Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Last week, as part of my company’s investment work in the health care industry, I sat through a marketing pitch from a Chinese manufacturer of low-cost and disposable drug tests, many of which deliver results in mere seconds. They ranged from the familiar home pregnancy tests to sophisticated multi-panel urine screens (for narcotics) — and even included a mouth swab for measuring blood-alcohol levels, the kind you’ll soon be scooping out of a bowl at your favorite bar to check your ability to drive before heading home. The pitch got me thinking about our collective future in this era of […]

Chile has not voted a right-wing president into office since Jorge Alessandri campaigned and won as an independent, center-right candidate in March 1958. But Sebastián Piñera may well break that precedent on Jan. 17. Having won the first-round election on Dec. 13 with 44 percent of the vote, Piñera fell shy of the simple majority required to avoid a run-off. He now faces Eduardo Frei, a former president representing the governing center-left Concertación coalition, who took only 30 percent of the first-round vote. In a country that has not seen a right-wing government since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship […]

In a WPR blog post earlier this week, Judah Grunstein described the “Yemen frenzy” induced by the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing plot as a post-9/11, “Pavlovian response.” But there’s more to the conditioned behavior than just the push for a massive, whole-of-government intervention in a country linked to an attempted domestic terrorist attack, and in which al-Qaida has a presence. A second factor at play is the tendency of the U.S. government — and indeed, of the entire political establishment — to dart from crisis to crisis, pouring time, treasure and resources into responding to the headlines of the […]

India continues to burnish its international image with initiatives like Brand India, a public-private campaign whose stated mission is to “build positive perceptions of India globally.” But when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged the country’s undernourished children as a “national shame,” it highlighted how India’s economic success co-exists with its persistently high rates for hunger, malnutrition, and income poverty. According to the World Bank, 46 percent of Indian children below the age of five are underweight, and the World Food Program says that 230 million Indians are living with hunger. Clearly India’s robust 8 percent growth in GDP does […]

JERUSALEM — The Obama administration is working hard to correct the missteps it made in the opening phases of its attempt to mediate a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The principal challenge now is persuading the Palestinian side to return to the negotiating table. This challenge emerged, ironically, as the direct result of Washington’s early errors in its quest for peace. The administration is learning from its mistakes and better understanding the nuances of this complicated conflict. And yet, its propensity to make counterproductive moves persists. A recent statement by the U.S. negotiator George Mitchell showed just how easy it […]

NEW DELHI — Fly three hours in just about any direction from New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, and you’re likely to land in a zone of either ongoing or recently resolved armed conflict — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma for the former, Sri Lanka and Nepal for the latter. What might be surprising, though, is that those odds are not diminished if you travel by road within India. As a result of structural complexities inherent to the Indian state, New Delhi faces internal security challenges that range from terrorism and militant Naxal extremism to insurgencies and proxy wars. Violence, […]

Bereft of an ally since the collapse of monarchical rule in Nepal nearly four years ago, China has been struggling to secure its place in the buffer state, wedged between China’s volatile Tibet region and its regional rival, India. Hardly a month goes by now without a high-level Chinese delegation arriving in Kathmandu seeking assurances on its security interests. In February 2005, China offered then-King Gyanendra a lifeline by calling his seizure of power, which otherwise prompted widespread international condemnation, an internal matter. A year later, when the royal regime no longer seemed tenable, China scrambled to build ties with […]

On Jan. 9, North and South Sudan marked the fifth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that brought an end to Africa’s longest civil war, but the mood has been anything but celebratory as the two sides proceed toward a referendum over Southern secession. Long-simmering ethnic tensions in the South are boiling into unrest — stoked, according to many in the Southern capital of Juba, by a Khartoum government unwilling to contemplate the oil-rich South’s seemingly inevitable secession. A massacre in Warrap state on Jan. 7, that left at least 139 dead and nearly 100 injured, was the latest clash […]

As part of its escalating campaign against Islamic terrorists based in Yemen, the U.S. government has expanded efforts to crack down on terrorist financiers in the Middle Eastern country. But the counter-finance approach in Yemen is complicated by the same factors that have stymied similar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Extremists operate increasingly cheaply — and what little money they do require, they can often raise without outside help. Yemen is increasingly a terror crossroads. U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 fellow soldiers in a November shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, reportedly had ties to radical Muslim […]

