WPR Blog Archive

I’ve flagged the EU-U.S. agreement on bank data sharing a few times now as an issue capable of driving EU institutional evolution under the Lisbon Treaty, perhaps more so than the newly created posts that were expected to do the heavy lifting. So it’s noteworthy that EU interior ministers are now calling for negotiating a new agreement, after the EU Parliament shot down the previous one, agreed to before Lisbon gave oversight of such agreements to parliament. The key here is that the U.S. wants the data that the agreement provides very badly, and the EU Commission wants to provide […]

Well, as you can see, I’ve changed the title a bit, because I can’t seem to limit myself to links. So think of it as “links plus.” – U.S.-Syria rapprochement off to a bumpy start. This sort of strategic reassurance to established friends is inevitable in a shifting playing field, so expectations management in the short term is in order here, especially with regard to Syria’s relations with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. The potential payoff is in the mid-term timeframe, if domestic politics allows the Obama administration to hold course. – The head of Russia’s ground forces said that they […]

I’m playing around with this as a way to link to items I’ve read and have little to add to, but that don’t overlap with the Off the Radar turf. – Investment banks (read: Goldman Sachs) have been making money coming and going on Greece’s debt. Jean Quatremer has been covering this for a few weeks, but delicately because few people are willing to go on record. The target, according to Quatremer, is not Greece, but the euro. Lots of Soros wannabe’s out there. – If uranium is the new oil, Kazakhstan is the new Persian Gulf, complete with all […]

At a time when international rights groups, governments and corporations are ramping up pressure over the trade in “conflict minerals,” Amnesty International called upon authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to do a better job protecting human rights activists working in the country from abuses. Highlighting the importance of human rights activists in playing “a crucial role in a country racked by instability and conflict,” AI released a briefing (.pdf) last week chronicling the cases of eight prominent DRC rights defenders. AI charges that much of the danger they and others face comes directly from government agencies. “The […]

I think the logic underlying Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ argument that Europe needs to take military force seriously again is solid, even if the idealist in me (yes, he lives) wishes the world would move closer to the European consensus against war than vice versa. The problem is that Gates, like most American defense thinkers, presents NATO as the only acceptable expression of a remilitarized Europe. And for a variety of reasons, that’s just unrealistic. To begin with, this is akin to repeatedly insisting to a lazy teenager that he has to help out around the house. No matter how […]

In some ways it’s good that it took me a few weeks to get around to discussing Aaron David Miller’s piece in Foreign Policy from earlier this month, titled “The End of Diplomacy,” because I found less to dislike about it on second reading. But even though I usually find Miller pretty convincing, I’ve still got some misgivings about this one. The article essentially casts the by-now familiar trope of the “Rise of the Rest” as the failure of American diplomacy — surprising, since Miller himself states that he’s not a “declinist.” Here’s the heart of the his argument: America […]

In a comment to my post on culinary nativism, Art Goldhammer calls attention to the recent flap in France over plans by a fast-food burger chain to offer Halal burgers as a menu option. The move was condemned in some quarters as another “concession” to France’s Muslims — who in the context of this discourse function generally as “Other” and particularly as “immigrants,” regardless of whether a given individual is either. Goldhammer points out the irony of a McDonald’s knock-off joint becoming the rallying cry for French food nativists. Indeed. Since posting that one, I’d also thought of the Israel-Lebanon […]

There are a few more repercussions bubbling up from the nomination of EU Commission President Manuel Barroso’s former chief of staff as EU ambasssador to the U.S. First of all, although the nomination clearly represents an opportunistic power grab by Barroso, it bears noting that it came after he failed to place Joao Vale de Almeida as the top appointee at the EAS. So Barroso aimed (and missed) at a higher target before settling on plucking the low-hanging fruit represented by the D.C. appointment. But it also bears noting that to do even that, Barroso basically disregarded the actual terms […]

