In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein, Frederick Deknatel and Laura Weiss talk about the tentative deal for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan announced this week. They also discuss the latest setback for Colombia’s peace process with the FARC insurgency and Boris Johnson’s bruising Brexit humiliation in the U.K. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three [...]
After weeks of political turmoil, Italy is set to have a new government, as the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, widely known as the M5S, has agreed to form a coalition with the center-left Democratic Party. The previous government, a partnership between the M5S and the far-right, anti-immigrant League party, collapsed last month after League leader Matteo Salvini filed a no-confidence motion in his own government in an effort to trigger new elections and take advantage of his rising popularity in opinion polls. The gambit backfired, however, when the M5S agreed to join together with the Democratic Party under the continued [...]
In the wake of World War II, the U.S. helped Japan draft a new constitution that forever renounced the use of military force as a means of settling international disputes. Japan has nonetheless maintained a well-equipped military for the purposes of self-defense, even while largely relying on the security umbrella provided by U.S. forces in the region. In a book that came out in April, Sheila Smith, the senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, makes a compelling case that Tokyo is now reevaluating that security posture in response to a militarily ascendant China, a nuclear [...]
