Diplomacy & Politics Archive

The victory of Syriza in Greece’s recent parliamentary elections has led some to speculate about the impact the radical leftist party will have on Europe’s political landscape. With the Greek economy suffocating from depression-level contraction, Syriza campaigned on the promise to end the budgetary austerity imposed by the so-called troika—the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB)—as a condition for the bailouts that are still the only thing keeping the country from a sovereign default. Would this leftist insurrection against the fiscal stewardship of the powers that be in Brussels, some asked, serve as […]

Flying into Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the early days of 2015, foreign diplomats could be excused for being disoriented. The news in the international press was focused on an impending offensive against Rwandan rebels in the east of the country, an area to which the United Nations peacekeeping mission––the largest in the world––had just relocated most of its troops and staff. And yet, in the embassies and upscale restaurants of the capital, the buzz was all about political wrangling among elites ahead of elections still two years away. The populist governor of mining-rich Katanga […]

As the oil slide further complicates Venezuela’s economic woes, with inflation and shortages of basic goods dominating the latest headlines from Caracas, another crisis is unfolding over the deterioration of the rule of law. In December, Venezuela’s highest court brought charges against opposition politician Maria Corina Machado, accusing her of a conspiracy to kill President Nicolas Maduro. Machado’s case came amid the ongoing trial of opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, who was arrested in February 2014 during widespread anti-government protests and charged with inciting violence and conspiring to commit a criminal offense. In August, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary […]

The death of 13 women last November in a government-run sterilization clinic, followed by the news of dozens of patients blinded by free cataract surgery, put the spotlight on the poor state of public health infrastructure in India. It was a particularly alarming wake-up call amid celebrations and positive press over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election victory last May and his much-touted promise to improve governance and shake up the status quo. But as those incidents—followed by the announcement of a 20 percent cut in the state health budget—showed, India’s health care woes only seem to be stacking up and […]

Washington is contending with the blowback from its latest diplomatic gambit in the struggle with Russia. Last week, U.S. officials began to float the possibility of offering Ukraine defensive weapons to counter the latest advances by Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country. If this was a trial balloon meant to reassure Kiev, it had the unfortunate side effect of throwing some major European powers into overt panic. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande publicly declared their opposition to the plan and hurried to Moscow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There are plans for […]

The talk of Washington this week was a new policy paper co-authored by a team of experts who argue forcefully that the United States “should provide Ukraine $1 billion in military assistance as soon as possible.” The report’s authors include Strobe Talbott and Steven Pifer, both former U.S. diplomats now at the Brooking Institution (Talbott is its president), who also made the case in a Washington Post op-ed last week, as well as Ivo Daalder, Michele Flournoy and other former top-ranking American officials. U.S. President Barack Obama and his national security team are reported to be considering the proposal. The […]

A few hundred miles from the Moscow-backed offensives in eastern Ukraine, a quieter Russian expansionist project is taking shape in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. On Jan. 23, the Russian Duma ratified what it called a “Treaty on Alliance and Strategic Partnership” with Abkhazia, further extending and codifying Russian suzerainty over the balmy, subtropical republic on the Black Sea. In nearby South Ossetia, a rump highlands statelet of less than 40,000 people, its de facto president has promised an even more comprehensive treaty with Moscow likely to be signed later this month. The reaction from Tbilisi […]

“The media refused to see the Syrian revolt as anything other than the continuation of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, at a time of enthusiasm over the Arab Spring. Journalists didn’t understand the sectarian subtleties in Syria, or perhaps they didn’t want to understand.” That was Fabrice Balanche, a leading French scholar of Syria who specializes in political geography, in an eye-opening interview with the Carnegie Endowment’s Aron Lund last Friday. Balanche’s research mapping Syria’s uprising-turned-civil-war is mostly in French, as Lund noted, and so has only recently entered into English-language Syria analysis, which should be all the better for […]

