Diplomacy & Politics Archive

Earlier this month, Israel approved a plan to strengthen trade ties and boost security cooperation with Japan. In an email interview, Ben-Ami Shillony, a professor emeritus in East Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discussed Israel-Japan relations. WPR: How extensive are Israel-Japan relations, and what are the main areas of cooperation? Ben-Ami Shillony: Israel and Japan are two highly industrialized democracies, complementing each other in many ways. Despite its small territory and population, Israel is today one of the leading high-tech and startup nations in the world. Japan, the third-largest economy in the world but grappling with an […]

The failure of U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration to send a high-level representative to the Paris unity march, convened in the wake of the terrorist attack on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, is being described by some as the first foreign policy gaffe of 2015. Given the Obama team’s laser-like focus on domestic issues in the run-up to the State of the Union address, however, it is not surprising. Moreover, given that one of the administration’s goals seems to be to halt further deterioration in the critical U.S.-India relationship, it is very understandable why the president […]

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was in Washington last week for talks with U.S. President Barack Obama. The visit came in the wake of Obama’s executive order protecting millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and his decision to loosen the decades-old embargo on Cuba, both of which won him favor in Mexico and across Latin America. Meanwhile, Pena Nieto has faced a difficult six months, following the massacre of 43 students in the southern city of Iguala and a series of scandals relating to railway contracts and his wife’s mansion. Immigration was at the top of the agenda, with Pena […]

In September 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court ruled that Juliana Deguis Pierre, who was born in the country to Haitian parents in 1984 and registered as Dominican at birth under Dominican law in effect at the time, should be retroactively deprived of Dominican nationality due to her parents’ migratory status. The decision touched off a political and humanitarian crisis that stretches beyond the island nation’s borders and deep into its political, economic and social history. By judicial fiat, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of undocumented individuals like Pierre were definitively stripped of Dominican nationality, with no immediate indication […]

Following a meeting in Tehran yesterday with visiting Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called on Russia to assume a more active role in multilateral talks over Iran’s nuclear program, which will resume later this week. Despite fears that the meeting could produce a shift in Russia’s stance in the talks, however, it produced no unusual announcements or initiatives. The lack of drama from Ryabkov’s trip provides yet another welcome sign that Russian threats to abandon the United States on the Iranian nuclear issue are mostly bluff. In November 2014, a senior National Security Council […]

Earlier this month Venezuela and Ecuador received major boosts from China, which has redoubled its stake in the two Latin American economies most vulnerable to plunging oil prices. Following recent visits to China by financial chiefs from both countries, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Rafael Correa, each traveled to Beijing in early January, where China held its first annual ministerial meeting with the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC). Correa returned from the visit with approximately $5.3 billion in new financing from the Export-Import Bank of China; Maduro announced that Venezuela would receive an additional […]

Where will international stabilization forces intervene in 2015? Potential answers include Libya, Syria, Nigeria’s northern borderlands and eastern Ukraine. Restoring order in any one of these places, let alone two or more at once, would be a daunting task. Libya is sinking into full-scale civil war. Syria has been ravaged by four years of violence, leaving over 200,000 dead. The Boko Haram militant group has inflicted repeated defeats on the Nigerian military in a conflict punctuated by massacres by both sides. Russia retains the ability to turn the war in Ukraine on and off at leisure. Few countries outside these […]

On Dec. 16, militants from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) infiltrated Peshawar Cantonment, a high-security zone under military administration housing key government offices, and attacked the Army Public School, killing 145 people—132 of them children. The massacre was a stark reminder of Pakistan’s crisis of urban violence, weaknesses in its intelligence apparatus and the need to strengthen its counterterrorism capabilities. The attack prompted the government to swiftly adopt new measures to improve counterinsurgency and counterterror efforts. Nevertheless, significant changes in strategic thinking and internal reforms will be needed for this incident to become a watershed moment for Pakistan’s security policies. Pakistan’s major […]

