WPR Blog Archive

It’s always advisable to take Iranian claims of potential commercial agreements in its energy sector with a gran of salt. But the recent South Africa-Iran trade talks do seem to point to what Nikolas Gvosdev identified as the weak link in the whole League of Democracies concept floated during the U.S. presidential election. Namely, that the South-South perspective in particular, and emerging powers’ interests more broadly, don’t necessarily correspond with the American agenda to isolate “rogue” nations. Not surprisingly, sovereignty and non-interventionism are pretty important issues to countries that identify as much with the intervenees as with the interveners.

I’m still puzzling through this one, which I hadn’t seen yet. But apparently a Russian-Turkish consortium was the only bidder back in September in a tender for Turkey’s first civilian nuclear power plants. (They are now revising that bid.) According to this FT piece from September, the other usual suspects (Westinghouse and Areva) backed out of the tender due to Turkey’s insistence that the first plant come online by 2015: “In nuclear terms, 2015 is tomorrow,” one expert on the sector said. “When suppliers ask you for more time, you listen.” The Turkish cabinet will make the final decision on […]

To the extent that my posting on Gaza over the past few weeks has focused on political and strategic analysis, it might have come across as callous to the human suffering taking place there. For the record, debates about whether a war is causing a humanitarian crisis always strike me as a waste of time. War, by its definition, is a humanitarian crisis, and the way in which this one was prosecuted, along with the nature of Gaza — which amounts to an open-air prison from which the civilian population can not flee — exacerbated that sad fact. That’s why […]

Public diplomacy has become something of a buzzword in foreign policy circles. But to lighten things up at the end of the week, I’m launching a new blog feature called Music Diplomacy. Each week I’ll post a song that has something to do with foreign affairs or foreign policy. Sometimes, like this week’s rollout, it will be a pretty strong connection. But other times, it might just be a song I like that happens to make passing reference to a foreign country or city. Other criteria will include availability, sound quality, relevance, and general funkiness, not necessarily in that order. […]

The European Parliament just ratified an agreement reached in one of the last ministerial meetings of the French EU presidency that essentially reduced a number of barriers to the emergence of a true European defense market. And depending on what the details of the Gaza ceasefire look like, French President Nicolas Sarkozy just might have succeeded in including an EU defense component in the implementation phase. Both would be major successes on one of Sarkozy’s priority dossiers. On the down side, as Jean-Dominique Merchet reports over at Secret Défense, delivery of the EADS-built A400M has been delayed yet again. The […]

Daniel Levy has a pre-after action report on the political calculus behind what seems like an imminent ceasefire agreement in Gaza, and the political fallout that the Obama administration will be left to navigate. Assuming the ceasefire goes through, his analysis seems to track pretty closely with my own rambling reflections on the conflict over the past few weeks, which is reassuring considering how plugged in Levy is. He, too, argues that a significant push towards a real final status agreement is needed to mitigate the blowback from the war. In essence, the illogic of Israel’s operation is that from […]

I don’t know what these people were thinking, but whoever organized the flotilla of rescue boats for the U.S. Airways plane that went down in the Hudson just put a mighty big dent in New Yorkers’ carefully crafted reputation for being mean, unfriendly and unwilling to go out of our way to help a stranger in need. I mean, it’s not like the pilot brought the plane in close to the pier, or anything. This thing was out in the middle of the river, for crine out loud, on a day when even the polar bears at the Central Park […]

I’ve written quite a bit about Israel’s strategic objectives in the Gaza War. By way of Rob at Arabic Media Shack comes this Alistair Crooke piece in the National which tries to explain why Hamas basically chose to provoke what it knew would be a devastating Israeli response by marking the end of the ceasfire last month with a volley of rockets into southern Israel. Short version: Hamas was already dying a slow but quiet death that was failing to mobilize any international urgency to loosen Israel’s grip on Gaza. Going out with a bang would speed up the process, […]

I’m not a lawyer, but in reading Bob Woodward’s WaPo interview with Susan Crawford, it seems that Crawford exculpates the coercive interrogation techniques authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration in the very terms she uses to confirm that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured. Here’s the passage: The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in whichthey applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . Youthink of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to anindividual. This was not any one particular act; this was just acombination of things that had a […]

World Politics Review’s managing editor, Judah Grunstein, appeared on France 24’s panel discussion, Politics, yesterday evening, alongside French Parliament Deputy Jacques Myard, European Parliament Deputy Alain Lipietz, and Middle East specialist Barah Mikaïl. Topics of discussion were the impact of the Israel-Hamas War on France, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s mediation efforts in the conflict. Part one of the program can be found here. Part two can be found here.

