Domestic Politics Archive

On Jan. 26, the Pentagon released further information (.pdf) about how the new Defense Strategic Guidance will be reflected in the Defense Department’s future spending priorities. The changes, designed to meet the White House’s mandate to cut $37 billion from its previously planned Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 defense budget, generally conform with the new directions contained in the strategic guidance document, but they leave several key questions unanswered. The department’s topline request for FY 2013 is $525 billion, down from an original $531 billion. The rest of the savings comes in the form of reducing supplemental funding for overseas contingency […]

The American political discourse is rife with fear-threat reactions regarding rising China, embodied most saliently in the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to East Asia and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s repeated promise to hold “currency manipulator” China responsible for its economic sabotage of the U.S. economy. Eagerly cashing in on the hype, last week’s Economist greeted us with the most lurid of covers heralding — yet again! — “the rise of state capitalism.” We are immediately informed by the subtitle that this is “the emerging world’s new model.” Sad to say, this is the state of strategic thinking in the […]

Last week, a group of rebel soldiers stormed the Papua New Guinea Defense Force barracks, placing the military commander under house arrest and calling for Prime Minister Peter O’Neill to step down. The mutiny, led by a retired colonel who was subsequently arrested over the weekend, was a failed attempt to put an end to the political impasse that has gripped the Pacific Island country for the past six months, ever since the parliament replaced former Prime Minister Michael Somare while he was out of the country for medical treatment. In December, the Supreme Court ruled that the parliament had […]

The government in Edinburgh, Scotland is holding a public consultation on the terms of a ballot for the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence. First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, who wants to hold the vote in the fall of 2014, intends to ask voters: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” The U.K. government insists that these matters must be decided in Westminster, home to the U.K. Parliament. But while they want to keep Great Britain as a united country, Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy, Nick Clegg, wrote that they “will not stand in the […]

Boko Haram, the radical Islamist sect behind a recent surge of violence in Nigeria, launched a series of attacks Friday that left at least 185 people dead in Kano, the country’s second-largest city. The attacks struck multiple security buildings as well as the regional police headquarters, and were the deadliest yet by the militant organization. The group, which aims to overthrow the Nigerian government and impose Sharia law, has grown increasingly violent, with its August 2011 bombing of the United Nations building in Abuja, the capital, as well as its attacks on churches raising alarm among international observers. “Boko Haram […]

A mutiny in Papua New Guinea has resulted in the ouster of the nation’s top defense official by rebels who seized the military’s headquarters and are demanding the reinstatement of former Prime Minister Michael Somare. World News Videos by NewsLook

ELDORET, Kenya — In a milestone ruling issued Monday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has decided to bring four prominent Kenyan political figures to trial for war crimes allegedly committed during the 2007-2008 post-election violence that engulfed the country, East Africa’s economic powerhouse and former paradigm of stability. Striking at the core of Kenyan political society, presidential frontrunners and Members of Parliament William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta will now face charges of masterminding the grassroots violence that claimed 1,200 lives, injured countless more and displaced hundreds of thousands. Civil service chief Francis Muthaura and radio broadcaster Joshua arap Sang will […]

On Jan. 15, in polling that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) characterized as not meeting the “fundamental principles of democratic elections,” the ruling Nur Otan party of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbaev won just more than 80 percent of votes cast and 83 out of 108 seats in Kazakhstan’s lower house of parliament, the Majilis. The OSCE, which had the largest and longest election observation mission in the country, cited the exclusion of opposition parties as well as numerous problems with counting and other violations at some of the polling places they monitored in concluding that the […]

Newly inaugurated Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina ordered the army to join the fight against organized crime and drug cartels last week. In an email interview, Bruce Bagley, chair of the department of international studies at the University of Miami, discussed Guatemala’s place in the war on drugs. WPR: What is the nature of Guatemala’s drug crisis, and what has recent policy been to confront it? Bruce Bagley: Guatemala has become a major transit country for cocaine moving north along the Pacific Corridor from Colombia to Mexico and into the United States. Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s militarization of Mexico’s anti-drug […]

BOGOTA — The Colombian government is under increasing pressure to crack down on drug gangs and bolster an inefficient judicial system following a recent forced curfew across parts of northern Colombia by one of the country’s main drug gangs. Earlier this month, the Urabenos, one of Colombia’s main drug trafficking groups, distributed menacing leaflets in dozens of municipalities in six Colombian provinces, ordering the inhabitants not to leave their homes. “We don’t want to see anyone walking around or doing any kind of work,” one leaflet said, adding that the imposed shutdown was in retaliation for the recent killing by […]

Outgoing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left his home nation to seek medical treatment in the U.S., while protesters call for justice against him despite immunity. World News Videos by NewsLook

With anti-government protests in Romania moving into their second week, demonstrators are showing a persistence unusual for this part of the world, underscoring the symbolic importance they have placed in calling attention to their widespread grievances. The woes that have brought Romanians to the streets — low incomes, corruption and rising authoritarianism — are familiar to many in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the protests, which according to police estimates brought 13,000 people to the streets across the country over the weekend, follow similar demonstrations in Russia and Hungary, leading some to suggest that this is the European incarnation of the Arab […]

Five unemployed Moroccan men have set themselves on fire in the capital Rabat after demonstrating against a lack of jobs, especially for university graduates.

If you look closely at the grainy pictures of anti-government protests in Syria, an intriguing symbol emerges: Protesters calling for the end to the dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad are waving two different versions of the Syrian flag. It may seem like a small detail, but it points to deep divisions among anti-Assad forces — divisions that are keeping Syrians from coordinating their efforts, sending mixed signals to the international community and creating concerns about how well the fractured opposition’s leadership would be able to function if it toppled Assad and suddenly found itself having to build a new government. […]

The Egyptian government is currently in talks with the International Monetary Fund over an emergency loan of $3 billion, after having declined a similar offer from the IMF last year. In an email interview, Magda Kandil, the executive director and director of research at the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, discussed Egypt’s international borrowing. WPR: How dependent has Egypt been historically on international financing, and how has that changed since the revolution? Magda Kandil: Egypt has been dependent on financing to close the gap in the fiscal deficit. However, most of the borrowing has been domestic. Currently, public debt is […]

Two weeks ago, President Barack Obama released a new strategic document intended to provide guidance for cuts in the growth rate of the defense budget (.pdf). Though the planned leveling off of the defense budget had already been announced in principle, the strategic priorities laid out in the document make it official: There’s going to be a knife fight at the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the American public won’t be watching. As I’ve argued before in this space, the process of cutting the defense budget is inherently messy. Defense policy is best understood as the outcome of a massive scrum between different […]

From its initial emergence as a British mandate following World War I, to the post-independence monarchy from 1932-1958, through the military coups that ushered in the rule of first the Baath Party in 1968 and then Saddam Hussein in 1979, external threats and internal tensions have characterized the history of Iraq. Now that all U.S. military forces have left the country, Iraq’s government once again faces the challenge of overcoming internal divisions, even as it becomes fully and solely responsible for Iraq’s security for the first time since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Iraqi leaders must manage these interrelated challenges […]