Defense & Security Archive

The U.S. military is increasingly ill-suited for today’s complex, interconnected and transparent security environment. It was designed to fight major wars against the military forces of other nations, yet never does so. Despite the best intentions of its architects, the U.S. military is a “kluge”—a combination of sometimes compatible, sometimes mismatched parts cobbled together. It works, but not as effectively or efficiently as it should. The United States could gain much from reorganizing its military to better reflect today’s security environment but this is easier said than done. The obstacles to deep change are powerful: There is so much tradition, […]

Turks will head to the polls again this Sunday, Nov. 1, to vote for a new parliament, after negotiations to form a coalition government failed following an inconclusive election in June. The vote comes amid considerable unrest in Turkey: In July, a two-year cease-fire agreement between the government and the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) collapsed, while a cell of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in southeastern Turkey has attacked several targets near the Syrian border and, recently, deeper in Turkey, including two suicide bombings that killed more than 100 people in Ankara earlier this month. Despite this unrest, opinions polls […]

Russia began its military intervention in Syria a month ago, initially declaring that its aim was to take on the self-proclaimed Islamic State. But instead, it immediately started targeting groups that pose the most threat to Bashar al-Assad’s regime, mainly the Islamist coalition of rebel and jihadi groups known as Jaish al-Fatah, or the Army of Conquest, which includes the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, as well as more moderate groups backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and even the United States. Russia hopes to consolidate the territory controlled by Assad’s forces, which have also launched an offensive on rebel groups […]

Although far removed from Australia’s traditional areas of interest in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, the Middle East continues to be a focus of Australian foreign policy and military strategy. But its own security interests in the region have nearly always been defined in terms of its security relationship with the United States. One of only four countries to have participated in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Australia was more recently among the first countries to follow Washington’s lead in offering renewed military assistance to Iraq after the fall of Mosul to the self-proclaimed Islamic State in June […]

The longtime president of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, is now eligible to run for a third consecutive term, after voters overwhelmingly approved amendments to the constitution in a referendum last Sunday, according to the official results announced Tuesday. The opposition, which has protested 72-year-old Sassou’s attempt to retain power since he announced his intentions in May, urged voters to boycott the referendum and called for civil disobedience. The government issued a ban on public gatherings, but protests ensued. Tens of thousands of demonstrators were met with a violent government crackdown. According to government officials, clashes between police […]

In a surprise last week, Canada’s Liberal Party won an overall majority in the federal election, gaining a clear mandate to form a new government led by party leader Justin Trudeau, the new prime minister-designate. Voters’ predominant concerns were the economy and moving on politically from Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper—not national security or foreign policy. However, Trudeau, Harper and the New Democratic Party’s Thomas Mulcair still clashed on a number of issues throughout the campaign related to Canada’s national and international security policies, including how to tackle terrorism, the refugee crisis and drug policy. Will Trudeau now follow through […]

Americans often take for granted that events that mark U.S. history are as indelibly imprinted in people’s memories around the world as they are in the U.S. For those of a certain generation, the assassination of John F. Kennedy is one such event. For younger Americans, it’s the attacks of Sept. 11. But at times, the reverse is also true, when historical events that occur elsewhere in the world become indelibly imprinted on American minds. That is the case for me and Nov. 4, 1995: the day Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv. I can still […]

During the early decades of the nuclear age, a debate developed on the general utility of force. In the new and dramatically altered conditions of that period, in which a third world war could have meant the obliteration of great cities and civilization, it was hard to see what political purposes could possibly be achieved by launching an aggressive war. But by the same token there were also horrendous risks in a defensive war if that required resort to the most destructive weapons available. The dominant response, at least when it came to war among the great powers, was to […]

Developments over the past year in Syria and Iraq suggest many parallels between the two countries. From the separatism of the Kurds and the fight against the self-declared Islamic State to the expansion of Russia’s presence and influence, the two states seem to be following similar trajectories. But a closer look suggests quite distinct realities. Syria clearly seems to be headed toward implosion, even if the bigger picture of chaos obscures at least one smaller one that could inspire optimism for the future. By contrast, Iraq’s narrative today is not one-dimensional—in fact, the signs point in many directions: The country […]