Almost exactly three years ago, a coalition of rebel groups dominated by Tuareg fighters started a military campaign for the independence of Mali’s northern regions. The separatist campaign led to a coup by disgruntled soldiers that shattered Mali’s image as a beacon of democracy in West Africa. But the world was really shocked into taking notice when Islamist groups associated with al-Qaida took advantage of the power vacuum in the north to establish a quasi-state, raising the specter of what some called an “Afghanistan on Europe’s doorstep.” Today, after a major French military intervention and the deployment of a large […]

On Jan. 8, Chinese President Xi Jinping strode into a meeting room in Beijing for an unprecedented gathering. The audience was filled with Latin American dignitaries, including three presidents, one prime minister and countless Cabinet members from the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). It was the first official high-level gathering of the China-CELAC Forum, and Xi expressed his appreciation. “Your presence,” he told his audience, “has brought warmth to Beijing in the depth of winter.” Xi vowed to double Chinese trade with Latin America to half a trillion dollars and raise direct Chinese investment in the region […]

Infighting over control of the levers of power rumbles on in Yemen, where last month Houthi rebels forced the resignation of the government at gunpoint. Although it has attracted less attention, the country’s economy is also in increasingly dire shape. If, as is likely, nothing is done to shore up government finances in the coming months, a long-predicted economic collapse is more or less certain. President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi announced his plans to step down on Jan. 22, shortly after his prime minister, Khaled Bahah, and the Cabinet he assembled last November said they were resigning en masse due to […]

China has wasted no time in mounting its own charm offensive to woo India in the aftermath of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi last week. An India Today headline sums it up: “As Modi hugs Obama, China sends a quick flying kiss.” Beijing’s riposte should remind U.S. officials who continue to bank on India’s suspicions of China not to assume that Obama’s trip was sufficient to reset the U.S.-India partnership. China’s reception for Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who arrived in Beijing this past weekend for consultations with her Russian […]

Just over a week ago, Greece elected an anti-austerity party, Syriza, the first in Europe to take office since the European debt crisis began in 2010. Syriza’s victory sent shockwaves across Europe, despite the fact that it was widely predicted ahead of the Jan. 25 election. Led by Alexis Tsipras, Syriza won 36 percent of the vote, 8 percent more than the ruling center-right New Democracy party, and 149 seats in parliament, just two seats shy of a majority. The biggest element of Syriza’s campaign platform was the promise to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s $268 billion bailout from the […]

On the surface, today’s Germany appears a model of harmony and consensus. Led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is beloved by the citizenry, Germany boasts the eurozone’s strongest economy, which has flourished even during the financial crisis and Europe-wide recession. Merkel, 60, heads up the country’s most popular party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and has no serious challenger in sight. The current “grand coalition,” elected in 2013, is an affable partnership with the center-left Social Democrats; the trade unions and industry get along well, too. Many experts and journalists, such as George Packer in a recent profile in The […]

Russia’s trade with China continues to grow despite the precipitous collapse in the value of the Russian ruble and the unprecedented Western economic sanctions imposed on Russia last year following Moscow’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Indeed, China’s economic importance to Moscow has increased as Russia’s commercial relations with Europe, the United States and Japan stagnate. Yet the Russia-China economic relationship is imbalanced, with Russia sending mostly natural resources to China and importing mostly Chinese consumer goods. As a result, the two countries will find it difficult to deepen their economic cooperation much further unless it expands to encompass high-value […]

On Jan. 29, in an op-ed for The New York Times, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced that the White House would request $1 billion from Congress in its 2016 budget to finance a range of development, security and good governance initiatives in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, often referred to as Central America’s Northern Triangle. The news is a welcome announcement for a region that is suffering from the effects of long-term poverty, inequality and insecurity. Despite the promise of U.S. aid, however, a great deal will have to fall into place for Washington’s new commitment to Central America […]

On Dec. 28, 2013, a 1-year-old boy named Emile died in Meliandou, Guinea, after having fallen ill with a fever, vomiting and bloody stool. Experts now believe that Emile was the first person to contract Ebola in the current West African outbreak. Since Emile’s death, the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified 22,057 cases of Ebola and 8,844 deaths in 9 countries connected to this epidemic, as of Jan. 28. The current Ebola outbreak has caused more illness and death than all previous outbreaks combined, challenged the ability of the WHO and the international community as a whole to respond […]