WPR Blog Archive

Defense News has the grim rundown: ten percent cuts in Italy on top of already planned reductions, $1.2 billion slashed annually in Germany, and reports (undenied by the Defense Ministry) of up to $6 billion over the next three years in France. According to the German defense minister, the cuts there will not be cosmetic, but will result in real reductions in capabilities and operations. Clearly this is bad news for an Atlantic Alliance that is already struggling to meet its current obligations. And it adds yet another challenge to those already identified by Nikolas Gvosdev in his WPR column […]

Children’s rights advocates across the globe came together May 25 to call for universal endorsement and implementation by 2012 of two United Nations protocols aimed at protecting children against exploitation during armed conflicts or at the hands of human traffickers. “In too many places, children are seen as commodities. In too many instances they are treated as criminals instead of being protected as victims. And there are too many conflicts where children are used as soldiers, spies or human shields,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, according to the U.N. News Center. The Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed […]

It looks like Turkey and Brazil might be making the same mistake that France made in 2003, which still serves as the textbook example of an old friend of mine’s admonition regarding marital disputes: Being right is overrated. Clearly subsequent events vindicated France’s position on the Iraq invasion. But anyone who thinks that France did not pay a price for actively lobbying to shoot down the U.N. resolution authorizing it — including then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s ill-advised tour of African capitals — is mistaken. The move demonstrated France’s ability to build consensus among a strategically weightless constituency, but led […]

I wanted to follow up briefly on this post, in which among other things I mentioned that Stateside criticisms of President Barack Obama don’t match the sense I get as an offshore observer of how he’s viewed by a global audience. A good comparison here is Brazil’s President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. At the end of his second term, Lula is enjoying stratospheric popularity levels that most leaders could only dream about as they prepare to leave office. And to top it all off, he just sealed a fuel swap agreement with Iran that most Stateside observers have been […]

Who owes what to whom in Europe, or everything you need to know about the EU debt crisis (via Barry Ritholz).

According to Le Figaro, the language of the Iran sanctions draft resolution (.pdf) floated last week by the Obama administration would not prohibit delivery of the long-contracted but repeatedly delayed Iranian purchase of Russian S-300 air defense systems. The draft prohibits the sale or transfer to Iran of “missiles or missile systems as defined for the purpose of the United Nations Register on Conventional Arms.” As Le Fig points out, that register explicitly does not include ground-to-air missiles such as the S-300. Pretty clever, as far as stealth concessions to Russia go.

If you’re looking for insight into the lessons learned from the global financial crisis, you could do a lot worse than this Walter Russell Mead essay. Mead nails down a bunch of thoughts that have been swirling in my head recently, that I haven’t had the time or the talent to express as articulately. In particular, the idea that the Battle of Financial Markets, as he calls the initial stage of the crisis, has now given way to the Battle of State Finance. By that he means that the global economy’s theoretic backstop — i.e., the state’s capacity to rescue […]

If you haven’t read Thomas P.M. Barnett’s latest WPR column, I recommend you do. It’s as thoughtful and thought-provoking a take on President Barack Obama’s domestic and international political horizons as any I’ve read recently. That’s mainly because Barnett neither dismisses nor exaggerates his targets, whether they be Obama’s accomplishments or failures, or the populist backlash to some of the latter. It’s not so much a critique of Obama, as it is an assessment of how his skills and shorcomings fit in structurally to the tasks at hand. As someone whose natural approach to problem-solving is to toss away everything […]

As you might have noticed, recently we’ve been developing some new ideas about how to best take advantage of the real-time potential offered by the blog platform. Part of that has to do with our sense that blogging as a form has reached an inflection point, and that now’s a good time to experiment with new approaches. But it mainly has to do with finding ways to provide as much insight and analysis as possible. To begin with what hasn’t changed, the WPR blog, newly renamed Trend Lines, will continue to publish my commentary and analysis on major foreign policy […]

