Briefing Archive

In the largest Russian military exercise since the height of the Cold War, Moscow this week is deploying 300,000 troops, 900 tanks and 1,000 aircraft in central and eastern Russia. The military demonstration, called “Vostok 2018,” or East Exercise 2018, is expected to last from Sept. 11 to 15. This year, for the first time ever, Chinese military forces will participate, sending 3,200 troops and 30 aircraft over the border into eastern Russia. Similar Cold War-era drills only included states that were part of the Soviet sphere. The Vostok exercise highlights two important, seemingly contradictory things about the relationship between […]

Will Nguyen doesn’t remember much of what happened immediately after he was beaten by police officers at a mass demonstration in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest metropolis. A fellow protester tipped him off that he was about to be arrested, but before he could escape into the crowd, half a dozen plainclothes officers descended on him, beating him with fists and clubs. What happened next is fuzzy. Video subsequently posted online shows him being dragged to a police truck, where he had a bag placed over his head before being taken to jail, but Nguyen doesn’t remember that. “When […]

MEDELLIN, Colombia—China has quickly established an extensive track record of using infrastructure spending, on everything from stadiums to ports, to secure resources and bolster trade across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Security and space industry analysts now say 2018 has already been a banner year for another part of China’s soft power outreach, as it has sold satellites and support systems to Nigeria, Cambodia and Pakistan. China’s space ambitions are closely tied to its Belt and Road Initiative. By the end of the year, it is expected that a basic system of 18 Chinese BeiDou-3 global positioning satellites will serve […]

From Bosnia to Rwanda, United Nations peacekeepers have always faced tough choices that come with operating in complex, dangerous environments. Today, the climate is no less challenging. Record fatalities and injuries for U.N. personnel have increased pressure from some quarters to embolden U.N. peacekeeping and political missions with stronger, more aggressive mandates. But recent decisions made by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, such as a mandate to support a regional, non-U.N. counterterrorism unit in Mali, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, risk plunging blue helmets into the quicksand of unwinnable wars. This short-term thinking poses considerable long-term risks […]

Last Friday, the day before voters in Mauritania went to the polls for parliamentary, regional and local elections, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that he would be “closely following developments” in the West African country. In particular, he called on “all parties” to “allow for the participation of all interested stakeholders.” By that point, however, this wish was already out of reach. That’s because in early August, Biram Dah Abeid, a prominent opposition politician, was arrested at his home by police officers who reportedly said they were executing “an order that came from above.” Abeid remains […]

What a difference a year makes. Last October, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a major policy speech on U.S.-India ties and the critical role India would play in the Trump administration’s new Indo-Pacific strategy. A month later in Vietnam, at the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, President Donald Trump championed India’s role in the region—even though it’s not a member of APEC—signaling that he was serious about accelerating strategic cooperation with India. But now, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis in New Delhi this week for high-level talks with their Indian […]

BERLIN — Earlier this summer, the leaders of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union, the sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, threatened to bring down the German government in a showdown with Merkel over stricter measures for refugees and asylum-seekers. The move was largely seen as an attempt by the party, which is facing a challenge from the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to prove it was tough enough on migration issues. It didn’t work out the way they intended. Two months after Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of the CSU, first went head-to-head with Merkel, […]

Aug. 11 was the beginning of a very difficult week in Afghanistan. After several weeks of growing pressure from the Taliban, over 1,000 of its fighters attacked Ghazni, a city of 270,000 that straddles the vitally important Highway 1 linking Kabul with the south of the country. The attack on Ghazni brought back haunting memories of the battle for Kunduz in the summer of 2015, when the Taliban seized control of a major Afghan city for the first time since 2001. A series of Taliban attacks across several neighboring provinces compounded an already bad situation. In the Ghormach district of […]