Column Archive

Last week, when the head of the Russian navy, Vice Adm. Viktor Chirkov, was quoted saying that Russia was seeking access to naval maintenance and supply facilities in Cuba, Vietnam and the Seychelles, the Russian government quickly denied the reports. The Russian navy abandoned almost all such overseas facilities more than a decade ago to save money and because it no longer had a global mission. Significantly, however, the government has not challenged Chirkov’s statement that Russia would construct new aircraft carriers starting after 2020. “At the moment,” Chirkov told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, “the construction bureau has […]

The downgrade warning issued to Germany by the credit rating agency Moody’s last week has shaken German public opinion and raised the question of whether Berlin can bear the costs of extricating the eurozone from its ongoing sovereign debt crisis. The question of what Germany can bear has two components: One involves the financial costs, while the other has to do with what German public opinion can support. Of the two, the answer to the latter question is easier to determine: According to recent polls, 70 percent of Germans are fed up with the euro crisis and increasingly convinced that […]

Last week, after the United Nations Security Council again deadlocked on the Syrian issue, calls were heard for Western and Middle Eastern powers to pursue a Kosovo-style intervention that would bypass the council altogether to bring about regime change in Damascus. At the beginning of this week, a spokesman for the Syrian Foreign Ministry, Jihad Makdissi, declared that while the Syrian government would never unleash its previously unconfirmed stockpiles of chemical weapons to suppress the rebellion, it might use them in the event that “Syria faces external aggression.” Just as Syria’s downing of a Turkish RF-4E reconnaissance aircraft in late-June […]

Since the wave of uprisings started rolling across the Middle East some 19 months ago, Israel has looked like the relatively quiet eye of a giant, fast-moving storm. The region’s raging winds of revolution have not battered Israel’s territory with great intensity, but as they whip furiously from one country to another, they are transforming the landscape, demolishing long-standing structures, igniting fires and creating a new level of anxious uncertainty. Israel rightly sees itself as a strong country, but one facing numerous enemies and a growing list of threats. That perception could have major implications. Israel continues to possess on […]

In the month since Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran published “Little America,” his brutal review of the U.S. and allied war effort in Afghanistan, it has been interesting to observe the reactions from the various tribes of the Beltway. No one escapes criticism in Chandrasekaran’s narrative, this columnist included, but the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Marine Corps come under especially heavy fire. The reaction from the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. military as a whole has been to add the book and its criticisms to the list of lessons that need […]

Recent fears surrounding the possible use of chemical weapons stockpiles by regime diehards in Libya and Syria, or their seizure by regional terrorists, underscore the continued danger of chemical weapons proliferation and the need to take stronger measures to oppose it. The use of a significant quantity of a chemical agent in a concentrated area can not only be extremely deadly. Because the effects of exposure to chemical agents occur rapidly and are usually extremely virulent, chemical weapons are also effective tools of psychological warfare. Moreover, under certain conditions, even a minor chemical weapons attack could cause widespread panic, leading […]

A plurality of Britons would like to leave the European Union if they could, with 48 percent supporting an EU exit against just 31 percent who would prefer to stay. However, most of them — 63 percent — don’t think this will happen. That’s perhaps the only optimistic figure of a recently released Chatham House and YouGov poll, showing that Britons understand and are resigned to the key consequence of globalization: Cooperation and multilateralism trump bilateralism or “going it alone.” Thus, the U.K. is not yet completely a lost cause for continental Europe. But it is close, as the rest […]

It looks like the vaunted U.S. pivot to Asia is going to be delayed. The ongoing conflict in Syria and the escalation of tensions with Iran make it highly unlikely that Washington will be able to shift away from its long-held priority focus on the Middle East anytime soon. When the Asia pivot was first floated by the Obama administration in 2009, it was based on a series of strategic assessments about the likely future of the Middle East. There was guarded optimism that a combination of effective sanctions and deft diplomacy could produce a workable deal on the Iranian […]

