WPR Blog Archive

Via 2point6billion.com, The Hindu recaps the most significant concrete outcomes of the RIC foreign minister summit: In a joint communiqué, adopted at their eighth meeting, the Foreign Ministers of the countries “reaffirmed the commonality” in their views on the global situation and, for the first time, set out coordinated positions on Kosovo, Iran, Afghanistan and the Asia-Pacific region, as India displayed a greater readiness to go along with its partners in the triangle on these issues. Meanwhile, Nikolas Gvosdev reports that the “Southern Democracy-Eastern Autocracy” alignment he’s been positing seems to have held up during UN Security Council discussions over […]

It’s worth noting that at the same time that Col. (and soon-to-be General) H.R. McMaster was telling an American Enterprise gathering that Iran has been carrying out targeted assassinations of Iraqi officials, three Iranian embassy staff and their Iraqi driver were fired on outside Iran’s Baghdad embassy. Iran blamed the attack, in which two of the employees were seriously wounded, on American security lapses. Setting aside the question of whether or not to broadly engage Iran through direct diplomatic negotiations, the need to engage Iran on the more limited question of Iraq security has already been recognized. So far, the […]

Talk about a nice going away present. Just before leaving office on May 6, Russia’s former Prime Minister (now vice premier) Viktor Zubkov sealed a ruling that transferred one third of Russia’s federally owned gas reserves to Gazprom. The transfer, which took place without tender, followed a smaller but hefty one in April, and boosted Gazprom’s wealth by 13 percent. Meanwhile, “Prime Minister” Putin announced plans for a round of tax holidays for Russian oil prospecting and developing companies. Of course, if I’m a Russian oil prospector, I’ve got to be wondering whether the field I develop will ultimately be […]

As if the ride wasn’t getting bumpy enough for French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the major transportation unions just announced their intention to strike next Thursday. Trains, subways and airports will all be effected nationwide. The pretext is to protest the government’s efforts to lengthen the contribution for full pension benefits from 40 to 41 years for transport workers. But I think it’s also safe to say that the unions are taking advantage of Sarkozy’s present weakness to try to redefine the balance of power resulting from last fall’s transport strike. That weeklong shutdown took place while Sarkozy was at the […]

I realized only today that the scholarly journal World Affairs, which was first published beginning in 1837, was relaunched in January as an entirely new sort of publication. A quick perusal of the winter and spring 2008 issues indicates the journal shows some promise as a place (like, we hope, World Politics Review), where a wide range of opinions and ideas, regardless of ostensible political stripe, have found a home. One essay that caught my eye was by David Rieff, who, in the guise of a review of both a recent book by Anne-Marie Slaughter and Barack Obama’s April 2007 […]

Through a combination of procedural clumsiness, personal ambition and institutional pride, the parliamentary majority of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has mounted something of a protest over the past few days. At issue is both the relationship of the government to its majority, and the functioning of the UMP party. Parliament members complain of inaccessible ministers and the imposition of unpopular legislation without deputies’ input. One prominent UMP figure attacked the party’s “Brezhnevian” direction. (French-language links.) So far, the legislative victims of the parliamentary rebellion have been a law on OGM’s and a constitutional amendment that would have bypassed popular referenda […]

Our friends at Inside the Pentagon this week are reporting a number of interesting developments (scroll down to “Mil-to-Mil”) relating to the U.S. military presence in Africa. First, in another step in the process of normalizing U.S.-Libya relations that began when Libya voluntarily abandoned its covert WMD programs in December 2003, the U.S. government will soon restart military-to-military relations with the country, ITP reports: The United States is close to signing a memorandum of understanding with the Libyan government that will open the doors to formal military engagement following years of strained relations, according to a senior military official in […]

Last night was one of the rare times I watched the televised news, so I finally saw footage of the impact of the Sichuan earthquake. There’s really no comparing the heartrending effect of video to even still images, let alone press coverage. The impact it had on me reminded me of remarks by a French diplomat for an article I did on the EUFOR Chad mission. He talked about the “CNN effect” on public opinion, and how it has increased the pressure on governments to intervene in far off crises. I’d add to that the observation that, in ways that […]

