Briefing Archive

KAMPALA, Uganda — When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni seized power 25 years ago, he brought order to a nation that was reeling from two decades of crisis. After the terror-filled reigns of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, Museveni ushered in an era of relative prosperity. The West was quick to brand Uganda a rare “African success.” Praised for tackling HIV/AIDS, promoting women’s rights and pursuing growth through the Washington Consensus of fiscal discipline and free markets, Museveni gained acclaim as a “New African Leader”: a bush soldier turned democrat, poised to steer his continent in a new direction. But in […]

For the third year running, China’s upcoming National People’s Congress will be dominated by political maneuvering and speculation over the 2012 leadership transition. With jockeying for post-2012 power an increasing focus of attention, the outgoing Hu-Wen administration has lost influence, effectively putting the government on lockdown at a time of critical economic and social change. As a result, Beijing has opted to flood the economy with new credit rather than engage necessary structural reforms, creating an increasing disparity between the country’s halting social progress and the image portrayed in government propaganda. Since Deng Xiaoping’s oft-cited instruction that China’s process of […]

Mexico is not known for its start-up ventures, whether in legitimate business or in organized crime. What Telmex and Televisa are to the world of legal commerce — unrepentant monopolists or oligopolists, ruthlessly opposed to new players in their respective industries — the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas are to the nation’s underworld. Yet that appears to be changing, at least in the criminal realm. The past 12 months in Mexico have been marked by a more significant upsurge of previously unknown groups than at any point in recent history. Among the new gangs: the Resistance, the New Generation Jalisco […]

I never really understood at the time why so many observers ridiculed French President Nicolas Sarkozy for his efforts to launch the Union for the Mediterranean. Clearly, it was an ambitious project. If the global economic crisis hadn’t finished it off, the complicated politics of the region probably would have. But in light of the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, where the uprisings have been driven as much by frustrated economic aspirations as by repressed political aspirations, it’s hard not to see Sarkozy’s emphasis on economic development of the southern Mediterranean — as a pre-emptive effort to prevent inflows […]

The Obama administration’s reaction to the dramatic events in Egypt has inspired many analogies in recent days. Its initial caution and clumsiness, followed by its conviction to “be on the right side of history,” reminded optimists of the Bush administration’s reaction in 1989 to the uprisings in Eastern Europe, for example, and pessimists of the Carter administration’s reaction a decade earlier to Iran’s revolution. The Obama administration’s air of ambivalence, however, evokes a perennial condition of international relations. Accustomed as most of us are to power hierarchies, we often overlook how difficult and complex actual relations can be between big […]

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on the fall of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s government. Part I examined the domestic factors leading to the government’s collapse. Part II examines the impact of the EU/IMF bailout on Ireland and the European Union. After almost half a year of lurching from crisis to crisis, the government of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen finally fell last week. His fate was effectively sealed at the end of last year by Ireland’s $100 billion bailout by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund, the only question being […]

Over the course of the two-week-old protests in Egypt, the American media has been consumed with debate over how the U.S. government should react. An emerging consensus across the political spectrum argues that President Barack Obama should support the protesters’ demand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resign immediately. This view was prominently expressed in an open letter to Obama by dozens of well-known scholars of Middle East politics, who advised him to essentially abandon 30 years of strong support for the Mubarak regime by throwing in America’s lot with the protest movement. Such a step would not clearly serve American […]

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the fall of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s government. Part I examines the domestic factors leading to the government’s collapse. Part II will examine the impact of the EU/IMF bailout on Ireland and the European Union. DUBLIN — After months of lurching from crisis to crisis, the government of Ireland’s lame-duck Prime Minister Brian Cowen finally came to an end Tuesday, with new elections to be held Feb. 25. Whatever happens Cowen will not be returning as prime minister — he will not contest the election after having been […]

Not since the 1960s has the idea of a common Arab identity seemed more real. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolts were quickly defined as Arab uprisings; sure enough, these historic events have already reverberated in Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia. But Tunisia and Egypt can also be described as African countries, and not just because of their geographic location. The nations of North Africa have been imagined as African by some of the region’s political and intellectual luminaries. Even Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s leader from 1956 to 1970 and an eloquent paladin of pan-Arabism, invoked the African element […]

Who cares about the United Nations Security Council? Over the past year, major powers have certainly been taking the council increasingly seriously. U.N. experts who argue that the council’s credibility rests on its appeal to big players in the global system were comforted by Germany, India and South Africa’s successful campaigns for two-year seats on the council last year. But some poor, weak governments have decided to defy it, with a series of African leaders, in particular, showing contempt for the council’s authority. In January 2010, President Idriss Déby of Chad insisted that the U.N. withdraw peacekeepers charged with protecting […]

As the recession recedes, fuel prices have begun to soar across Latin America, confronting governments with the dilemma of how to balance fiscal demands with energy subsidies that are increasingly wreaking budgetary havoc, especially in the Andean nations. The Bolivian and Chilean governments’ recent efforts to confront that dilemma led to dramatic images of unrest, with protesters in both nations burning tires, throwing rocks and building barricades in response to announced policy changes. At the end of December, major cities across Bolivia erupted when President Evo Morales’ government decided to remove price controls that were artificially depressing fuel prices. The […]

In April 2009, Moldova, a former Soviet republic sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, earned short-lived attention for post-election street riots that some dubbed a Twitter revolution. This brief eruption of popular discontent led some to expect another “color revolution” along the lines of those in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, both of which ushered in unwaveringly pro-Western governments and attracted immediate support from Washington and Brussels. While the riots in Moldova did not lead to an immediate change of government — and had little to do with Twitter — they did mark the beginning of the end for […]

It’s time to think the unthinkable: Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Persian Gulf states may be next in line to confront widespread popular discontent. As a wave of mass protests sweeps the Arab world, shaking the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the core, rumblings of popular restlessness are bubbling to the surface in the Gulf. Shiite opposition groups in Bahrain, a strategic island kingdom that hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, have called for protests on Feb. 14 to demand greater political freedom, an end to human rights abuses, improved economic opportunities. To quell rising anger, Arab leaders […]

The massive, exhilarating protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen mark a sea change for the better in the Arab world. But the implications of the uprisings for women in these countries have not yet been fully analyzed. All of the countries currently experiencing upheaval have made significant progress for women — progress that could be swept away very easily, as it was in Iran in 1979, never to be regained. Tunisia promulgated one of the most-enlightened personal-status codes for women in the Arab world in 1956, under Habib Bourguiba. Polygyny, the taking of multiple wives, was outlawed; men could no […]

India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), announced in late December that it would no longer allow Indian importers to trade with Iran using the Asian Clearing Union (ACU), saying it wanted to explore an alternate means of facilitating trade-related payments. The move came as something of a surprise, even though the U.S. had been pushing India to take this measure for quite some time. For its part, Iran did not welcome the move and initially put the onus on India to find an alternative mechanism. Talks are currently underway to resolve the issue. Nevertheless, the episode has […]

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono just concluded a landmark visit to India, where he was the guest of honor at India’s 62nd Republic Day celebrations on Jan. 26. Ties between the two countries stretch back to India’s first Republic Day celebration in 1950, when Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, was also the guest of honor. India had previously given unstinting support to Indonesia’s struggle for independence from the Dutch, convening a special U.N. conference on the subject in New Delhi in 1949 to further mobilize support. The two countries went on to become leading members of the Nonaligned Movement, founded in […]