International Politics Mastery: Western Security and Russia

Speak confidently about international security relations between the West and Russia, including history and present.

From the author of the best-selling course International Politics Mastery: Become an Expert Analyst

In this course, you will learn to speak confidently about dilemmas and challenges facing the relations between the West and Russia.

By the end of the course, you will become an expert on the security situation facing the United States, the European Union, NATO and Russia. The ideas I discuss in this course are timeless.

By knowing them, you will become more confident in your understanding and interpretation of what’s happening between the West and Russia.

Linking history and present

In this course, I will take you on an exciting journey beginning between the two world wars, when the relationship of Russia with the United States and Europe was hotly debated.

As early as in 1926, one influential advocate of European integration argued that Russia was a threat. A few years later another influential thinker responded that European integration would only make things worse and lead to more conflicts.

We will then discuss how those early divisions are still relevant today, and we can see them in international responses to the conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine. I will also share with you my own views on the conflict between the West and Russia.

This course is not about 'the news' and events

So what exactly is this course about? It is about international security and Russia, of course, but it is not really about policy events and actions. You can learn what is happening from reading the news on the Internet and that way you can stay very well informed.

This course is about something you will not easily find on the Internet. It is about some fundamental ideas about international security and Russia.

To simplify, most of the things we take from the news are events. And most of the things we take from the books, expert magazines and journals, are about ideas.

Policy leaders, conflicts and different agreements and disagreements, they change all the time. And you can take all this information from the Internet. But the ideas I am about to teach you in this course, they are timeless.

They concern the fundamental questions, such as:

Who is mainly responsible for the conflicts between the West and Russia?
Is it the expansionist European Union and NATO?
Or, is it aggressive Russia, which cannot accept that it is no longer a super power?
How should the West organise itself and respond to the Russian challenge?
Should Europe become more integrated, more like a super state?
Or, should it seek cooperation with Russia?
How could such cooperation look like?
How would Russia like to reorganise the Western security system?
These are precisely the questions of ideas. When you learn the answers to those questions, you can then easily take any event, such as the conflict in Ukraine or the war in Syria, and apply your knowledge to expertly analyse those problems.

Your knowledge will be supported by decades of research and idea exchanges between some of the greatest intellectuals. Are you excited?

What you will get in this course



At the end of your course, you will be able to:

Speak confidently about international security relations between the West and Russia, including history and present.
Educate others about international security and Russia, beyond what's covered in the news.
Understand competing explanations of why the relations between the West and Russia are bad.
Link historical examples going back to the inter-war period with the current situation concerning the West and Russia.
Understand how a relatively unimportant country of Poland may have contributed to the conflict in Ukraine.
Recognise the importance of the EU and NATO security strategies for how those organisation see Russia.
Speak confidently about brilliant theorists and thinkers and link their ideas to current events.
Understand the Western as well as the Russian perspective on the current security situation.
Speak in terms of strategies and ideas, not just describing what happened and who was involved.