Since the end of the Cold War the United States sought to enhance its privileged position as a ‘leader’ of the international community, capable of mobilizing and coordinating other states to achieve collective goals and ensure shared values. For this purpose, the U.S. relied on traditional alliances and intergovernmental organizations as mediators in relations between Washington and the less powerful countries in order to ensure the legitimacy of the American engagement. However, one can witness the United States’ reorientation towards more flexible and less institutionalized formats of interaction in recent years. It may be considered as the transformation of power relations underlying ‘liberal international order’. Although the established U.S.-led alliances still serve as the pillars of the ‘American hegemony’, many functions are increasingly carried out beyond the frameworks of the alliances, and the less institutionalized structures are becoming increasingly important. Thus, it is necessary to explore the links between legitimacy concerns and evolution of institutional tools, whereby the international order congenial with the U.S.’ interests can be maintained. The paper examines the views of both Russian and Western expert communities on the role of U.S. coalitions and partnerships in ensuring legitimacy of the postCold War ‘American hegemony’. The author notes that the existing approaches pay insufficient attention to the dynamics of power relations between the United States and its partners and allies. To fill this gap, the author engages theoretical assumptions of the English school, which consider the issue of ‘legitimacy’ within the framework of the concept of ‘international society’ — the group of states within which the division of roles and social stratification are intertwined with the processes of reproduction and transformation of power relations. On this basis the author explores the specifics of the United States’ partnerships and ad hoc coalitions as the tools of legitimizing the ‘American hegemony’ after the end of the Cold War. The author concludes that the use of these mechanisms allows the United States to effectively mobilize collective efforts and manage the distribution of roles between its allies and partners. However, it generates additional risks and challenges in times of tensions.

North Korea and Iran have been featured in all official U.S. missile defense policy documents since the late 1990s. The threat posed by two countries to the United States and their allies’ armed forces deployed in various regions has been the main incentive for the development of regional missile defense (theater missile defense) programs for more than 20 years. All this time, there has been an ongoing debate among American politicians, strategists, and academic experts on the prospects and specifics of the regional missile defense architectures, levels of U.S. allies’ participation in their development, as well as the very need to deploy these systems in North-East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The paper attempts to summarize and analyze the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of the idea to use the regional missile defense systems in the regional deterrence of North Korea and Iran.
The first section examines approaches of different U.S. administrations to this issue. The author emphasizes that the Biden administration officials have already confirmed most of the basic postulates formulated by the Trump administration on the matter. According to them, the high efficiency of regional missile defense facilitates regional deterrence of the DPRK and Iran.
The second section examines debates in the U.S. expert community. The author identifies two main approaches. The first basically repeats the arguments of the U.S. administration on the benefits of regional missile defense for regional stability. According to the second approach, the regional missile defense may destabilize the situation in the region without enhancing the protection of the U.S. and their allies’ armed forces.
The third section provides a critical analysis of the debate. The author concludes that the arguments and assessments of both the opponents and proponents of the deterrence of the DPRK and Iran by means of regional missile defense are theoretically ill-founded and often one-sided. Subsequently, many crucial issues related to the use of missile defense systems and their potential impact on the regional security remain understudied. All this suggests that there is a need for a more detailed study of this issue, particularly given increasing regional tensions.

Exploration of bibliography on the U.S. foreign policy reveals a striking and inexplicable lack of scholarly attention to such an interesting phenomenon, as presidential foreign aid initiatives. Such initiatives are studied exclusively in the context of a given administration’ policy but not as an element of the U.S. national system of foreign aid management. This paper is meant to fill this gaping niche. The first section defines a place of such initiatives among the presidential tools to influence foreign aid policies and the reasons behind their proliferation. The second section compares a dozen of the most prominent presidential initiatives of the XXI century — with a special focus on the differences between the most recent Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, launched by Joseph Biden at the Summit for Democracy, and the initiatives of his predecessors. The conclusion is drawn that presidential initiatives have gained in significance over the last two decades due to objective as well as subjective factors. On the one hand, U.S. presidents sought to expand the room for maneuver in foreign aid programming and budgeting, which had been very limited from the very beginning due to the legal constraints and which had contracted even further because of a quick proliferation of Congressional earmarks and directives. On the other hand, one should not underestimate the impact of an unprecedented activism of the George W. Bush that the last three U.S. presidents had to keep in mind in their own aid policies. However, the launch of each initiative was determined by a unique combination of factors operating at the individual, domestic and structural levels. This explains a great variety in circumstances surrounding their launch, documentary and institutional formalization, which did not preclude a number of key similarities: 1) determining the funding volume; 2) providing a long-term perspective; 3) supporting the initiative through authorization acts, presidential orders, memoranda/directives or strategic planning documents issued by the White House; 4) establishing new coordination units. The higher the status of these units and the clearer their mandates were, the more effectively the implementation process went. The launch of the Joseph Biden’s Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal — which combines diplomacy and development tools — at the end of his first year in office illustrates the role of the aforementioned factors. His intent to solidify his legacy predetermined the choice of a thematic profile for the first presidential initiative which would reflect his personal ideas and considerations about a pivotal confrontation of the epoch in the most explicit way. However, at least for the time being the Joseph Biden’s initiative stands out in all three main dimensions, which raises doubts about its potential to exert a systemic and long-term influence on the U.S. foreign assistance policies.

