policy continuity, patterned consistency, and is best described as the goldilocks grand strategy.

My doctoral project investigates the impact of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative on transatlantic relations during the period 1983-86. The dissertation focuses on the three main European powers, namely Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany, and examines their reaction to SDI both individually and comparatively. The study exploits SDI’s position at the intersection of nuclear strategy, political ideology, Cold War diplomacy, and industrial politics to offer a multifaceted, multi-national, and primary source-based analysis of US-European relations during the Reagan Presidency. The picture of the transatlantic relationship which emerges from the dissertation is a complex and nuanced one. On the one hand, the analysis argues that relations across the Atlantic during the Reagan era cannot be reduced to a scenario of accelerating ‘drift’ between the United States and Western Europe. Instead, on SDI as well as on other matters, moments of acute friction alternated with a constantly renewed search for dialogue, cooperation, and compromise on the part of the Europeans and also, if to a lesser degree, of the Americans. On the other hand, the ‘exceptionalist’ ideology and worldview underpinning SDI, the prevailing indifference in Washington to its implications for NATO, and most importantly the persistent anti-nuclear rhetoric and ambitions associated with the initiative revealed a distinct lack of sensitivity to European interest by the Reagan administration. As the dissertation shows, the anti-nuclear drive inherent in SDI, which both reflected and reinforced Reagan’s deep-seated interest in nuclear abolition, constituted the most disruptive aspect of the initiative from the viewpoint of European leaders. In these respects, the SDI controversy epitomises the unilateral tendencies and increasingly divergent priorities from those of the European allies which characterised much of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy – making the 1980s a decade of recurrent tensions in transatlantic relations.

The aim of this work is to test the ability of three selected theoretical approaches to explain the response of the Czech Republic to the American offer to build the ABM radar device on the Czech soil. These theories are: neorealism, utilitarian liberalism and constructivism. Each of these approaches looks at the social reality from a different perspective which allows us to view the issue in its complexity and diversity. Each theory also uses a different set of independent variables to explain the behavior of the Czech government in this case (these variables are: autonomy and influence for neorealism; domestic interests for liberalism and international and domestic norms for constructivism). Thanks to this variety of variables we are enabled to critically evaluate which key factors played the crucial role in the Czech decision-making process in this particular issue and possibly also to point out some assumed regularities which might play an important role in forming of the Czech security policy as such. The main task of the first chapter is to provide some broader historical and political context of the case. Next three chapters are then dedicated to testing of the theories by comparing their deductively phrased hypothesis with the value of dependent variable, which for our work is represented...