Editor’s note: This is Heather Hurlburt’s final “Full-Spectrum Diplomacy” column at World Politics Review. We’d like to thank her for filling in for Richard Gowan, who will be returning next week, and look forward to featuring her work in WPR in the future. This is going to be a rough week for Americans, who like their politics simple and their geopolitics even simpler. Give us plucky honest underdogs for good guys, nasty corrupt villains for bad guys, open-field battles where everyone shoots straight, and we are the most generous people on Earth. Really. Though the U.S. ranked 19th in government [...]
The news from Iraq was nothing short of stunning: A group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) managed to take control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, adding to a growing expanse of territory on both sides of the border between Iraq and Syria now under the control of the ultra-extremist Sunni militant organization. As shocking as the sudden conquest was the impact it had on the population. Within hours of the Iraqi military’s retreat and the ensuing hoisting of the Islamists’ flag, half a million residents of Mosul started streaming out of the city in what [...]
The election of Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi as president of Egypt will further inflame the jihadist insurgency that took off after the Egyptian military removed Mohamed Morsi, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, from power in 2013. If history is any guide, el-Sisi, a former general, will hold tightly to power, justifying it as the only way to protect Egypt’s security, thus repeating a common pattern across Africa and the Middle East as elections lead to de facto dictatorships with a few trappings of democracy. Invariably this will further anger and radicalize the Islamist opposition, empowering the extremists who believe that the [...]