In recent years the African continent, possessing a significant resource, economic and demographic potential, has become a scene of the growing rivalry between China and the United States. On the basis of a wide range of primary sources and recent researches, the author provides an in-depth analysis of both the current state and prospects for interaction between the two powers in Africa. The first section examines the key areas and features of China’s economic activities across the African continent, their trends and scope. The author shows, that among the factors that contributed to the strengthening of the PRC’s economic position in the region was its willingness to provide large loans and take part in ambitious infrastructure projects without imposing political conditions and without interfering in the internal affairs of African states. Such an approach allowed China to supersede the US in a number of sensitive areas (trade, mining of rare earth elements, humanitarian cooperation), as well as to gain the diplomatic support of African states, primarily within the UN. The second section examines ideological and military-political rivalry between the PRC and the United States in Africa. The author emphasizes the lack of consensus in the U.S. expert community on China’s readiness and desire to escalate the Cold War-like confrontation with the United States in Africa. The African states are not prepared for such confrontation either. However, the author concludes that the competition between China and the United States in Africa does not necessarily imply only the logic of confrontation. It is possible to find some common ground, for example, in developing market relations, promoting infrastructure projects, combating piracy, expanding healthcare facilities in the African states, etc. According to the author, such an approach could prioritize the issues of peace and the development of the African peoples.

The fishery sector has a unique position within the European Union regulatory system. Being in the joint competence of supranational and national authorities, it has a complex transnational nature, characterized by an active participation of non-governmental organizations and associations, as well as a number of coordinating international authorities. Additionally, the fishery is of particular importance for nation states since it is linked to issues of sovereignty and social stability. The paper examines possible applications of the multi-level governance (MLG) theory to the study of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), its history, current state and prospects for development. The first section outlines the key provisions of the MLG theory and describes its general applicability to the study of the EU institutions. In order to provide a better understanding of strengths and weaknesses of the MLG theory, the author compares it to a number of related approaches traditionally used in integration studies in general and the European integration studies in particular. The author concludes that the multi-level governance framework is particularly suitable to the study of complex regulatory processes that involve different actors, like in the case of the EU CFP. Such an approach allows the author to identify certain specifics of the EU political practices in this area of regulation. For example, the author highlights a clear desire of the supranational bodies to acquire additional competences and to bring about redistribution of power in their favor through mobilizing the support of sub-national actors and think-tanks and at the expense of national actors. However, the author concludes that in order to provide a truly comprehensive understanding of the EU CFP, the traditional focus of the MLG approach should be expanded to encompass yet another level of analysis — the global one.

The book under review is a monograph by O.V. Petrosyants ‘The U.S.-German relations, 1938–1941: Politics, diplomacy, priorities’ published in 2021. The reviewer emphasizes the relevance and novelty of the research as it revisits a set of well-established in both the Soviet and Russian historical studies views on and assessments of the U.S. foreign policy before and at the beginning of World War II. The monograph is based on a wide range of primary sources including previously unpublished documents from the Russian and American archives. It reveals a complex and contradictory nature of the U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s and identifies its key internal and external determinants. The reviewer notes that the study pays special attention to tensions between isolationists and interventionists within the American elites and agrees with the author’s conclusion that the isolationists’ position turned out to be more and more regressive and short-sighted as the international situation worsened. However, as the author emphasizes, it was the need to take into account the isolationists’ influence that largely led to the inconsistency and indecisiveness of the U.S. foreign policy during that period. The reviewer stresses that such balanced assessments characterize all the chapters of the book which makes it a must-read for all specialists on the U.S. foreign policy. However, the reviewer notes that the German diplomacy is not examined in the book as consistently and thoroughly as that of Washington and often appears as a mere observer. The reviewer concludes that this research is especially relevant and worthy of attention in the current international context since it points to the need for an objective and unbiased study of the foreign policy of past and present Russia’s rivals as a key to a better understanding of their current goals.