Column Archive

Ever since Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to name an obvious successor to the Communist Party of China’s Politburo Standing Committee at its five-yearly congress last year, observers have suspected he might harbor ambitions for extending his grip on power beyond the two five-year terms allowed by the constitution. Yesterday, the party announced it would abolish those presidential term limits, clearing the way for Xi to continue in office indefinitely and suggesting that the era of collective leadership ushered in by Deng Xiaopeng is drawing to a close. The move comes at a moment of significant soul-searching among China-watchers in […]

As the athletes marched in for the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics on Sunday, it was hard to find the blue-and-white Korean unification flag. Rather than marching under that flag and in matching white uniforms, like they had for the opening ceremony, athletes from the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea waved their respective national flags and wore separate outfits. Was the spirit of unity from two weeks ago already gone? The diplomatic work to get the North Koreans to the Olympics as part of a single Korean delegation should not be confused with […]

It is hard to feel excited about United Nations Security Council resolutions anymore. On Saturday, after days of exhausting diplomacy, the council unanimously passed a resolution calling for a 30-day cease-fire across Syria. Most diplomatic observers reacted either cautiously or outright cynically. Previous U.N.-backed cessations of hostilities in the country have evaporated quickly. A veteran of the siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia in the 1990s once told me that he had kept a list of how long each cease-fire there had lasted before a shot was fired. The shortest was less than a minute. The record in Syria is no […]

The ongoing and increasingly grim conflict in Syria is a portent of wars to come. As I wrote last week, future Syria-style wars will be defined by four characteristics: intricate complexity, a conflict-specific configuration of antagonists, an inability of the international community to undertake humanitarian intervention and a failure of the United Nations to play an effective role in ending the fighting. But beyond these core features, wars resembling Syria’s civil war will share other attributes both on and off the battlefield, with profound and troubling implications for the United States. In any war, resource streams are crucial. Because a […]

After years of mostly steady economic growth and largely moderating politics in much of Latin America, the past year brought a spate of unexpected difficulties to the region, from severe political crises triggered by corruption scandals, to economic disruptions from the collapse of commodity prices. The troubles, as I’ve noted, will be key to the many pivotal elections this year. And now, there’s another major challenge for the governments and people of the region: a huge outflow of refugees and migrants from Venezuela. Venezuela’s worsening political and economic crises have triggered a wave of mass migration that looks set to […]

Editor’s note: This is a special Wednesday edition of Diplomatic Fallout. Judah Grunstein will return with Balance of Power next week. There is a long history of bold ideas for peacekeeping missions that never quite took off. In 1936, British officials considered deploying 10,000 peacekeepers to the Rhineland as a buffer force between France and an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany. In 1969, the Irish foreign minister called for a United Nations force to counter mounting sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland. London said no. In January 2009, in one of its very last foreign policy initiatives, the outgoing George W. Bush […]

The recent international conference in Kuwait to help Iraq rebuild after its war against the Islamic State provided stark and surprising insights into which countries are most invested in Iraqi stability. While the United Nations and the World Bank led the launch of a new recovery and resilience program for the country, it was the neighboring Gulf states and Turkey that stepped up to the plate with new pledges. Given heightened regional tensions over Iran and Syria, the commitment to help Iraq recuperate looks like a positive development for the Middle East. Perhaps with some trepidation and ambivalence, its neighbors […]

Week by week, month by month, the horrific war in Syria grinds on, killing combatants from many countries and, most tragic of all, Syrian civilians—the unintended or, in many cases, intended victims of the warring parties. As Liz Sly and Loveday Morris wrote recently in The Washington Post, “A war that began with peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad is rapidly descending into a global scramble for control over what remains of the broken country of Syria, risking a wider conflict. Under skies crowded by the warplanes of half a dozen countries, an assortment of factions backed by rival powers […]

