WPR Blog Archive

International efforts to certify diamonds as “conflict free” — known as the Kimberley Process — are failing, raising the specter of a return of “blood diamonds” to the international market, Partnership Africa Canada warns in its latest annual review of the certification scheme. “The cost of a collapse would be disastrous for an industry that benefits so many countries, and for the millions of people in developing countries who depend, directly and indirectly, on it. A criminalized diamond economy would re-emerge and conflict diamonds could soon follow. The problems can and must be fixed,” the report warns (.pdf). The Kimberley […]

It seems to me that Stephen Walt’s “Plan B” for President Barack Obama’s foreign policy basically amounts to shrugging off the inability to achieve desired outcomes and lowering expectations moving forward. I’m not saying Walt’s necessarily wrong on the merits, but it doesn’t strike me as a winning second-term agenda, which was the point of the exercise. I can’t find the exact post, but Nikolas Gvosdev has been developing the theme that eventually, Obama is going to have to make it clear just what the costs are for crossing him, both to friends, rivals and enemies. So far, there haven’t […]

A couple news items today warrant following up on this previous post regarding the EU and its ability to project power. But this time, I’d like to focus on hard power. Of course, when it comes to hard power, the major constraint on the EU’s ability to project force is the unwillingness of its member states to spend the necessary amounts on defense. But another has been the unwillingness of some member states, primarily Great Britain and until recently Poland, to duplicate structures and force commitments already dedicated to NATO. As a result, EU defense is dependent on ad hoc […]

For a while, I’ve been meaning to write a post about issues on which I’ve either changed my mind or experienced an evolution in thinking. Unfortunately, overarching projects like that tend to become a bit daunting. But this Sydney Morning Herald op-ed by Sam Roggeveen at least gives me an excuse to mention one such area in particular: Europe. I used to strongly support a vision of a more integrated Europe, with foreign and defense policies capable of projecting force and influence at a level comparable to its economic and diplomatic weight. My feeling is still that, given the many […]

A lot of the debate over the way forward in Afghanistan revolves around how central safe havens are to the ability of transnational terrorist networks to target the U.S. and the West. Simply put, if you believe, as the Obama administration has stated it does, that the principal mission in Afghanistan is to eliminate the threat posed by al-Qaida, the question becomes, To what extent does that mission depend on denying the group the use of territory? Only after you’ve established your position on safe havens does the question arise of whether creating a stable Afghan state is the best […]

Greg Scoblete wonders whether the Taliban’s new YouTube channel represents an attempt by the group to widen its appeal, and calls the question “disturbing.” I’d actually find it reassuring, if that’s the intention. Radical groups remain radical precisely because they value ideological “purity” over wide appeal. It’s when they attempt to widen their appeal that they are forced to confront the reality of how limited a constituency there is for their radical agendas. And actually being answerable to a wider constituency only reinforces that process. The reason Hezbollah has been deterred by the 2006 Lebanon War is not because of […]

Not all of it is the result of armed intervention. Two pillars of stability in the region, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are on the verge of a potentially generational change in leadership, and of course the result is alarmism. In some ways I take a contrarian view of the Middle East: It’s neither as important nor as “on the brink” as it’s consistently portrayed. There’s a sometimes abrupt and sometimes gradual ebb and flow between violence and enmity on the one hand and hard-nosed realism and treachery on the other, all of which makes for a much more fluid strategic […]

If you haven’t seen this Onion clip (via Laura Rozen), it’s worth taking a look. My reaction to the Onion is usually just to think, “That’s funny.” This one actually made me laugh. But then it made me think. (I know, I know. Humor. Less.) It puts its finger, in a way that our nation’s comics seem better able to do these days than our political pundits, on a pretty determinant question in international relations. Namely, are nations, like raging forest fires, guided by natures that are unchanging and unresponsive to engagement and dialogue? Or are they guided by reason, […]

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — Nearly a week after Taliban fighters overran a U.S. and Afghan military outpost in eastern Afghanistan, killing eight Americans and at least two Afghan soldiers, details are finally emerging about the bloody battle. But one U.S. Air Force official wonders why the air service hasn’t highlighted its own vital contributions to it. The battle in the Kamdesh district of Nuristan province pitted hundreds of Taliban fighters against several platoons of American and Afghan troops in an isolated outpost. A platoon typically numbers 40 people. In hours of heavy fighting, the Taliban managed to penetrate the outpost’s walls […]

