Geographically incomparable – insomuch that one occupies 30,528 square kilometers and the other constitutes the second largest country in the world by total area – yet politically and culturally analogous to the extent that both contain significant French-speaking minorities, the federal parliamentary constitutional monarchies of Belgium and Canada present ideal cases for comparison.
In declaring war on Germany in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson defined the central goal of his vision for American foreign policy by asserting that “the world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”[i]Wilson ingrained this philosophy, known as Liberal Internationalism, into the psyche of the American public by advocating for the promotion of democracy, economic openness, well-structured multilateral institutions, and American leadership.
From the earliest conceptual and theoretical work on cyber conflict, the problem of attribution, or “the return address problem,” has loomed large, undermining efforts to construct a credible deterrent against cyber attacks. The United States Department of Defense (DoD), in a 2011 policy report, recognized as much and identified the development of advanced forensics capabilities as a key component of national cyber strategy.
The early 1990s saw the climactic rupture of the Soviet Union, and with it a near total extirpation of Russian status on the world stage. That the federation has since managed to claw its way back from this decade in the backwaters of international affairs can be attributed to the ideas and vision espoused by the late Yevgeny Primakov, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 1998.