WPR Blog Archive

If what we’re hearing about the the intra-Shiite fighting in Basra is true, it’s an operation that’s been signalled for weeks, which means it’s been planned for longer than that. It’s also pretty obvious, as Phillip Carter observes over at Intel Dump, that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is using the Iraqi security forces to consolidate his hold on power. Which basically means that the factional differences that were supposed to be resolved in the political arena through reconciliation are being settled in the street with mortar and rocket fire, and that this was the plan for quite a while. […]

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Congress granted the President the authority to exempt Pakistan from prohibitions on foreign aid to countries where the elected head of state has been deposed by military coup. The bill, subsequently renewed each year since, stipulates the conditions under which the power be invoked: if the President determines and certifies to the appropriate congressional committees that such waiver — (A) would facilitate the transition to democratic rule in Pakistan; and (B) is important to United States efforts to respond to, deter, or prevent acts of international terrorism. Yesterday, President Bush once again invoked the […]

It probably takes the editor of a Midwestern newspaper to get away with saying something like this about Midwestern newspaper people: I’ve got a staff here of really smart newspaper people and almost none of them have probably been outside the United States. I’ve got to name one of them the foreign editor, and that person is going to have to edit the AP foreign wire, and there’s nobody here with the world view, the international sophistication, to take that wire and turn it into something meaningful for my readers. The passage comes from an interview/profile of Richard Longworth linked […]

Usually when the Bush administration appeals a lower court ruling to the Supreme Court, I start feeling a little queasy. Not this time. As Miles Pomper points out in this WPR feature, there are some really good reasons to worry about relaxing restrictions on Russian uranium exports to the American nuclear industry. So much is made of the threat of fissile material falling into the wrong hands, and the program to downblend Russia’s weapons grade uranium is one of the few lasting successes of the immediate post-Cold War period. Finding a way to make the program attractive enough to renew […]

Marc Lynch gave a comic roundup of yesterday’s Middle East nuclear energy news (the U.S. and Bahrain signed an MoU, and the UAE announced the start of their partnership with France) before wondering, “Seriously, does anyone else find the GCC’s rush to acquire ‘peaceful nuclear energy programs’ and the West’s seeming enthusiasm for the prospect a bit odd?” The long answer is here, a WPR article by yours truly on France’s nuclear diplomacy in the Muslim world, which I think gives a good summary of why, despite some basic security concerns, there’s no real need for alarm just yet. But […]

You’ll recall that last month I mentioned an increase in Turkey’s troop commitment in Afghanistan and a more active Turkish role in pushing back against Iran’s nuclear program as likely chits for the U.S. signing off on its weeklong incursion into northern Iraq. Well, it seems that Dick cheney flew into Ankara today and met with Turkey’s president, prime minister and chief of staff to collect on both accounts. And in a further sign of America’s diminished standing in the region, he left more or less empty-handed. (Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan did issue a pro forma declaration urging Tehran […]

Turkish President Abdullah Gul met with Turkmenistan President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov yesterday, and while both leaders expressed their “. . .mutual will for improving bilateral economic and commercial relations between the two countries,” no agreement was announced on whether or not Turkmeni gas will feed the proposed Nabucco pipeline that would make Turkey a gas hub connecting Central Asia with Southern and Central Europe. For Today’s Zaman (Turkey), that meant the two countries “agree to boost economic cooperation.” For RIA Novosti, citing a Turkish-language paper, that meant “Nabucco trans-Caspian gas pipeline in jeopardy.” WPR contributing editor John Rosenthal recently wrote about […]

Here’s something that caught my eye for no particular reason, from The Interpreter, the blog of the Lowy Institute for International Policy (Australia). Michael Fullilove wrote this in response to Barack Obama’s claim, most recently in his speech on race, that his story is only possible in America: I know plenty of first and second generation immigrants sitting in Australian parliaments; our deputy prime minister is a woman and one of our most senior ministers is a gay woman of Chinese heritage. The French recently installed a man with a Hungarian name in the Élysée Palace. New Zealand’s foreign minister […]

McClatchy’s Jack Chang signals that it might be a tad early to close the books on the recent tensions between Colombia and its two neighbors, Ecuador and Venezuela. Emerging reports indicate that Colombia’s strike on the FARC camp inside Ecuadoran territory killed an Ecuadoran national, leading Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa to threaten calling the matter before the OAS once again. Meanwhile, the other powderkeg waiting to go off are the computer harddrives found in the camp that linked both Correa and Hugo Chavez to the Colombian Marxist insurgents. Interpol is working them over, and if it turns out they’re legit, […]