Chinese citizens have been turning to the Internet for information on loved ones who went missing after an earthquake in Sichuan province took up to 13,000 lives. Twitter, the online tool that allows friends and family members to send short updates to one another via IM, SMS, and social networking sites like Facebook, has helped many Chinese keep each other up-to-date on their safety as well as on news related to the quake. There’s been discussion of Twitters becoming more and more popular as a “platform for serious discourse,” used by citizen and professional journalists alike. Twitter apparently broke the […]

Amidst the signs of progress in Iraq, two cautionary notes: despite the Maliki government’s solidification of its hold on power by military means, very few of the major political challenges to national reconciliation have been addressed, let alone solved; and the security gains of the past year have now exerted a “push me-pull you” pressure on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons to return to their homes, which have either been appropriated or walled off behind sectarian lines. In other words, having returned the security situation to what resembles a frozen civil war (or a tenuous and sporadically violated ceasefire), […]

While browsing through this interim GAO report (.pdf, via the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs) on Coalition Support Funds reimbursed to Pakistan for its antiterrorism operations in the FATA, I was surprised to see that the amount of requests for reimbursement that were denied spiked from $5 million to $25 million in February 2007. That’s almost a third of the monthly operational expenses that Pakistan was “billing” to the program at the time. Almost as surprising was the fact that the amount of reimbursements that were denied immediately dipped back down to roughly $15 million by […]

Those suggesting we should conduct a “coercive humanitarian intervention” in Burma would do well to consider this, from a WaPo article that otherwise describes the junta’s efforts to mask the country’s underlying dysfunction: The primary focus of the rulers is to ensure unity in a country with 130 ethnic groups, many of which have fought the military — dominated by the Bamar ethnic majority — for six decades. The moral arguments for intervening in Burma are irrefutable. And in a world where decisions were made free of any practical considerations, they’d suffice. So while I can’t really say I object […]

According to this Jamestown Foundation article by David Romano, Turkey’s recent diplomatic contacts with the Kurdish Regional Government represent a major shift, and is the result of a combination of factors: . . .Turkey’s late February military incursion, which lasted only eight days, did limited damage to the PKK and may have convinced Ankara of the need to pay more attention to a variety of counter-insurgency approaches. At the same time, the incursion probably succeeded in convincing KRG leaders of the need to work harder to both contain the PKK and improve relations with Turkey. To Ankara’s credit, its February […]

In an article for Foreign Policy, Laura Rozen reveals the degree to which the Israeli national security establishment has now moved out ahead of the Bush administration’s hardline posture in the Middle East. There’s no small amount of irony there, since it was this same Israeli national security establishment that initially reinforced Bush’s policy of isolation and containment of the region’s bad guys. But now, in the case of both Hamas and Syria, Israeli insistence has led to Washington lifting its objections to backchannel talks. Rozen suggests that while a late-administration reversal can’t be ruled out, most people are already […]

This is a very insightful and neglected historical analogy, and the fact that it’s made by the former head of the U.S. Special Forces Command will hopefully pre-empt any attempts to dismiss it as America-bashing. It’s become something of a conventional wisdom that the democratization of Latin America has been a net victory for American regional interests. But as Maj. Gen. Lambert points out, the fallout from the methods used to suppress and/or eradicate a generation of Marxist revolutionaries is still being felt. Gen. Lambert doesn’t mention the exacerbating factor of ambient anti-American sentiment that no amount of public diplomacy […]

It never ceases to amaze me how closely terrorist propagandists in Iraq and elsewhere monitor events in the United States for tidbits that they can use against their enemy. For example, this from the May 13 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus (as of this writing, the current issue was not yet online): The Iraqi mujahideen are claiming that resistance engineering units have successfully “decoded” U.S. military robots designed for urban combat and turned them against U.S. soldiers. After redirecting the robots against U.S. forces, the American military was forced to withdraw the robots from service, according to the […]

The USA Today story which Judah flagged below concerns a Pentagon program that I had mentioned previously on this blog hearing about in an off-the-record conversation with a government contractor. In my previous post, I mentioned that focusing our information operations efforts on making our enemies look bad (targeting Muslim extremists for ridicule in ways that drives a wedge between them and Muslim moderates, for example) would be a more efficient and effective approach than focusing on bolstering the U.S. image. This goes double for the Pentagon. While an information operations campaign aimed at demoralizing and dividing U.S. enemies is […]