WPR Blog Archive

I wish there was an English translation of this Le Figaro interview with outgoing French army chief of staff, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, mainly for the overlap it reveals in terms of French and U.S. strategic thinking, but also for the very cogent way in which he frames many of the familiar aspects of the discussion. For the overlap, Georgelin suggests that instead of preparing for enemies, the military must prepare for a variety of unpredictable threat scenarios, something the QDR also emphasizes. His discussion of the difficulty democracies face in maintaining political will to wage distant wars of “forward defense” […]

The Indian national security journal, Pragati, put together a great infographic of U.N. peacekeeping operations around the world. Definitely worth a glance, especially since that’s all it takes to absorb the information.

If you’re not already reading Laura Rozen every day, I suggest you start doing so. The latest good reason being this story, on the behind-the-scenes role that Japan has been playing in working out an offshore fuel swap agreement for Iran’s medical nuclear reactor. The interesting aspect here is that the “Japan model” — or the technical mastery of all the separate components of a nuclear weapon capacity without the actual bomb — has often been mentioned as one interpretation of Tehran’s political objective. So long as Washington and its partners (notably France) ruled out the possibility of domestic Iranian […]

I haven’t had a chance to do more than skim through the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (.pdf), despite the fact that Congress Daily helpfully managed to acquire it over the weekend. I have read through some of the early reviews, though, and recommend Robert Farley, Spencer Ackerman and the gang at Information Dissemination for a start. I don’t think anyone who’s been following the military’s operational soul searching and evolution over the past five years will be surprised by anything here. But I’d offer one alternative reading of the degree to which COIN figures prominently in this year’s edition, as […]

One of the subjects of the France 24 week-in-review panel discussion program I took part in on Friday — link to follow, hopefully, because it was a great group — was Tony Blair’s appearance before the U.K.’s Iraq War inquiry commission. Blair, it seems, suggested that among the reasons he had supported the invasion of Iraq was because he didn’t want the U.S. to be “alone.” This reflected, as one of the other panelists put it, how the Iraq War was a war in search of a cause, to which I responded that it seems to me that Blair had […]