Column Archive

When Venezuela’s charismatic revolutionary, the late Hugo Chavez, won the presidential election in his country for the first time in 1998, he launched a new political era in Latin America. For the next 17 years, leftist politicians—many of them emerging from humble beginnings, as Chavez had—rose to power through democratic means in a region where that path had seldom been successful for the left or the poor. Chavez’s model of modified socialist economics and modified democratic governance soon spread to a number of countries and became the dominant political phenomenon of the 21st century in Latin America. That period of […]

Back at the end of September, when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene directly in the nearly five-year-old civil war in Syria, more than a few U.S. pundits and politicians bemoaned the negative impact of Russia’s intervention on U.S. interests in the region, while lauding the Russian leader’s willingness to use force to advance Moscow’s interests in the region. “A dramatic example of the diminution of . . . American influence in the region, particularly in Iraq,” said Sen. John McCain. “Putin is willing to back up his pursuit of his interests with force,” wrote Eliot Abrams, who seemed […]

A somber weariness has settled in across Western democracies in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Defeating and destroying the so-called Islamic State with military force has won broader support. But most realize that the challenge will require a complex set of policy responses, far beyond aerial bombardments to liberate territory controlled by the group in Syria and Iraq. Although there is not yet any consensus about what such a long-term strategy should look like, some new ideas are emerging. To begin with, the old debate over how to distinguish between the threat posed by al-Qaida and the newer one […]