I first learned that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize from a congratulatory IAEA press release e-mail. “That’s funny,” I thought. “Looks like the Onion hacked the IAEA’s server.” But lo and behold, a quick google search revealed that this was not a spoof. WTF?!? This is a horrible, horrible decision on the part of the Nobel committee, one that will likely do more political harm to Obama than good by providing fodder to the narrative that the hopes being placed in him far outstrip his record of accomplishments. What’s more, it’s a terrible insult to many […]

The debate over the Afghanistan War is now swirling around in a few different directions, with the primary focus in recent weeks being on short-term options and the Obama administration’s process for policy development and implementation. That’s understandable, given, on the one hand, the urgency of the situation on the ground — as reported by Gen. Stanley McChrystal in his strategic review, and independently by the analysts who advised him in the preparation of that document — and on the other, the Obama administration’s “sticker shock” when presented with the resources needed to wage its stated strategy of a counterinsurgency […]

As reported by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Afghanistan War strategic review officially spirals into “crash and burn” mode. For all of its mindboggling revelations, one graf from the article leaped out at me: Less than three weeks after Obama took office, the White House selectedformer CIA officer Bruce Riedel to review U.S. policy towardAfghanistan and Pakistan. Riedel was told to consult broadly but actquickly: The president wanted his conclusions by mid-March, before aNATO summit in Europe early in April. (Emphasis added.) Of course, that was the combination “first date/honeymoon” summit where President Barack Obama expected to use his post-election political capital […]

Inevitably, the world has been drawing its own conclusions from President Barack Obama’s unsuccessful bid last week to help Chicago host the 2016 Summer Olympics. And a wide spectrum of press comment centers on whether it has dimmed his global luster. “So is the magic spell the Obamas had woven worldwide beginning to come undone?” asked the Indian paper, The Statesman. That depends, according to a more considered editorial in the Saudi Gazette. “[Obama’s] defeat could soon be a distant memory, and may never be more than a quixotic-blip trip,” the paper observed. “But if, for whatever reason, bigger losses […]

I noticed that Stephen Walt’s post questioning the risk of a nuclear or near-nuclear Iran setting off a regional nuclear arms race in the Middle East was long on nonproliferation theory and non-regional historical examples. But there wasn’t much discussion of the political dynamics specific to the Middle East that would certainly play a role in such a scenario. For that I recommend this U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report (.pdf) examining the factors driving Saudi, Egyptian and Turkish policy on this very question. Although it expresses no certainty, the report’s outlook is a bit less sanguine than Walt’s discussion. […]

Among the consequences of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, we often hear about Iran’s fearsome response capacity, which at its most potent include its proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas and militia cells in Iraq and potentially Afghanistan); its long-range missiles (capable of reaching Israel); its asymmetric and irregular assets abroad (think terrorist attacks); and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipping. Sam Roggeveen was the first person I remember who directly challenged a number of these assumptions. Eugene Gholz recently expressed skepticism about the oil transport angle. Now Robert Farley builds on a post by Galrann […]

As the Afghanistan debate heats up Stateside, one of the casualties seems to be not so much truth, but civility. It’s a shame, because there are currently about a half-dozen very talented, insightful online analysts of the war — who I, for one, depend on to challenge and inform my thinking — that are increasingly getting caught up in personal blog spats, or else responding to everything that varies at all from their opinion with a very insulting tone. I’m not going to call anyone out by name, because half of them don’t necessarily read this blog and the ones […]

In response to my post on Christian Brose becoming Sen. John McCain’s national security adviser, Rob, age 26, writes: I somewhat disagree with your comparison of the significance between GM of a baseball team and foreign policy adviser to a senator. Someone can gain a mastery of an issue on their own, through intelligence, and simply doing the necessary reading, at any age, and in that sense I’m not at all surprised that Brose was hired as McCain’s adviser. But managing is a whole different story, because, especially at the high level of a baseball GM, it requires at least […]