When the Iranian revolution against the Shah Reza Pahlavi reached critical mass in late-1978, the United States found itself with very limited political leverage in Iran because of a longstanding U.S. commitment to ignore the country’s opposition politicians. Washington had considered this precondition an acceptable price to pay for the shah’s support of the West during the Cold War. But it backfired when the shah found himself facing a tidal wave of mullah-led unrest. The Carter administration, fearing the shah’s displeasure, simply waited too long to press him to replace his autocratic rule with a reformist government. In 1979, desperate […]

To no one’s surprise, least of all the European Union, Britain’s new foreign secretary, William Hague, opted to visit Washington before setting foot in Brussels. There were several reasons why the Washington trip had priority. One was to reassure the Obama administration on the coalition’s continued commitment to the Afghan conflict. The Liberal Democrat Party, with its left-of-center roots, is viewed somewhat warily in Washington. The party opposed the Iraq war, but views the Afghan war with qualified acceptance. But as strong Europeanists, the Liberal Democrats are less enthusiastic about being tied too closely to the United States. Prior to […]

A Malawian couple became the latest gay rights activists to face a judicial backlash for their public stand on sexuality this week, when they were sentenced to 14 years hard labor for “gross indecency.” Western governments and human rights campaigners around the globe, including 1980s gender-bending pop icon Boy George, have leapt to the couple’s defense. Malawian authorities arrested Tiwonge Chimbalanga and his partner, Steven Monjeza, on Dec. 26, 2009, after the two participated in a traditional engagement ceremony. Judge Nyakwawa Usiwa-Usiwa sentenced the pair on Thursday, following their convictions on charges of “gross indecency” and “unnatural acts.” “I will […]

Recent statements by the Indian Army have shown a softened stance toward the ongoing dispute with China along the Line of Actual Control — an area that has long been a source of tension for the two countries. In an e-mail interview, Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explains the current situation along the China-India border. WPR: What are the core unresolved issues regarding the India-China border? Douglas Paal: The principal disputes are over territory. The Sino-Indian territorial dispute is one of China’s few remaining border disputes after a decade of resolving tough […]

Human rights campaigners are condemning the election of seven countries with controversial rights records to the United Nations Human Rights Council by the General Assembly last week, and calling for reform of the election process. “The council elections have become a pre-cooked process that strips the meaning from the membership standards established by the General Assembly,” Human Rights Watch Global Advocacy Director Peggy Hicks said in a press release. A total of 14 countries got electoral nods from the General Assembly during the uncontested, closed-slate May 13 vote. Libya, Angola, Malaysia, Qatar, Uganda, Mauritania and Thailand drew fire from rights […]

My first reaction on reading the draft resolution of the U.N. sanctions against Iran (.pdf) now being circulated was that the economic component seemed pretty ho-hum, certainly far from the crippling measures we’ve been hearing about for the past few months. On the other hand, the military component caught my eye, because it seemed to put the kabosh on any hope Iran might still have of taking delivery of the Russian-made S-300 air defense missile systems it had contracted for. Today the AFP is reporting that if the draft stands as written, that is in fact the case. That represents […]

An incident earlier this month in which a Chinese survey vessel chased off a Japanese coast guard vessel in the East China Sea is putting further strain on longstanding territorial disputes between China and Japan, despite diplomatic efforts to resolve them. In an e-mail interview, Brookings Institution Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies Director Richard C. Bush III explains the current state of Japan-China maritime disputes.WPR: What are the current territorial disputes between Japan and China in the East China Sea? Richard Bush: Japan and China have one territorial dispute: That concerns islands north and east of Taiwan that China […]

Following up on my previous post, I thought I’d flag another perspective, and one that I find compelling, from Gary Sick. I think Sick is a bit quick to overlook the significance of Iran’s refusal (so far) to suspend 20 percent uranium enrichment. So I’m not sure it was yet appropriate to take yes for answer. But I agree that the timing of the U.N. sanctions announcement on the part of the Obama administration was pretty lousy. Even if the adminsitration had held on to the option of proceeding with a draft sanctions resolution, it should have at least given […]