WPR Blog Archive

In the National Interest, Nikolas Gvosdev suggests that in order to avoid the kind of infighting that led to the paralysis of the Carter administration’s foreign policy, President-elect Obama should task his national security team based on their constituencies, and then manage them properly to keep them out of each other’s lanes. It makes sense, but there’s one thing that’s always escaped me about the “Carter paralysis” analogy: Given the hand he was dealt in terms of the post-Watergate institutional crisis of the presidency, and the post-Vietnam crisis of American global influence, not to mention the domestic faultlines and divisiveness […]

Given that President-elect Barack Obama campaigned and won on a platform of engaging Iran diplomatically, the question now becomes not only how, but when. The timing is complicated, as Blake Hounshell of FP Passport points out, because of Iran’s upcoming presidential election, with some analysts (Brookings and CFR in a joint report) urging immediate steps, and others (CEIP’s Karim Sadjadpour) cautioning against giving Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline foriegn policy a diplomatic victory to run on. Foreign Policy Watch’s MDC argues that current circumstances — including Obama’s popularity in Europe — provide America with a strong bargaining position, and has […]

An asymmetric blogwar just broke out regarding the Army’s latest doctrinal manual on Stability Operations (see Jack Kem’s WPR feature for background). Before diving into the fray myself, here’s the sequence so far: Jason Brownlee attacks the manual as an imperialist handbook, whereby the operational doctrine facilitates and drives the strategic urge for imperialist occupations. Andrew Exum attacks Brownlee, arguing that the army would be irresponsible if it didn’t equip its junior officers and troops with the operational tools necessary to wage the wars America is actually now fighting. Any imperialist urge would come from the subsequent civilian misuse of […]

I haven’t had a chance to go through them all yet, but Dave Dilegge at Small Wars Journal has all the links for the latest Newsweek issue featuring foreign policy advice from experts on the toughest challenges facing the Obama administration. (Rumor has it that Dave sleeps from time to time, but I’m skeptical.)

Is it possible that Turkey has been so busy lately mediating other countries’ disputes that it’s got no time to resolve its own? Hurriyet reports: Turkey has made no effort to ease tensions with Greece to defuse a long-running territorial dispute, Greece’s foreign minister said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday. “While we made a conscious effort from the Greek side — such as the Greek prime minister’s visit to Ankara — Turkey did not reciprocate,” Bakoyanni told Reuters. On a related note, a quick check through the Turkish press revealed almost nothing but bad news: a bomb explosion […]

The Middle East Times talks to Maen Rashid Areikat, deputy head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) negotiations affairs department, who has this to say about the divide in Palestinian leadership: “Hamas is not only aPalestinian problem. Hamas is a regional problem; Hamas is aninternational problem,” said Areikat. “You cannot simply make themdisappear.” “We don’t have the military power to remove Hamas by force,” said Areikat, “and we don’t want Israel to do it for us.” So far, not that much different than what most people have been lamenting for the past two years. What’s interesting about Areikat’s comments, though, […]

The Times of India is reporting that China has begun to put pressure on Pakistan to come clean on whatever they know and whoever they might have tabs on in connection with the militant groups potentially behind the Mumbai attacks. What remains uncertain is whether Beijing’s efforts will be directed towards addressing the problem of these groups infiltrating into India, or into China’s own Xinjiang province, where there is also an Islamic insurgency under way. The guiding logic behind the Asia Triangle feature that WPR is running this week (which was obviously planned months ago) is that America has gradually […]

Dave Dilegge at the Small Wars Journal blog put together a useful overview of reaction to Obama’s national security team. I think Laura Rozen nailed it, too, when she described the event and the team as “sober.” Add an “m” and you’ve got the mood that will probably apply come Jan. 20, when the gang starts realizing the task they’re up against. I want to avoid getting too deep into the “rotisserie league” diplomacy game. There’s no real way to predict how all the parts will ultimately fit together once they are in motion. And to paraphrase the wartime cliche […]

For those of you who enter the site through the blog, I’d like to call your attention to our latest theme issue on the front page, the Asia Triangle. In three deep analysis pieces (M.K. Bhadrakumar on India here, Jing-dong Yuan on China here, and Arif Rafiq on Pakistan here), we examine the balance of power on the South Asian subcontinent between India, Pakistan and China, and how that might impact the emerging consensus calling for a “regional approach” to turn the tide in, and ultimately stabilize, Afghanistan. We’ve had this feature in development for a while now, and last […]

So it looks like Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State is about to be officially announced. One advantage of Hillary at State that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that it keeps a potential rival out of the country often enough to weaken her ability to create a problem for Obama domestically. That could backfire, of course, because there’s nothing that says Hillary couldn’t have turned out to be a strong ally in the Senate. But more than keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, thisseems like a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies out […]

Just some quick thoughts on the Mumbai attacks before turning the subject over to our two cover stories that examine them from the Indian perspective (by M.K. Bhadrakumar) as well as from Pakistan’s (by Jayshree Bajoria). There are still a lot of unanswered questions regarding some of the moving parts. But what the attacks demonstrate more than anything else is the need to resist letting a handful of extremists set the foreign policy agendas of regional and global nuclear powers. In other words, there’s a need to formulate a better response than the Bush Doctrine to the ways in which […]