Diplomacy & Politics Archive

The killing of Osama bin Laden in a comfortable neighborhood not far from Pakistan’s capital has again illustrated the fundamentally ambiguous nature of the security relationship between Washington and Islamabad. In the past, Pakistani authorities have played a key role in capturing or killing al-Qaida leaders, mainly because many of the most prominent international terrorists are located on their territory. This has led to suspicions that some terrorists enjoy the support of influential Pakistanis. Bin Laden appears to have had similar protection, an impression reinforced by the fact that his enormous compound was a stone’s throw from Pakistani military facilities […]

Not surprisingly, people in the Taliban-controlled areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have turned out — some of their own volition, many under duress — to mourn Osama bin Laden’s death and to threaten the United States and its allies. Yet, as a Pew survey documented, the idolization once lavished upon bin Laden seems to have waned in recent years among Muslim polities. The sociopolitical change now being sought by Middle Eastern masses protesting their countries’ secular and religious autocracies is a far cry from the caliphate that bin Laden envisioned. Islamist militant groups like Hamas in Gaza have condemned the […]

The pro-democracy uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have moved crisis-ridden Pakistan out of the global spotlight. This is unfortunate, because Pakistan’s timid democratic resurgence faces a variety of obstacles, and its stability is more uncertain than ever before. To expect that Pakistan may soon experience a similar democratic transformation is not only excessively optimistic, but also ignores recent history: Pakistan exhausted its own “Arab Street” moment in 2007, when Gen. Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign following demonstrations by a diverse and vibrant civil society movement led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. That was […]

With the weeks grinding on in an intervention that no one anticipated, the West finds itself increasingly embroiled in Libya’s civil war. In this special report, World Politics Review explores the strategic and diplomatic fallout of NATO’s intervention in Libya through articles published in the past two months. Below are links to each article in this special report, which subscribers can read in full. Subscribers can also download a .pdf version of this report from our document center. Not a subscriber? Subscribe now, or try our subscription service for free. U.S. Leadership Obama Abdicating U.S. Leadership in LibyaBy Thomas P.M. […]

While the death of Osama bin Laden represents the long overdue demise of one man, its impact on the long-term trajectory of American foreign policy is likely to be more profound: Along with bin Laden, so too dies the “global war on terrorism.” This does not mean that there are no longer any terrorists who want to kill Americans and other Westerners. Neither does it mean that al-Qaida will simply disappear overnight. And another major attack could return the U.S. and its allies to a war footing. But bin Laden’s death does mean that the exaggerated role that terrorism has […]

President Barack Obama reshuffled his national security team last week, and the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. The White House proclaimed that this was the “strongest possible team,” leaving unanswered the question, “Toward what end?” Obama’s choices represent the continued reduction of the role of security as an administration priority. That fits into his determined strategy to reduce America’s overseas military commitments amid the country’s ongoing fiscal distress. Obama foresees a smaller, increasingly background role for U.S. security in the world, and these selections feed that pattern. First, there is Leon Panetta’s move from director of the Central Intelligence Agency to […]

Exactly one year after explaining that a future Conservative government would be “highly active and activist in European affairs,” William Hague, now the British foreign secretary, signaled quite the contrary when he appeared before the U.K.’s House of Commons Defense Select Committee on March 9. His comments in Parliament showed a worrying misunderstanding of the capacities of the two key European institutions of which the U.K. is a member — the European Union and NATO. In response to questions on international alliances and the U.K.’s perspective toward them, Hague argued that NATO is singularly designed for national security whereas the […]