Less than three weeks ago, Colombians saw a familiar face splashed across every news platform. The man known by his nom de guerre “Timochenko,” the leader of what used to be Colombia’s largest guerilla group, which fought government forces for more than half a century, was formally launching his campaign for the presidency. As the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC by its Spanish acronym, Rodrigo Londono had commanded thousands of men and women in a campaign for a radical Marxist revolution. But Londono also guided the militia to a peace deal in 2016, vowing […]

Much was made in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency of “Trump’s generals,” the retired and active flag officers who made up his Cabinet and White House staff. Retired generals James Mattis and John Kelly, acting as defense secretary and then-homeland security chief respectively, and active-duty Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, were seen as experienced national security hands who would, it was hoped, create a buffer between America’s vital interests and a new president who wasn’t just inexperienced but often reckless and incendiary. From the outset, there were misgivings about such an outsized role for military […]

The U.S. foreign policy community tosses the word “failure” around a lot: intelligence failures, policy failures, failures of imagination. Each American president is assigned his share of failures, sometimes based on reflections of those who participated in hard policy decisions, but more often based on judgments made by others who were not directly involved. It’s perfectly fair to assess whether the outcome of a particular policy succeeded or failed to achieve its stated goal. Yet over time, some misleading “truths” become established that need to be checked and revisited. Take the increasingly common framing of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as […]

Analyzing the United Nations is rather like being a nervous seismologist in California. Geological experts are accustomed to tremors and small quakes along the San Andreas Fault, which bisects America’s most heavily populated state. But they are on alert for a much more powerful earthquake that could wreck some of the country’s most prosperous cities. Some say this will come soon. U.N. experts are likewise hardened to the regular crises that shake the organization but do not upend it. From Mali to Syria, the U.N. is struggling to make or keep peace. But despite occasional bouts of diplomatic frustration, the […]

Over the past few months, the Trump administration has reportedly been mulling a limited, preventive military strike against North Korea, what has been called the “bloody nose” strategy. Pushed hardest by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, it is based on the belief that if North Korea has the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, Washington would be deterred from intervening on the Korean Peninsula, thus allowing Pyongyang to step up its aggression against South Korea and other nearby nations. The only way to prevent this scenario, the thinking goes, is a military […]

The contentious relationship between Turkey and the West hit a little-noticed but significant milestone this week, when the Dutch government announced it was formally downgrading diplomatic ties and officially withdrawing its ambassador from Ankara. Turkey and the Netherlands remain NATO allies, and diplomatic relations continue at the level of charges d’affaires. While not garnering the attention of the escalating confrontation between Turkey and NATO in Syria, the Dutch move is an important marker of Turkey’s continuing drift away from the West under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The decision was also unexpected because Turkey and the Netherlands had been in talks […]

The National Defense Strategy released by the Pentagon in January paints a worrying picture not only of the world, but also of the Pentagon’s perception of it. In doing so, the document manages to achieve an extraordinary feat: repudiate the worldview of both the sitting president and his predecessor. The National Defense Strategy, or NDS, portrays the international arena as a field of strategic competition, where geopolitical contests have replaced terrorism as the chief threat to American security. This newly competitive world pits the U.S. against great powers in China and Russia and regional ones in Iran and North Korea. […]

Based on public polling, voter trends and the continued appeal of populist outsiders from Washington to Warsaw, it’s abundantly clear that there’s an erosion of competence and confidence in governments. It’s a global phenomenon, and U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the slow, steady decline in the capacity of formal public institutions to make wise policies and implement them. In this age of uncertainty, however, civil society organizations have proven more able and willing to fill some of the gaps. While it is true that they lack the legitimacy of elected officials, and cannot actually […]

International institutions offer spies incredibly easy places to ply their trade. Although this is a sensitive topic, it may be these institutions’ most important contribution to international stability. While organizations like the United Nations and African Union emphasize their contributions to peacemaking and sustainable development, their headquarters are also hunting grounds for spooks. Last month, Le Monde revealed that Chinese intelligence services have been downloading vast amounts of data from the servers at the AU’s offices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, every night for five years. Beijing says that this is absurd. Everyone else assumes it is a fact. China generously […]