CONTRIBUTORS

TANISHA FAZAL is a political scientist who focuses on armed conflict, sovereignty, and international law. A professor at the University of Minnesota, Fazal wrote a 2019 Foreign Affairs essay with Paul Poast arguing that optimists were wrong to contend that war was over. In an earlier book, she examined the phenomenon of “state death,” whereby a country disappears from the world map. In “The Return of Conquest?” (page 20), Fazal draws on that work to make clear what’s at stake in Ukraine: if Russia succeeds in overturning the long-standing norm against territorial conquest, more states could be forced to defend their borders.

ANNA REID is a historian and journalist specializing in eastern Europe. She has served as the Kyiv correspondent for The Economist and The Daily Telegraph and written several books on Russia and Ukraine, including Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine. In “Putin’s War on History” (page 54), Reid explores Ukraine’s long and complex history and argues that at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s attack is a battle over that contested past.

STEPHEN KOTKIN is the author of seminal scholarship on Russia, the Soviet Union, and global history. The first volume in his acclaimed three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; the second won the Council on Foreign Relation’s Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a professor at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In “The Cold War Never Ended” (page 64), he argues that the crisis in Ukraine is the latest phase of a geopolitical struggle that stretches back to World War II—one that the West can win only by being the West.

The dean of American defense strategists, ANDREW KREPINEVICH graduated from West Point and served as an officer in the U.S. Army for 21 years, during which time he wrote The Army and Vietnam, an influential critique of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. He has served in the U.S. Department of Defense and was the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments from 1995 to 2016. In “The New Nuclear Age” (page 92), he argues that China’s aggressive expansion of its nuclear arsenal is upending the balance that has prevented nuclear war for decades—and that this should prompt urgent new thinking about how to avert catastrophe in a dangerous new atomic age.