Matthew Yglesias responded with typical cleverness to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s claim that liberals look down on anyone who doesn’t like “brie and Chablis.” As Yglesias makes clear, the choice of brie and Chablis to conjure sophistication and condescension is a curious one, given their widespread acceptance into American eating habits. But Yglesias overlooks both the general nativist subtext to the attack, as well as its more particular nativist subtext. Whether or not they are now produced and/or widely consumed in the U.S., brie and Chablis clearly function here as imported tastes. They also function as tastes imported from France, […]

One curious aspect of the Stateside discussion of the U.S.-China relationship is how rarely it takes into consideration how things look from the perspective of our friends and allies in the neighborhood. So we hear about the need to balance, hedge and integrate in order to maintain regional stability, but often our friends in the region — Australia, Japan and South Korea, in particular — are portrayed as mere pawns on our chess board, without real concerns and interests of their own. That’s particularly shortsighted at a time when Japan is actively seeking to recalibrate its foreign policy posture, and […]

I had the pleasure of participating in France 24’s week-in-review program, The World This Week, on Friday, along with the IHT’s Tom Redburn and France 24’s Armen Georgian. Topics included the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the military coup in Niger and U.S.-China relations. Part one can be seen here. Part two can be seen here.

If it seems like journalists around the world are increasingly under fire, in jail or dying for doing their jobs, that’s because they are. From China to Egypt, to Somalia and the Philippines, more journalists died in 2009 than in any year since the Committee to Protect Journalists began tracking numbers. Seventy-one journalists worldwide lost their lives, according to the CPJ, with the Philippines, Somalia, Iraq and Pakistan seeing the most journalists killed on their soil in 2009. A further 136 journalists are currently imprisoned around the world, with China and Iran holding the highest number behind bars. The CPJ […]

Greece’s financial crisis has brought to the surface the residual North versus South prejudice that lurks in the European Union. In private — or mostly so — Brussels officials from northern member countries tend to talk of Spain’s economic “plight,” but Greece’s “mess.” There is some sympathy for Madrid and its problems, but little more than irritation and impatience for Athens. As Greece’s fiscal crisis drags on, there is more wistful talk of an “extreme solution” that would require Greece to request a temporary suspension from the European monetary union. An exit clause in the Lisbon Treaty for member states […]

The IAEA’s latest Iran report is available here (via Arms Control Wonk). As Laura Rozen notes, the good news is that Iran appears to be experiencing significant technical difficulties in its already existing LEU enrichment efforts. But that’s about where the good news ends. Now, part of the difficulty in fully registering the bad news is that a lot of it involves technical details that are more the province of the ACW gang than political analysts. But another complicating factor is the diplomatic language used by the IAEA report itself. For obvious reasons, a technical report cannot categorically define or […]

I’m glad to see I’m not alone in this reading of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, although I found the anti-access section of the report a bit more explicit with regard to China than did Defense News’ Wendell Minnick. Nevertheless, the QDR’s very obvious references to improving capacity vis à vis China struck me as perhaps an even more significant change from the 2006 version than the emphasis on COIN and stability ops, which was already to a large degree there four years ago. Conventional war has not been downgraded, it’s just being planned at even more of a distance, […]

I drew a comparison earlier this week between the transfer of power in Nigeria with what occurred in Honduras last year, noting the radically different international reactions in the two cases. We might have an even better comparison today, in the form of Niger’s military coup to remove President Mamadou Tandja from power. The coup comes after Tandja had dissolved parliament and amended the constitution last year to remove term limits that would have disqualified him from seeking re-election. My hunch is that beyond the perfunctory condemnations (the AU and ECOWAS have already offered theirs), we won’t hear much outrage […]

I’ve mentioned a number of times the ways in which France’s nuclear energy giant, Areva, has benefited from the U.S. opening foreign markets to nuclear energy. The U.S.-India 123 agreement is the most flagrant example, since it really involved bringing India in from the NSG cold. So it’s worth noting that among the beneficiaries of President Barack Obama’s new nuclear energy initiative is none other than . . . Areva. They’ve been partnering up with U.S. utility and nuclear power companies for the past few years in anticipation of the U.S. shift to nuclear. And part of their strategy of […]