Briefing Archive

Clashes erupted in the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdane on Monday when Islamist fighters attacked military and police posts. Scores were killed, including seven civilians, 13 security officers and 46 militants. Many observers have characterized the assault, which occurred just 20 miles from the Libyan border, as the latest example of the Libyan conflict’s dangerous spillover across a porous border. But the attack also reveals that, even as the self-proclaimed Islamic State gains ground in Libya, the most significant threat to Tunisia’s security resides within its borders. That’s because the militants, who claimed to be taking over the town as […]

Last month’s elections for Iran’s parliament and Assembly of Experts were complicated by the elaborate and extensive vetting procedure that filters out candidates considered too radical for the system. The overwhelming majority of those disqualified candidates belonged to the progressive end of the spectrum, usually referred to as reformists. Yet despite the authorities’ efforts to manage the outcome, Iran’s hard-liners still lost their majority in Iran’s 290-member parliament, or Majlis, while moderates won a majority in the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body tasked with choosing the next supreme leader. Key hard-liners, including two prominent clerics from the Assembly of […]

North Korea’s recent provocations—a nuclear test in January and a missile test, under the guise of a peaceful satellite launch, a month later—have pressed the United States, along with its key regional allies, South Korea and Japan, into recalibrating Washington’s failed policy of so-called strategic patience with Pyongyang. Concerns about North Korea’s aggressive behavior coupled with ineffective responses thus far have prompted Washington, Seoul and Tokyo to stress that there can be no more maintenance of the status-quo when it comes to deterrence. In addition to seeking new and more-robust sanctions at the United Nations Security Council, one of the […]

Over the past year, the Obama administration has rapidly repaired diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba. Last month, in the latest of many agreements, Washington and Havana signed a deal restoring commercial flights between the two countries for the first time in more than 50 years, just as the White House approved construction of the first U.S. factory in Cuba since the 1960 embargo. The outreach is an attempt, according to President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, to ensure that the U.S.-Cuba rapprochement is nearly irreversible by the time Obama leaves office. To further cement ties, Obama […]

The past year has seen the emergence of the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since the end of World War II, with almost 1.3 million asylum-seekers arriving in 2015, mostly on boats from Turkey or North Africa. The vast majority have been Syrians fleeing the devastating collapse of their country, though they have been joined by people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea and a range of other troubled countries. Those seeking protection have arrived in a divided, disorganized and panicked continent. The inadequacy of Europe’s response has jeopardized not only international refugee norms but, in the recent words of French Prime […]

After welcoming more than a million refugees into Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval ratings have seen better days. Discontent with her open-door policy has steadily risen, and so has support for right-wing populists. Her push for a European Union-wide solution seems increasingly likely to fail, while the question of her political survival has crept into headlines at home and abroad. The sheer scale of Europe’s escalating refugee crisis, the most serious since World War II, has been the driving external force behind this unsettling reversal of Merkel’s political fortune. But there has also been a strong domestic one: Horst Seehofer, […]

The migrant and refugee crisis, the dangers lurking beneath the surface of the eurozone, the United Kingdom’s potential exit, war just beyond its borders—the European Union arguably faces the greatest risks in its nearly six-decade history. Linked to all these challenges are some of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which once most enthusiastically embraced the EU project but are now starting to push back against Brussels. An extraordinary conference of the prime ministers of the Visegrad Group—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics—on Feb. 15 led to a statement reasserting the members’ insistence on “more effective protection” […]

On Feb. 5, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, removed the entire high command of the country’s armed forces. The move followed a public dispute about the amount paid by the Ministry of the Environment in 2010 to acquire a military-owned plot of land in the city of Guayaquil, which was incorporated into a natural reserve. After an investigation, the government claimed that it had overpaid by $41 million and would therefore reduce its obligations to the Social Security Institute of the Armed Forces (ISSFA), the original owner of the land. The military publicly rejected the accusations and resisted the reimbursement of […]

On Feb. 21, voters went to the polls for the first round of Niger’s presidential election. Like many other West African states, Niger has a two-round system, in which the election goes to a run-off if no candidate wins an absolute majority. Niger faces just such a scenario: According to official results, incumbent President Mahamadou Issoufou, who took office in 2011, scored 48.4 percent of the votes. In the second round, scheduled for March 20, Issoufou will face the former speaker of the National Assembly, Hama Amadou, who won 17.8 percent in the first round. Despite the vulnerability that incumbents […]

“We’re all in this together,” said Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s veteran oil minister, at an oil conference in Houston last week. The oil market “could drown in oversupply,” as the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned in January, and global prices are at their lowest level since 2003, so all petrostates are bleeding. Venezuela is on the brink of bankruptcy; Russia’s economy is expected to shrink for the second year in a row; and Nigeria and Azerbaijan are seeking emergency loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The economic hardship experienced by its members makes one wonder why […]