It causes me no small amount of regret to pen what follows, but I think Matthew Yglesias is being unfair to Tom Friedman here. By my reading, Friedman isn’t endorsing the use of collective punishment as a deterrent, he’s just saying that that’s the logic behind Israel’s operation in Gaza. And, as I argued last week, that is the logic behind Israel’s Gaza operation, even if it’s a logic that I don’t endorse. Yglesias says of Friedman, he is “positing a much sicker rationale for military action than its actual initiators have been willing to articulate.” But surely Yglesias would […]

Writing on Monday in her new digs over at Foreign Policy, Laura Rozen told the story of how Candidate Obama’s foreign policy brain trust has been largely bypassed in President-elect Obama’s foreign policy team in favor of Hillary Clinton loyalists. My first reaction was basically, Boo-hoo. I can think of worse things than being left stranded in a tenured academic gig. But today Laura followed that piece up with an email from one of her sources for the original piece, explaining the policy implications of what went down: There’s an old saying in Washington: policy is people. This means thatto […]

The news that Brazil’s uranium enrichment facility, officially inaugurated back in 2006, will become fully operational in a month presents interesting comparisons to Iran’s program. After all, although it isn’t necessarily hostile to the U.S., Brazil has spearheaded efforts to defend and promote emerging nations’ interests vis à vis the West on a global level, and the U.S. on a regional level. (See Peter Kingstone’s WPR feature article for more.) In fact, if I had to choose between which of the two, Brazil or Iran, offers a credible pole around which meaningful challenges to America’s interests and influence might coalesce, […]

The story begins with a sculpture commissioned by the Czech Republic for the start of its EU presidency. Set in the atrium of the European Council in Brussels, the sprawling piece is a collection of maps of the EU member states, each sculpted by a native artist to represent not just the geography, but the essence of his or her country. What follows is pure genius: the sculpted map of France is covered by a giant “On Strike!” banner. The Netherlands is entirely under water, with five minarets poking above the surface. Luxembourg is a gold nugget, covered by a […]

Usually the way it works is that Art Goldhammer criticizes NicolasSarkozy’s foreign policy for being all hat and no cattle, and then I,for some reason, feel the need to point out that there is some cattleif you can ever get past the hat. But today Art decided to flip thescript, and nails a bunch of things about Sarkozy which I wish I’d formulated myself: . . . Sarkozy’s very flaws can sometimes play a usefulrole: his egotism encourages him to run risks that others might avoid,and he seems to be undeterred by the prospect of losing face. This canbe helpful […]

In the January/February issue of the Atlantic, that publication’s polymathic literary editor (and former foreign policy analyst at RAND) Benjamin Schwarz takes on what he calls the “dangerous sentiments” about America’s virtually unlimited role in the world that have been held by all recent presidents, regardless of party, including, if one is to judge by his rhetoric and that of his advisers, President-elect Obama: To define, as Obama does, conflict, misrule, nondemocratic states, and noncapitalist economies as threats in themselves; to assert (as did Anthony Lake, Obama’s senior and probably closest foreign-policy adviser, when he served as national-security adviser in […]

The Gaza holding pattern continues, with the central front now definitively shifted to the negotiations in Cairo and, through Turkish shuttle diplomacy, Syria. France has also been in contact with Iran and perhaps even other “intermediaries . . . who allow us to talk to Hamas,” although French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner did not elaborate on the latter comment. Turkey’s decisive re-entry is encouraging, and the fact that itsdelegation, scheduled to return directly to Ankara from Cairo, insteadstopped in Damscus before heading back to Cairo suggests that thenegotiations might be going better in Cairo than they have been in themedia. […]