Bøger af Jonah Blank

In this study, RAND researchers examined the current role of security cooperation efforts as a tool in the emerging strategic competition among the United States, Russia, and China.

The authors examine the nature of the emerging era of international competition, assess the perspectives of the major powers?beginning with the primary challengers to the U.S.-led international order?and evaluate various characteristics for each country.

One of the United States'' key partners in long-term strategic competition with China is India, which has the world''s second-largest active-duty armed forces and is already a peer or near-peer competitor of China across a range of military capabilities. However, U.S. planners must be keenly aware of the constraints on both India''s willingness and capacity to forge a partnership based on strategic competition with China.

The U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD's) 2018 National Defense Strategy highlights the importance of working with regional allies and partners in order to manage China's rise as a strategic competitor to the United States in the Indo-Pacific region. In this country-level report in a series, the author examines the potential for, and potential impediments to, partnering more closely with Indonesia. In many ways, Indonesia is a natural partner: Its self-defined core national security interests, including the preservation of its sovereignty against encroachment by any would-be hegemonic regional power, are in relatively close harmony with those of the United States. But U.S. planners must be keenly aware of the constraints on Indonesia's willingness and capacity to forge a partnership based on strategic competition with China. These constraints include persistent aversion to any partnership that might be characterized as "alignment"; enduring antiforeign attitudes, particularly in military circles; strong desire to balance security engagement among the widest possible array of nations; deep and growing economic linkages with China; an institutional mindset for the military that is geared more toward internal stability than external defense; historical and ongoing underfunding of basic military needs; and a lack of military capability and interoperability sufficient for frictionless interaction with U.S. forces. Although Indonesia will remain an important U.S. partner, such challenges should moderate expectations about the pace for increased engagement.

The values of traditionalist Islam are often portrayed as inherently hostile to those of a modern, pluralistic society. This book shatters many of these stereotypes. Jonah Blank provides a first-hand account of the Daudi Bohra to show how a premodern clerical elite has embraced modernity.