The theme of the day being strategy vs. tactics, this Shawn Brimley piece at Small Wars Journal bears mentioning. Brimley argues for organizing a grand American strategy for the 21st century around the theme of sustainment, and he identifies in particular three vital global interests that America needs to defend by virtue of its position as the world’s dominant power and de facto “leader”: Beyond the defense of the homeland, a grand strategy of sustainment would commit the United States to the pursuit of three vital global interests: stable balances of power in key regions, an open international economy, and […]

In his Newsweek column, Dan Drezner notes that while improved trans-Atlantic relations have allowed Europe and America to agree on common external threats, they have not yet found adequate responses to them. The result is a decline in the West’s overall influence, something that Drezner considers inevitable in the long run, even if it is sometimes prematurely announced. In many ways this is obvious, and something that we should be approaching not as some terrible threat but as a necessary evolution in geopolitics. In his book, Continuing History, former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine discussed the need for the West […]

Over the course of a well-needed break for the Easter weekend, I actually got around to reading some printed news, which is how I ran across this interview in the Nouvel Observateur with Iraq specialist Pierre-Jean Luizard. In it he expresses some of the broader strategic flaws of the Anbar Awakening which have been ignored due to the tactical success the strategy has had in terms of reducing Sunni violence directed at American forces. Like most criticisms of the Awakening, Luizard’s analysis begins with the vacuum that passes for the Iraqi state. But Luizard suggests that the dynamic has become […]

The top 10 most-read articles on World Politics Review last week: 1. Are Unmanned Airplanes the U.S. Air Force’s Salvation?2. Nabucco Follies: State Department Shills for EU Pipeline to Carry Iranian Gas3. After Surprising Elections, True Test of Malaysian Democracy Lies Ahead4. Saakashvili-Bush Summit Faces Serious Obstacles5. As Tibet Burns, Exiles in Nepal Feel the Heat6. Rebellion in Northern Niger Exacts Large Human, Economic Toll7. Bucharest Summit Offers an Opportunity to Begin Repairing NATO’s Warfighting Capacity8. Rights & Wrongs: Afghanistan, China, Syria and Zimbabwe9. The United Nations’ Unscientific War on Biotechnology10. Migration, Governance at Root of Global Shortage of Health […]

A few quick links from our blog reading this afternoon: –Eric Trager at Commentary’s Contentions blog is unimpressed with the results of Cheney’s Middle East trip. –Lucy Moore at Foreign Policy’s Passport blog looks at some of the dubious moral support China is receiving for its Tibet crackdown. –The U.S. State Department’s Dipnote blog reveals just what exactly a passport file contains. –The Counterterrorism blog links to the first installment of the the Investigative Project on Terorrism’s look at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. –Phil Carter at Intel Dump says Barack Obama should be the choice of veterans and military […]

Most Iran-watchers agree that the recent parliamentary elections represent a mild setback for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pragmatists led by Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Larijani roughly split the conservative vote, and even reform candidates, who were suppressed from the ballots in large numbers, managed to pick up some seats. The resulting tension has immediately made itself felt in the standoff that has galvanized world attention and divided the Iranian leadership: the decision of whether or not to pursue Tehran’s controversial policy of implementing Daylight Savings Time: Iran will again use daylight saving time this year despite earlier opposition from President Mahmoud […]

I’ve shied away from discussing the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War because most of the analysis I’ve seen didn’t seem to add anything new to our understanding of the situation on the ground or the terms of our domestic debate. The former remains cloudy and depends largely on whether you believe the Surge has been a tactical success or a strategic miscalculation, and as a consequence, the latter seems reduced to the realm of tactics and policy, to the detriment of strategy and history. A satisfying exception is Simon Serfaty’s monograph, A Bad War Gone Worse, from The Washington […]

While the Moscow meeting between Condoleezza Rice, Bob Gates and their Russian counterparts did not produce any breakthroughson the missile defense standoff, all reports suggested that there were some more wide-ranging strategic proposals on the table and that the mood was noticeably lighter thanprevious meetings. So I was surprised to see reports this morning ofRussian disappointment over promised written proposals that were not delivered. Apparently, though, that was atechnical glitch that was later ironed out. Frequent WPR contributor Richard Weitz has a good overview in the National Interest of some of the broader arms-control challengesfacing America and Russia. One thing […]