Libya, that sparsely populated North African country on the shores of the Mediterranean, has a history of punching above its weight. The Libyan people, in their first postrevolutionary elections, have just done it again, defying the conventional wisdom by thoroughly trouncing Islamist parties at the polls. Whether through the antics of its outrageous former dictator, the flamboyant Moammar Gadhafi, or through its opposition’s so-far-unmatched success at enlisting NATO’s firepower in deposing his oppressive regime, Libya has managed to make headlines and even to bend the curve of history. Conceivably, the latest electoral results, which still leave many unanswered questions, have […]

A few weeks ago, a couple of articles appeared in two Israeli newspapers — Israel Hayom and Maariv — criticizing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. At first glance, there was nothing terribly significant about the articles. After all, one can hardly open a newspaper in any language these days without reading a criticism of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. I have written several myself in these pages. But what stood out about these two articles is that they were written by people working for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As such, they represented a departure from a historical norm on both sides […]

In its just-released final audit report (.pdf), the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds (SIGIR) last week warned that billions of U.S. dollars may have been wasted or misappropriated in the process of reconstructing Iraq. While reports of waste surfaced early in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq, problems have also plagued the transition since 2010 from a military- to a civilian-led U.S. mission in Iraq. Many of those shortcomings came to light during a recent hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to assess the interagency effort in Iraq now that all U.S. combat […]

In 2000, when Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel formed a coalition government with Jörg Haider’s far-right populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the 14 member states of the European Union immediately agreed to sanction the country. Acting on the basis of bilateral relations, as the EU Treaty did not justify such sanctions, the EU member states froze diplomatic relations and sought to isolate Austria in international institutions, despite the fact that Haider and his FPÖ had been democratically elected. Today, with populism on the rise across the member states of the EU, this kind of forceful reaction is no longer even […]

This past week, during an unannounced visit to Kabul, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the Obama administration had designated Afghanistan a “major non-NATO ally.” Though the status does not carry with it any sort of legal expectation that the United States will consider an attack against Afghanistan as an attack on the U.S., it is one of the most significant designations in America’s diplomatic arsenal in terms of upgrading a bilateral relationship outside a formal treaty of alliance. Most reports indicate that this status was granted to Afghanistan to reassure the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai […]

One evening last week, the Chinese government threw a dinner party for a visiting international delegation. If the menu that night in Beijing was strictly kosher, it was because the guests of honor for the event came from Israel. And the day had featured a remarkable event. Just hours earlier, China’s Minister of Transportation Li Shenglin and his Israeli counterpart, Yisrael Katz, had signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on a multibillion dollar project inside Israel that some say could constitute an alternative trade route to the Suez Canal. While it is doubtful the Suez Canal’s importance will be […]

Last week, I made the argument that the crisis in civil-military relations in the United States is not actually much of a crisis after all. By any reasonable measure, civil-military relations in the United States are actually remarkably healthy. This week, though, I will highlight those areas where there are problems — and propose ways forward. To begin, both political parties have contributed to the problems the United States faces with respect to civil-military relations, as have both the U.S. military and the civilians it serves. In other words, all sides deserve some of the blame for several disturbing trends. […]

Uzbekistan’s decision to withdraw from the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) highlights the dilemma confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin as he tries to strengthen Moscow’s pre-eminence among the former Soviet republics through the region’s multiple multilateral institutions. The CSTO and other Moscow-led regional organizations have important symbolic value to Russia regardless of their actual effectiveness, because they affirm Moscow’s strategic primacy in the former Soviet space. The other member states accept this arrangement since it can yield some tangible benefits, such as economic and military assistance, as long as it does not overly constrain their freedom of action. The […]

On July 7, for the first time since 1969, Libyans voted to elect a General National Congress as part of efforts to create a new political system after the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi last year. The elections saw 2,639 individual candidates compete for 120 seats in 69 constituencies, with 559 women making up 44 percent of the candidates registered for seats reserved for political parties. Turnout was high, with 2.8 million people — of which 45 percent were women — registering to vote from among the roughly 3.5 million Libyans eligible to do so. The polls, which were the country’s […]