WPR Blog Archive

I’ve been following Joshua Kucera’s series of articles over at Slate about his travels in the Chinese province of Xinjiang among the Uighur people. So an interview he did for EurasiaNet with Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur activist, caught my eye. It’s worth a look, if only as a reminder of the stubborn ethno-nationalist faultlines that continue to percolate under the surface of China’s rise. The lack of that kind of threat to American national cohesiveness is obviously one advantage the United States will continue to enjoy over all of its strategic rivals of scale well into the future (unless, of […]

It is hard to overstate the impact of the latest terrorist attack in Jerusalem, where a lone gunman managed to enter a religious school to kill eight students and wound nine others on Thursday evening. Israeli commentators were quick to highlight that by targeting the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, which is regarded as the flagship institution of the religious Zionist movement, the attack was clearly intended “to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors.” News of the attack […]

Gian Gentile’s WPR article, Misreading the Surge, has touched off a minor firestorm which, fortunately, is creating more light than heat. Phillip Carter over at Intel Dump has all the relevant links so far, and a brief pro-con summary even made it onto Andrew Sullivan’s site over the weekend. Not bad for what at first glance might seem like arcane COIN tactical debates. The debate is a crucially important one to have, though, because in war, narrative matters. And while that seems obvious when it comes to parsing defeat (the Vietnam War is a prime example), it’s also true in […]

Really, the more I read about the Air Force tanker contract, the better the deal looks for EADS. Basically, EADS will be building commercial Airbus A330’s and handing them off to Northrop Grumman for the sensitive mil tech upgrades that will make them USAF compatible. In other words, in addition to the European subsidies it already enjoys as a semi-national enterprise, EADS will now also be receiving a de facto American subsidy (ie. a guaranteed order for 179 planes) to establish a productive beachhead in the dollar zone. And with the Euro at a buck-fifty and climbing, that $600 mil […]

If you haven’t yet read Nir Rosen’s Rolling Stone article, The Myth of the Surge, definitely click through and give it a look. It provides anecdotal support, but support nonetheless, for all the caveats being attached to the recent progress in Iraq, especially as concerns the Sunni Awakening. But it also anecdotally supports the image that’s beginning to emerge of a low-intensity, quasi-suspended civil war under way in Iraq, ie. the exact opposite of what the Surge was designed to accomplish. It’s already clear that the American military approach to the complexities of Iraq has been to assemble a network […]

Call me a cynic, but Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s historic visit to Ankara accompanied by the Iraqi Ministers of Finance, Oil and Industry seems like a tip-off as to why the Turkish incursion into the Qandil Mountains didn’t set off a regional conflagration. The fact that the Iraqi Minister of National Security (talk bout a dead-letter office) went along for the ride does nothing to reduce the suggestion of a modus operandus being put into place. What’s often ignored in the alarmist coverage of the Turkey-PKK conflict is that the Turks and Iraqi Kurds have enormous mutual economic interests, and […]

Via the Small Wars Journal blog comes a Spencer Ackerman piece on the battle raging within the Army officer corps over just what balance to strike between traditional high-intensity warfare capabilities and counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. We’ve had our finger on the pulse of this debate in one form or another for the past week or so, based in part on a WPR opinion piece contributed by one of the protagonists of Ackerman’s article, Gian Gentile. Gentile warns that we’re in the process of over-compensating for past COIN failures, and uses the 2006 Israeli-Hizbollah war as an example of the dangers […]

Apparently Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon has distanced himself from Thomas Barnett’s glowing Esquire profile. That’s probably because by contrasting Fallon’s clear-sighted strategic vision with the war goggles through which the Bush adminstration is viewing the region, it probably raised the temperature a few degrees on the Admiral’s hot seat. Too bad, because Fallon really does seem to have a folk wisdom about how to handle some of the region’s trouble spots that in its simplicity offers more substance than some of the more soaring diplomatic initiatives I’ve seen proposed elsewhere. Here he is on Iran: “Tehran’s feeling pretty cocky […]

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt’s piece in Foreign Affairs. The Economist on sovereign wealth funds, here and here. Watch more World Politics Review video reports in our video section.

