Briefing Archive

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent two-day state visit to Bangladesh has been pathbreaking in more ways than one. Not only is Singh’s visit to Dhaka the first by an Indian prime minister since 1999, Singh is the first prime minister from India’s 126-year-old Congress party to visit his country’s eastern neighbor in nearly 40 years. Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, won independence in 1971 with Indian military help. But relations between the two South Asian nations have since been bedeviled by mutual mistrust and border clashes that have thwarted any attempts at substantive commercial or political engagement. Until recently, New […]

Eight years after Moammar Gadhafi gave up his mail-order nuclear weapons program and chemical munitions in exchange for détente with the West, he has been chased from power by a ragtag rebel army backed by Western airpower. Chances are that Gadhafi regrets his decision to forgo his WMD programs. If he had been armed with nuclear or chemical weapons, NATO might not have intervened when he threatened to massacre his own people. While Gadhafi’s fall is good news, the end of the eccentric colonel’s dictatorship now heightens the challenge of getting the Irans and North Koreas of the world to […]

Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on the impact of Sept. 11 on U.S. foreign policy. Part I examined the militarization of U.S. foreign policy following Sept. 11. Part II examines ways to reverse this trend. After the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States should be contemplating a future of military restraint and foreign policy modesty. Moreover, with potentially painful cuts on the horizon for the Defense Department, the time has come for the armed forces to do less and for other agencies to pick up the slack. But that doesn’t appear to be […]

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on the impact of Sept. 11 on U.S. foreign policy. Part I examines the militarization of U.S. foreign policy following Sept. 11. Part II will examine ways to reverse this trend. On Sept. 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the single deadliest terrorist attack in American history — the work, not of a foreign army, but of al-Qaida, a nonstate actor. The U.S. wasted little time in responding. The Taliban government in Afghanistan that had provided safe haven for the terrorist group was quickly deposed by a combination […]

A memorandum of understanding between the Armenian Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources and the Isle of Man-registered International Minerals & Mines Ltd. is paving the way for the exploration of Armenia’s shale reserves. Should large-scale commercial extraction proceed, Armenia’s energy find could grant the landlocked Caucasus nation a measure of energy independence and, with it, newfound geopolitical freedom. The Aug. 3 deal comes on the heels of another agreement between the Energy Ministry and the U.S. State Department in June to cooperate in energy exploration, commercialization and investment. This agreement plans “cooperative assessment and technical studies of Armenia’s energy […]

Ending a months-long dispute over oil payments, Iran has now resumed oil shipments to India, with Turkey stepping in as a key facilitator to resolve the impasse. Turkey’s Halkbank is currently routing Indian oil payments to Iran that had been blocked by U.S. sanctions; according to reports, more than 80 percent of the $5 billion in accumulated arrears have been cleared. The tripartite arrangement, which comes amid regional tensions over Syria’s future, indicates that India and its overall energy interests are emerging as a key variable in the strategic calculus of Middle Eastern capitals. Previously characterized mainly by drift, the […]

In two recently leaked voice recordings, former Turkish Chief of General Staff Gen. Isik Kosaner is heard commenting about the ongoing “Sledgehammer” case, in which several Turkish military officers have been accused of plotting a coup. On the tapes, Kosaner also bluntly questions the effectiveness of the Turkish armed forces in their fight against the separatist Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK), labeled as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the U.S. Critics of the military’s traditionally strong role in Turkish politics immediately highlighted the news, speculating on Kosaner’s integrity and mental health, the military’s alleged hidden political agenda […]

Riots, like those that wracked the U.K. last month, tend to be portrayed as either righteous rebellions of the oppressed or mere criminality. The truth is that riots are propelled by a complex mixture of political motivations and the enjoyment by everyday people of the power to loot and otherwise transgress without punishment. The spectacle of British police losing the tactical advantage to swarms of electronically networked rioters amid general government paralysis does not bode well for a future in which economic austerity collides with raw public anger. Politics is about power, and containment of the crowd is a core […]