Global Archive

Democracy is floundering in . . . Europe? An Iranian nuke stand-off may not be so imminent. Musharraf is playing the spin doctor; the United States made Iraq a magnet for terrorists; and tanks rolled through Bangkok but bullets are still flying in Southern Thailand. And why can’t something be done about genocide in Sudan? With so much going on this week, maybe you missed the quiet stream of articles questioning the relative peace and stability that exists across Europe. Ivan Krastev claimed in the Sept. 27 Wall Street Journal that Europe’s best kept secret is not that old Europe […]

Pervez Musharraf was on a sort of book tour of the United States this past week. Below, you can watch two very different television interviews with the Pakistani president. First, a short, humorous appearance on The Daily Show with John Stewart: Second, an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose: Having problems viewing the embedded videos? Try watching the first here, and the second here. I plan to continue using the wonders of YouTube and Google Video on this blog. So please send any tips for videos that our readers might be interested in to info@worldpoliticsreview.com.

Today we take a quick look at some interesting posts from the foreign policy blogosphere over the last week. We hope to make this a regular feature on Fridays, and include more posts in future installments than I will here. If you have suggestions for serious foreign policy, defense or international affairs blogs we should check out and perhaps include in future reviews, drop us a line at info@worldpoliticsreview.com. So, on with the show. I read more than a couple of musings this week on the search within the U.S. foreign policy establishment (to the extent there is such a […]

The Lincoln Group, the firm that was in the news last year for heading a controversial U.S. Special Operations Command program to pay Iraqi print media for the placement of ghost-written opinion pieces, is back in the news. It seems the firm has been awarded a $6 million-plus (correction: it’s $12 million-plus, according to MNF-I) contract to conduct “strategic communication management services” on behalf of Multi-National Forces Iraq. The contract announcement doesn’t offer much detail. The Lincoln Group isn’t really talking either. “Lincoln Group is proud to be trusted to assist the multinational forces in Iraq with communicating news about […]

For our readers who are interested in the military, defense and national security, I wanted to take the opportunity to point out recent articles you might be interested in, as well as highlight our expanding coverage of this area. If you select “defense and military” on the issues pull-down menu on our front page, the results list will give you a pretty good sampling of our national security-related coverage so far. You can see we have exclusive news and commentary articles about everything from unmanned aircraft to military justice to NATO operations in Afghanistan. And of course in coming weeks […]

Iran, Venezuela and the United States exchanged verbal machine-gun fire at the United Nations. The Pope ignited a new fight over semantics with Islam and U.S. politicians locked horns over the terminology of torture law. A war of words broke out across the globe this week and commentators wasted no time filling the world’s English-language opinion pages with clarifications of what was being said. There was also a coup in Thailand and a few new things were written — although unsurprisingly nothing was done — about the crisis in Sudan. Kaveh L. Afrasiabi observed in the Sept. 23 Asia Times […]

Colombia is at a crossroads, and whether it finds the road to peace depends largely on the success of newly re-elected President Alvaro Uribe’s two-pronged strategy to end a decades-long internal armed conflict. Uribe was re-elected in May largely because he seemed to be achieving success where so many of his predecessors had failed — in the fight against the country’s leftist guerrillas, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. At the same time, the newly enacted Justice and Peace Law is an attempt to get the country’s rightist paramilitaries, under the umbrella of the United Self-Defense […]

Although we seek to be timely and relevant here at World Politics Review, covering breaking news is not our prime focus. We like to think that news stories and commentary that go deeper, and put current events into context,is our forte. But, on the other hand, if we can from time to time cover breaking stories in our usual way, and do it well, then of course we’ll jump at the chance. Thanks to some great contributors, we’ve had that chance today. First, we are lucky to have contributor and veteran international affairs reporter Roland Flamini on the scene at […]

“The army commander Gen Sonthi Boonyarataglin staged a coup d’etatTuesday evening (Thailand time) and ousted the government of PrimeMinister Thaksin Shinawatra,” the Bangok Post reports. The coup leaders were opportunistic in their timing. Thaksin was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. In addition, the coup “occurred late Tuesday night, when Bangkok was under a major rainstorm, and few people were seen on the streets,” according to the Post. World Politics Review contributor Graham Lees emailed late Tuesday night from Bangkok and reported that the situation was confused there. “There are real risks here of a clash […]

Mexico’s election-crisis, the U.S.-South Korea marriage and China’s economic tap-dance (or romp) through Africa all got op-ed attention in the world’s English-language press this week. Terrorism and the war in Iraq were also woven into an ongoing flood of commentary prompted by the passing of the five-year anniversary of 9/11. But it was a handful of off-beat articles that grabbed us most, beginning with Carlos Alberto Montaner’s reminder in the Sept. 12 Miami Herald that this week marked the start of a meeting in Cuba of world leaders associated with “a curious diplomatic entity known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).” […]

Welcome to our new World Politics Blog. In this space, our editors will keep readers abreast of what’s happening on the site. We’ll call attention to notable pieces, relate them to the news, and from time to time our contributing writers will even post their thoughts here. We plan, for example, to feature first-person accounts from reporters of their experiences covering stories on location. For my first post here, I thought it would be a good idea just to point out a few features of the site. As you know if you’re a regular reader, our bread and butter is […]

Turkey’s giving up on Europe and looking East instead, A.Q. Khan’s a hero in Pakistan, Chavez is buying influence, China’s rewriting history, it’s somehow getting worse in Sudan, sanctions will just inflame North Korea and the United States should cut a deal with the Taliban to fix Afghanistan. In a nutshell: The op-ed pages ran the gambit this week. But one theme did emerge. With the five-year anniversary of September 11 upon us, there was no shortage of reflective articles about how the world has, or has not, changed since New York’s twin towers came crumbling down. “It was the […]