PARIS—For the seven years I have lived here, the French military has been at war, first in Afghanistan, then in Libya, Mali and the wider Sahel region. Yet if the French armed forces were not only engaged, but at times stretched to the breaking point by their operational pace, the French people seemed oblivious to the country’s role in the fight against Islamic extremism in Africa and now the Middle East. In all but the most dramatic circumstances, casualties were ignored, and while the spotlight of breaking news at times put these wars in the public’s mind, the debate was […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looked at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II focuses on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Despite Tunisia’s success navigating its political transition by holding peaceful, fair elections, the challenges of keeping it sustainable remain enormous. If Tunisia’s newly elected leaders don’t deal with those challenges carefully, they could undermine the steady progress Tunisia has made over the past four years. The most alarming issue is the absence of a clear economic agenda in […]

Gambia yesterday accused the former head of the presidential guard of leading a small coup attempt that two U.S. citizens were also involved in. In an email interview, Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, discussed Gambian politics and the recent attempted coup. WPR: What is the nature of President Yahya Jammeh’s regime, and how strong is his support among the general public and military? Jeffrey Smith: Yahya Jammeh is a retrograde dictator, one of the last remaining strongmen in power on the African continent. For West Africa, a region that […]

A Middle Eastern mystery is finally being unraveled, and what is emerging looks like one more disaster for the Muslim Brotherhood. It was Qatar, the miniature emirate endowed with outsize wealth and equally outsize ambitions, that served as the Brotherhood’s most powerful supporter when it looked as if the group would rise inexorably to power throughout the region in the wave of populist uprisings known once as the Arab Spring. Qatar gambled on the Brotherhood, and when fortune abruptly and viciously turned against the group, the emirate decided to double down and continue betting that the Brotherhood would ultimately succeed. […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looks at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II will focus on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Tunisians are making history again. The birthplace of the Arab Spring seems to be setting itself up to be the home of Arab democracy, pluralism and peaceful transition—and a model for the entire Arab world. Last month, for the first time since its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia successfully held competitive parliamentary and presidential elections—praised by […]

Last month, after a summit in Doha where the wealthy Arab kingdoms of the Persian Gulf rallied around a joint naval and police force, Qatar’s foreign minister had some kind words for Egypt. Evoking the 1950s and 1960s, the height of pan-Arab rhetoric, Khalid bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah called Egypt “strong and capable…the backbone of all Arabs.” The nostalgia was part of a reconciliation campaign, led by the conservative Gulf countries that back Egyptian strongman President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to mend ties between Egypt and Qatar. That came on the heels of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain’s own […]

U.S. President Barack Obama has returned from his holiday vacation in Hawaii to start a “barnstorming” tour across the United States to make the case for his domestic policy agenda in the run-up to the State of the Union address on Jan. 20. Faced with a new Republican-controlled Congress that will not be particularly hospitable to his proposals, Obama is likely to emphasize his core domestic priorities. When he does return to foreign policy matters after the address, Obama, like other “fourth quarter” presidents before him, will likely begin to sort the issues facing him in his last two years […]

When Oman’s foreign minister made two visits to India last year, once before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government was sworn in and once right after, it became the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member to commence high-level engagement with the new Indian government. The visits were also a signal that Oman continues to be India’s closest strategic partner in West Asia. As a country that not only hosts some 700,000 Indian expatriates, but also key Indian listening facilities, Oman is assuming ever-greater importance for New Dehli as an outpost to project Indian influence—especially with the rise of the […]

Sweden was plunged into political crisis last month when its prime minister, Stefan Lofven, initially called for new elections to be held in March after the populist Sweden Democrats joined with the center-right opposition coalition to vote down the ruling Social Democrat and Green Party government budget. The crisis came just two months after a general election that brought the Social Democrats back to power. With the Social Democrat-Green coalition ruling as a minority, the Sweden Democrats found themselves in the powerful position of being the deciding vote in parliament. That allowed them to act on their hardline anti-immigration platform, […]