WPR Blog Archive

Today’s selection began with a reference to the Falklands War in this video that Andrew Sullivan posted. That got me looking for a good video of the Madness song, Blue Skinned Beast, which turned out to be pretty fruitless. A few random associations later and that had become any good reference to Thatcher-era England. And for reasons that I can’t fully explain, because there are other candidates that might seem more obvious, that led me straight to Linton Kwesi Johnson. The poem on which the song is built takes the form of a letter home from a young Carribean man […]

We’re very happy to introduce WPR’s newest regular columnist, Thomas P.M. Barnett,appearing every Monday beginning next week. Most of you are probablyalready familiar with Barnett’s work, but for those of you who aren’t,you’re in for a real treat. In addition to being a New York Timesbest-selling author and a sought-after public speaker, Barnett is achallenging and iconoclastic thinker, who combines intellectualcreativity with clarity of analysis. The result is a far-reachingvision of U.S. grand strategy that somehow manages to be bothprovocatively novel and intuitively obvious at the same time. If youlike big ideas, you’ll like Barnett’s column, The New Rules. We’re […]

A quote from a Le Monde article: Think of the context that arose in the region the day after . . . Everything had to be rebuilt, from roads to buildings, both public and private . . . XXXXX made its men, its building equipment, its businesses available. Thanks to its connections to corrupt political networks, it swept up the tenders and became the true partner for reconstruction. (Translated from the French.) So who could XXXXX be? Hezbollah, circa 2006, after the Lebanon War? Hamas, circa 2009, after the Gaza War? Nope. The Mafia, circa 1980, after the Naples earthquake. […]

This makes sense to me, and seems like skillful diplomacy: The day after Turkey sends its foreign minister to Cyprus to maintain Turkish Cypriot commitment to reconciliation talks, Turkish President Abdullah Gul links a Turkish green light on the Nabucco pipeline project to Turkey’s EU accession negotiations, blocked by — among other things — the Cyprus standoff. Interesting how when it’s the EU or the U.S. doing this sort of thing it’s called “carrot and stick diplomacy,” but when it’s Turkey, it’s called “linking” and “conditionality.”

A big part of the American exit strategy from both Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed a big part of U.S. COIN doctrine more generally, is the de-Americanization of the conflicts through the progressive replacement of U.S. forces by indigenous security forces. The same thing can essentially be said about efforts to get Pakistan to address the Taliban insurgency in FATA and the NWFP more aggressively as well. Those efforts will obviously hit snags, as this NY Times article about the lapses in Iraqi security forces’ preparedness illustrates. There’s also something predictably counterproductive about having the Pakistani military commit the same […]

For a solid backgrounder on U.S. Taiwan policy, take a look at this CRS report (.pdf, via FAS’ Secrecy News site). The foundations of current U.S. policy towards Taiwan date back to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, as well as several communiqués signed with the PRC, the latest in 1982. As the report makes clear, there’s been enough changes in the past 30 weeks, let alone the past 30 years, to warrant a new look at some of the assumptions in our thinking on cross-Straits relations. There’s currently room for leeway on China policy by individual presidential administrations, and […]

President Barack Obama’s selection of career diplomat Johnnie Carson as assistant secretary of state for Africa seems an obvious, if somewhat unexciting, choice. Reaching once again into the Clinton-era dugout, Obama perhaps got the idea from current U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who was Carson’s boss during the Clinton years. Unfortunately this particular era of U.S.-African relations was a disaster for millions in places like Rwanda, Somalia and Liberia. Ironically, the Africans liked President Bush because they thought he was generous. President Obama will have to demonstrate the same level of generosity, while at the same time entering diplomatically into some […]

One of the elements undermining Turkish credibility in its claims to a regional role of mediator, of course, is the fact that Turkey itself is mired in longstanding disputes, one with Armenia and the other with Greece over Cyprus. Some headway was recently made on the Armenia front, even if thorny obstacles remain (Yigal Schleifer’s got more on that here). But the Cyprus standoff has far more practical and strategic consequences in terms of NATO-EU relations. So I’m not surprised to see newly named Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu show up in Cyprus yesterday, probably to both show support and […]

