Column Archive

It’s not hard to understand what motivates local Iraqis and Syrians to fight for the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS). Most believe they are defending their community, Sunni Arabs, against repression from the Alawite-dominated Syrian dictatorship or the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. But the motives of the estimated 20,000 foreign fighters that have joined IS are more complex, tied to deep psychological factors that make them less amenable to political solutions and more difficult to address. Every insurgent movement includes people with diverse motives. Yet the counterinsurgency doctrine of the United States and its NATO partners gravitates to political and economic grievances, […]

When U.S. prosecutors unveiled a stack of corruption indictments against individuals involved with FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, they unwittingly added fuel to a potentially transformative movement that is emerging with astonishing force in Latin America. Throughout the continent, powerful men and women who had grown accustomed to operating with impunity in gray areas of the law are suddenly finding themselves on the defensive. They now face a day of reckoning, as mass movements demand an end to graft, corruption and favoritism benefiting top government officials as well as their friends, families and supporters. Against this backdrop, Washington’s […]

An epidemic of hysteria swept through Washington earlier this week, and politicians from across the political spectrum were all showing symptoms. Not surprisingly, the subject was domestic surveillance and the National Security Agency (NSA), a topic for which over-the-top rhetoric has practically become derigueur in the two years since NSA contractor Edward Snowden absconded with digital reams of highly classified NSA materials and turned them over to reporters. On one side of this week’s histrionics were the usual threat-mongers, hand-wringers and scare merchants: Republican homeland security hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. With the […]

As expected, the recently completed Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was much more contentious than the previous five-year review held in 2010. At that time, the Obama administration’s push to re-energize bilateral arms control initiatives with Russia and shore up the global nonproliferation regime resulted in a generally successful 2010 conference. However, since then great power tensions have grown, and, besides the Iran nuclear talks, progress toward meeting the Action Plan adopted at the 2010 Review Conference has generally been seen as incomplete. As a result, at this year’s review, fundamental differences among the participants regarding the […]

Sepp Blatter should make a bid to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations: The Swiss septuagenarian has proved he is a master of multilateral diplomacy. Last week, he won a fifth term as president of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), despite the corruption scandal engulfing the organization. Blatter has exploited political divisions among the West, Russia and the developing world to protect his position. The FIFA affair is a microcosm of wider tensions plaguing international institutions, and it offers some especially hard lessons about the limits of Western appeals to morality and the rule of law […]