MADRID — Spain’s six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, which began on Jan. 1, 2010, is off to a bumpy start. With the Lisbon Treaty now in effect, the traditional role of the EU rotating presidency has been downgraded. Responsibility for many issues which were once the domain of the rotating presidency now falls to the newly named permanent EU president, Herman Van Rompuy, and EU foreign minister, Catherine Ashton — who together are supposed to comprise the new “public face” of the EU. Nevertheless, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has announced a series of ambitious initiatives […]

Just 12 days into 2010, Chinese government representatives have already made more than a half-dozen official statements warning the Obama administration against selling additional weapons to Taiwan. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may respond in several ways to the announced sales, with the freezing of Sino-American military relations likely to be one means of retaliation. The Obama administration should accept a temporary suspension to educate Chinese policymakers that the defense dialogue is not something that Beijing can employ as a source of leverage over Washington. The immediate catalyst for Beijing’s anger came on Dec. 23, when the Defense Department […]

For the past seven months, countless parallels have been drawn between the current uprising gripping Iran and the events that ultimately led to the demise of the Pahlavi monarchy some 30 years ago. Whether or not the comparisons are accurate, one irony that cannot be escaped is that the regime is facing increasingly vocal dissent from the very clerical class that brought it to power. In fact, as the Islamic Republic deviates more and more from its theocratic roots and transforms into a military dictatorship, it risks alienating the very marjas who have given it legitimacy since its inception. Most […]

The U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement, signed in October 2008 after intense bilateral negotiations, is a crucial trade deal for both nations, offering India’s fledgling civilian nuclear industry the opportunity to access sophisticated U.S. technology, while providing American companies with the possibility of significant commercial benefits from the engagement. However, despite the deal’s obvious benefits and the urgency displayed by both countries to get it signed over a year ago, obstacles still remain to making it operational. To finalize the agreement, the Bush administration overruled longstanding U.S. non-proliferation policy by implicitly recognizing India as a nuclear power. The deal was also […]

The chaos in Copenhagen offered a powerful, and sobering, illustration of how far the world’s governments are from negotiating an accord to bring climate change under control. Those who believe that a robust and binding climate framework is essential have been left depressed and demoralized. Many now fear that a global governance system that is unable to respond to one of the toughest threats the world faces must, in fact, be broken. History suggests (.pdf) that the climate change priesthood will soldier on, insisting that a deal needs just one more push. Meanwhile, they’ll bury the process ever further in […]

ZAGREB, Croatia — Croatian voters face a stark choice this Sunday when they go to the polls to elect a new president, between the Social Democrat, Ivo Josipovic, and the former Social Democrat and Zagreb’s mayor, Milan Bandic. The outcome of the election will serve as a litmus test of the country’s European aspirations, and could have an impact on regional stability. Although the president’s constitutional powers were much curtailed under incumbent, Stipe Mesic, the office still carries considerable weight, according to Josip Kregar, an independent member of the Zagreb city council. “Croatia is a young democracy and the personality […]

A year ago, Christian Brose penned a provocative article for Foreign Policy entitled “George W. Obama.” In it, the former speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice asserted that “Obama ran against a caricature of Bush’s first term” during the 2008 election, rather than the Bush foreign policy of the second term. Moreover, of the latter, he predicted that Obama would “largely continue it.” In large measure, Brose has turned out to be right. Despite the rhetoric of “change we can believe in,” there has been a high degree of continuity between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Take the most […]

Here are a few of this week’s highlights from WPR’s video section: – As Yemen’s stability comes into question, experts identify more than just Al Qaida as a threat to the crumbling nation. WorldFocus interviews military analyst Anthony Cordesman about the U.S. role in Yemen in this video. – Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to be plagued by ethnic tensions. WorldFocus talks about the issues with Ivana Howard of the National Endowment for Democracy in this video. – The Afghan parliament turned down a majority of President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet picks, but is this a step backward or forward for democracy […]