During the final stages of Turkey’s elections, many observers pointed to distant moments from the country’s history to explain its contemporary political conflicts. One more recent event was particularly crucial to reinforcing the social polarization tearing at Turkish society today: the military coup of September 1980.
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe.” It comes at a time when the prospects for peace are particularly dim, with internal political challenges on both sides and recurrent violence punctuated by periodic outbreaks of heavier fighting.
Since 2017, Cameroon has been engulfed in a bloody civil war, forcing more than 1 million people to flee their homes. Diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict have repeatedly failed. Now divisions among the armed separatist movement fighting the government risk escalating the conflict, raising further obstacles to reaching peace.
The commanders of armed groups in African countries are often portrayed as erratic tyrants with little understanding of the world—in both Hollywood films and in news coverage. Yet as clashes in Sudan escalate into civil war, it is becoming increasingly clear that the geopolitical sophistication of such warlords has been underestimated.
The U.S. military commitment to the Middle East has long been a core principle of U.S. foreign policy, stemming from the conviction that it keeps the region from falling into chaos and that a retreat would embolden enemies there and around the world. But the world is changing, and so should U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
Few conflicts have been predicted by so many observers, so far in advance, as the fighting that erupted on April 15 in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Almost every external and domestic powerbroker that has exerted influence over Sudan’s development over the past four decades shares in the blame for this devastating cycle of violence.