Israel’s deterrent policy of nuclear ambiguity is in the spotlight this week, as a result of remarks by Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller at a U.N. non-proliferation meeting, and this resulting Eli Lake article. Andrew Sullivan followed with a sincere post wondering about the logic behind the “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to Israel’s nuclear status, followed by a reader’s response linking it to U.S. law forbidding aid to a NPT non-signatory that acquires nuclear weapons. Now, there’s no question that the legal issue raised by Sullivan’s reader is damning, as is the fundamental hypocrisy involved in holding Iran […]

Good news for the Lisbon Treaty. With the passage by the Czech Republic’s Senate, the only non-formality standing in the way of adoption is the do-over of the Irish referendum. Assuming it does ultimately pass, it will be fascinating to see how the first permanent EU president shapes the Union’s global profile. The treaty will provide the institutional structure, but a lot will depend on the personalities that end up incarnating the functions and the precedents they set. Less good news is this item about Italy returning a boatful of illegal immigrants directly to Libya, pursuant to a bilateral agreement […]

Although the subject of India was barely mentioned in public, it was central to the private discussions between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington yesterday. Here’s Helene Cooper writing in the NY Times: [T]he one thing that no one seemed to be talking about publicly is theone thing that, privately, Obama officials acknowledge is the mostimportant: how to get the Pakistani government and army to move thecountry’s troops from the east, where they are preoccupied with a warwith India that most American officials do not think they will have tofight, to the west, where the Islamist insurgents are taking over […]

Regarding Iran’s helicopter attacks against PJAK camps in Iraqi Kurdistan over the weekend, John McCreary at NightWatch wonders: The curious point isthat combat aircraft from both Iranand Turkey violate Iraqiairspace with impunity while a USarmy and air force is responsible for protecting the country. That would seemto need an explanation by someone, but, then, this is the Middle East. That the Turkish aircraft get a pass is due to lobbying by PM Tayyip Recep Ergogan in November 2007 that has gone a long way towards redrawing the map of northern Iraq from a Turkish-Kurdish standoff into a Turkish-Kurdish partnership. There’s […]

I’ve been taking my time to fully digest the wildly fluctuating press reports coming out of Pakistan and Washington over the past few weeks. But I tend towards a bit of skepticism towards both. There seems to be a lot of “not seeing the forest for the trees” on both sides. In Pakistan, that means an almost casual, business-as-usual approach to a residual problem that totally misses the increasingly urgent cues coming from the Obama administration. In Washington, that means a heightened alarmism that is better adapted to shaping American opinion than it is to addressing what amounts to a […]

At my own risk and peril, I’ve got to take issue with Joshua Foust on this one (third bullet point down in his post). The problem here isn’t that Al Jazeera “cannot tell the difference between standard issue evangelical boilerplate and a command to go destroy Islam in the name of Jesus.” It’s that a population that already suspects it’s being targeted as part of a religious crusade against Islam might not be able to. Given some of the quotes in the article, I wonder whether the evangelicals at issue might not be able to either. Clearly the U.S. Army […]

Afghan President Hamid Karzai may have a lot of explaining to do concerning his choice of running mate for the upcoming Afghan elections when he meets with President Barack Obama today. Considering the growing popular skepticism (.pdf) in America about the Afghanistan War, one would think that Karzai would have made things easier for his Washington supporters with a more attractive choice. Instead he’s picked Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a former warlord and protégé of murdered Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Massoud, who has also been accused of drug smuggling, gun running and kidnapping. Kai Eide, the senior U.N. envoy in Kabul, […]

World Politics Review managing editor Judah Grunstein made two appearances yesterday on France 24. In the morning, he appeared on the short-format program, “Face Off,” to discuss the recent violence in Iraq. The English-language segment can be seen here. The French-language segment is not yet available online. In the evening, he appeared on the long-format panel discussion program, “The Debate,” to discuss the possible banning of the political party founded by controversial French political humorist, Dieudonné. The English-dubbed version of the program can be seen here (part one) and here (part two). The French-language segment can be found here (part […]

In reading up on the recent violence in Iraq for a France 24 taping I did this morning (I’ll post the link when it goes live tomorrow), I found myself thinking that the Surge ultimately did achieve its second-stage objective of providing the space for political reconciliation. Not in Iraq, that is, but in the U.S. And that might turn out to be just as, if not more, important. Because the Iraqi political accomodation the Surge was meant to facilitate was the one aspect of the strategy that was entirely out of our hands. The Surge — and here I […]