On Sept. 28, in the village of Dadri in the state of Uttar Pradesh, barely 50 miles from India’s capital of New Delhi, a Hindu mob beat a Muslim laborer, Mohammed Akhlaq, to death. The mob had attacked Akhlaq at home in the belief that he had slaughtered a cow to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid. The horrific absurdity of the crime was further accentuated when subsequent forensic examination of the meat taken from Akhlaq’s refrigerator demonstrated that it was actually mutton. The killing generated understandable anger and profound dismay within India’s vast civil society. However, it took a […]

Do Europeans still make good peacemakers? Europe’s militaries have been in long-term decline since the end of the Cold War. But the continent’s diplomats and politicians retain a prominent role in international crisis management. This is nowhere more obvious than in the Middle East and North Africa. The United Nations currently has seven top-level envoys working on conflicts in the region. Five of them are Europeans. The U.N. has, for example, decided that a German official will replace a Spanish diplomat as its envoy on Libya. Staffan de Mistura, who holds double Italian-Swedish nationality, still has the ugly task of […]

A few years ago Afghanistan seemed on the path to success. The economy was doing relatively well. The Taliban were losing ground to Afghan security forces, the U.S. military and units from other partner nations. The new president, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, seemed more willing to tackle Afghanistan’s deep political problems than Hamid Karzai, his erratic predecessor. By all indications, things were looking up. Sadly this has proven to be an illusion. Ghani has not gotten a handle on Afghanistan’s crippling corruption, cronyism and ethnic strife. The country will not be able to function without massive economic assistance far into the […]

Consider three pieces of bad news from Egypt this week: low voter turnout—likely just as the government intended—in a sham election; the resignation of Egypt’s central bank governor as the currency continues to be devalued; and the arrest of a senior leader and chief financier of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Each development was a reminder of the state of Egypt under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, a strongman who has ruled unilaterally without a parliament since 2013. The hope of democratic reform seems farther away than ever. The economy, in free fall since the popular uprising that led to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster […]

The latest edition of the New York Times Magazine featured a cover story that aimed to challenge the generally accepted narrative of how the U.S. found and killed Osama bin Laden. The article by Jonathan Mahler centered on an alternative version of events by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In Hersh’s telling, the story we have heard from the Obama administration and retold by a number of books and movies essentially amounts to a vast cover-up. In exploring the controversy, Mahler focuses more on the hunt for the bin Laden story than on the hunt for bin Laden—that is, on […]

On July 20, Colombia’s peace talks with the FARC guerrilla group emerged from what was hopefully their roughest patch. With daily episodes of combat between FARC militants and the Colombian army, June was the most violent month in Colombia since peace talks began in October 2012. Then, in late July, at the strong urging of foreign diplomats accompanying the talks, the FARC declared a new unilateral cease-fire, and both sides said they would dedicate themselves to making it bilateral. The three months since then have been the least violent that Colombia has experienced since 1975. The July truce and de-escalation […]

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the times of plenty and stability are over. The autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq has been hailed for most of the past decade as an emerging Dubai in Mesopotamia and the only success story of the Iraq war. But it is descending farther into civil strife, agonizing economic recession and a political stalemate that threatens to paralyze one of America’s most potent allies in the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Last Monday, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), fired four ministers of his government, all of them members of the […]

The Israel-Palestine conflict, with all its recurring violence, often seems like the broken record of international affairs. Still this latest wave of lone-wolf Palestinian terrorist attacks followed by predictably harsh Israeli reprisals—and mutual recriminations from both sides that the other is responsible—should come as no surprise. With the collapse of peace talks, the re-election of a right-wing Israeli government opposed to a two-state solution, the continued corruption and dysfunction of the Palestinian leadership and the lack of any realistic path to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the chickens have once again come home to roost in the […]