Quick morning blog round-up: — Armenia (A Fistful of Euros): “Once you start thinking in terms of agents provocateurs and double motives, suddenly it’s all a hall of mirrors.” — Venezuela (Inside South America): “As a peacemaking tool, indifference could be more effective than diplomacy.” — Iraq (Thomas Barnett): “Yes, there is plenty of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, and especially anti-Bush sentiment. But here’s the deal, there’s no pre-Bush thinking left there.” — Kosovo (Washington Realist): “Perhaps a real surprise for Washington is the “wait-and-see” attitude of the Arab world and the larger Islamic world.” There’s more out there, […]

A month is a long time in the era of online news and opinion, but I just stumbled on a Project on Defense Alternatives monograph from back in February that’s really worth a mention. Carl Conetta makes a pretty convincing argument that the major significance of 9/11 was political, not strategic, and that the true historical pivot point of our time remains the fall of the Soviet Union. Conetta begins with the paradox of American military primacy in the post-Cold War era. This nugget is enough to make any foreign policy writer green with envy: With Soviet collapse, America won […]

HONG KONG — One person who’s not impressed by the field of candidates competing in Saturday’s Malaysian election is former premier Mahathir Mohammad, who lorded over the peninsula with an iron fist and an acid tongue for two decades. Five years after standing down, he says he’s unhappy with the record number of second-generation candidates running for office; but there are exceptions. “I do not want the people to say that I am setting up a dynasty,” he recently told the Bernama news agency. “We should not have a dynasty in our country’s politics.” Nurul Izzah Anwar, the 27-year-old daughter […]

As part of the discussion on nation-building, we thought it might be useful to compare and contrast what the presidential candidates have proposed so far. Similar to what Marc Lynch noted in a post on “public diplomacy” and the “war of ideas”, both John McCain and Barack Obama have offered direct proposals for nation-building, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy outline in Foreign Affairs mentioned the need for diplomacy as part of broader American policy, but nothing concrete in the way of how to shore up failing states. We’ll try to get some comment from the Clinton campaign, […]

My humble contribution to the nation-building discussion thread: At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the United States should be very careful about intervening on the ground in places that are already failed states, or in places where our intervention is likely to hasten a failing state’s descent into failure. This should be the case whether the purpose is ostensibly humanitarian or not — I don’t understand why some who believe Iraq is a disaster want to intervene military in Darfur, for example. In cases where military intervention is necessary to protect U.S. national security interests (narrowly defined), […]

There’s been some speculation that the third round of Iran sanctions just approved by the Security Council demonstrates that the NIE did no harm and might even have helped efforts to apply diplomatic and economic pressure on Tehran. But when I asked a well-informed European official what impact the NIE had on this round of sanctions, he replied, “Hurt it tremendously.” As for whether the sanctions, which do have some bite, are stiffer than expected, he replied that it depends what you expected. Last week’s IAEA report, on the other hand, was “. . .extremely useful, because it came from […]

I came across a swirl of articles this week that seem to converge around a theme: At the Globalist, a piece about how the media, by neglecting the major stories coming out of pre-9/11 Afghanistan, contributed to the failure to articulate a coherent American foreign policy in the region. Also at the Globalist, a piece about how we seem to be repeating the same mistake in Somalia as we speak, this time due to a reductionist tendency to view all conflicts therough counter-terrorism. This Foreign Affairs piece on the tenacity of ethno-nationalism as a driving force in regional conflicts for […]

This is important, and not just for what Gian Gentile says about the mistaken credit given to the Surge for reducing violence in Iraq. It’s a military truism that an army often prepares to fight the last war. So while there are a number of positive conclusions to be drawn about the U.S. Army’s adoption of a more nuanced counterinsurgency posture, it’s also important to remember that there is no guarantee that the next enemy the American military faces will be an insurgency. Between the pre-invasion purges (Shinseki) and post-invasion failures (Sanchez, Casey) of the old school generals, Iraq has […]