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When George Osborne, Britain’s new chancellor of the exchequer, recentlyannounced that the Ministry of Defense (MoD) must now pay for the modernization of the Trident submarine-based nuclear deterrent out of its own day-to-day budget, it marked a stark change from previous policy, by which the Treasury has traditionally footed the bill for nuclear weapons development. Though the plans are not new, the announcement caused a public row between Defense Secretary Liam Fox and Osborne. Fox has warned that with the MoD’s budget already in tatters, it will be impossible to maintain the MoD’s other capabilities if it has to meet […]

Reaction in the Mediterranean to BP’s plans to start drilling five off-shore wells off the Libyan Gulf of Sirte in October has been surprisingly low key given the British oil giant’s recent track record in the Gulf of Mexico. So far, the only group to express vigorous concern, at least in public, has been archeologists: The seabed off that stretch of the Libyan coast is rich in ancient sites and artifacts, including the remains of a sunken port once vital to Roman shipping. Yet there is nothing particularly reassuring about BP’s new $900 million operation, even as the company continues […]

Maritime issues have risen to the forefront of current regional security concerns in Asia. Indeed, many emerging non-traditional security concerns such as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), maritime terrorism, piracy, safety and security of sea lines of communication, smuggling (of arms, drugs and humans), illegal fishing and marine pollution are all essentially maritime issues. Some of them provide opportunities for multilateral maritime security cooperation when supporting factors coincide and are mutually reinforcing. The cooperative anti-piracy effort off the coast of Somalia, the loose and fragile 2002 ASEAN Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, […]

In June of this year, the United States Navy published the 2010 Naval Operations Concept (.pdf) (NOC), designed as the operational fulfillment of the Cooperative Maritime Strategy (.pdf) (CS-21) released in 2007. The 112-page NOC is an elaboration of the concepts set forth in the 20-page Cooperative Strategy, with detailed discussion of how the missions laid forth in the earlier document can be accomplished with the forces available to the United States Navy. CS-21 itself is a curious document. Deceptively modest, it was developed as the Navy’s strategic answer to the post-Cold War environment. But whether intentionally, as some have […]

China’s remarkable weathering of the global recession has accelerated the expansion of its power relative to that of the West. American observers of China have already noted an increasingly assertive approach by Beijing, and attribute this shift in behavior to an expectation among China’s leaders of a greater degree of deference and influence in international affairs. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in regional maritime issues, where Beijing’s interests in maintaining access to foreign resources and enforcing its claims of sovereignty mix with foreign perceptions of Chinese intentions and external reactions to China’s decades-long military modernization program. Fueled by […]

Agence France Presse reported last week that Russia signed a five-year military cooperation agreement with Israel. Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov announced the agreement, which includes joint defense education and medical training, on Sept. 6, after meeting with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak, in Moscow. Fifty Russian crewmembers are already in Israel training to operate the 36 drones Moscow that ordered after its 2008 war with Georgia, and the Russians are now proposing a joint production line to manufacture Israeli-designed UAVs in Russia. The defense agreement comes just weeks after former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens wrote an op-ed in […]

If America could be magically granted its ideal Muslim strategic partner, what would we ask for? Would we want a country that fell in line with every U.S. foreign policy stance? Not if the regime was to have any credibility with the Islamic world. No, ideally, the government would be just Islamist enough to be seen as preserving the nation’s religious and cultural identity, even as it aggressively modernized its society and connected its economy to the larger world. It would have an activist foreign policy that emphasized diplomacy, multilateralism and regional stability, while also maintaining sufficient independence from America […]

Singapore and Taiwan may sign a free trade agreement, according to officials from both countries. In an e-mail interview, Sheridan Prasso, an Asia Society associate fellow, discusses the evolution of Taiwan’s trade policy. WPR: What has historically been Taiwan’s trade policy? Sheridan Prasso: For decades, Taiwan was able to sustain a high rate of growth by using its low-wage workforce to turn out consumer goods such as shoes and apparel, and electrical products such as clocks and calculators. Much of this was exported to markets in North America and Europe. “Made in Taiwan” was as ubiquitous in the 1960s-1980s as […]

Perhaps because there was so much to digest in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s review of the Obama administration’s foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on Wednesday, her olive branch to Europe has been largely overlooked. Yet some members of her distinguished audience did a double take when she said, “President Obama and I have reached out to strengthen both our bilateral and multilateral ties in Europe. And the post-Lisbon EU is developing an expanded global role and our relationship is growing and changing as a result. . . .. There is no doubt that a […]

In U.S. domestic politics, which demands that presidential administrations pursue policies with near-instantaneous results, the biblical adage, “One sows, another reaps,” is anathema. As a result, President Barack Obama is not only under growing pressure to demonstrate results to a skeptical American electorate months before the 2010 midterm elections, he also needs to chalk up a series of successes to buoy his 2012 re-election campaign. Fortunately, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pithily noted during her last visit to Georgia, the United States is able to walk and chew gum at the same time. This logic also applies to the […]

In early August, at the fourth trilateral summit between Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan held in Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged the leaders of the other two countries to join in an alliance to counterbalance NATO’s growing presence in Central Asia. Though any such formal alliance is unlikely, the declaration reflects Tehran’s desire to play a larger role in Central Asia’s regional dynamics. If Iran has always been geographically part of the regional context of Central Asia and the Caucasus, Tehran’s geopolitical orientation has historically been focused southward, on the Persian Gulf. For more than a century, Iranian interests in […]

I mentioned in my first post back from vacation that the U.S. should be focusing its foreign policy attention on Africa in the “post-Iraq” era. The reasons why remained inchoate and intuitive, untilNikolas Gvosdev, in his WPR column today, helped me bring them into focus when he wrote: Beyond Latin America, the [U.S. should] explore ways to bind Western and Southern Africa closer to the United States. . . . Washington should pay more attention to surrounding the United States with a “ring of friends” to its south, rather than thinking of our security as guaranteed by the oceans to […]

I got an e-mail a while back from a reader who mentioned that he loved our Global Insider items, adding that they’re always highly informative even if the subjects are a bit “random.” I agreed with the former observation, but not with the latter. And a news item that I expect will garner a bit of attention over the coming days will help explain the method behind the apparent madness. We usually pick the GI topics from items on our Leading Indicators channel, based on whether we feel like it warrants closer attention due to its significance or its likelihood […]

Armenia agreed to extend Russia’s lease of a military base in the city of Gyumri until 2044. In an e-mail interview,Kim Iskyan, a director in the Russia and Eurasia practice at Eurasia Group, discusses Russia-Armenia defense relations. WPR: What has historically been Russia and Armenia’s defense relationship? Kim Iskyan: Russia and Armenia have long shared a close relationship, with defense as a critical dimension. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there were Soviet bases in all three countries of the Caucasus, but Azerbaijan and Georgia subsequently engineered the departure of the Russian military presence. Armenia, though, wanted […]

VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s tourism authorities would like the world to think of their country as an idyllic retreat, or as the writer Anton Chekhov described it during his 1890 visit, a “Paradise on Earth — an exotic fairy tale setting.” That’s why the ever-present military checkpoints and machine-gun-toting soldiers that dot the capital never make it into the television commercials urging Europeans to visit this beautiful Indian Ocean island. The advertisements also steer clear of the island’s northern region and this town, Vavuniya. It is the gateway to the area formerly controlled by the separatist Liberation Tigers […]

Leaders from Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Turkey attended a Developing 8 summit in Abuja, Nigeria in July. In an e-mail interview, Gareth Jenkins, Istanbul-based analyst and author of “Political Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East?“, explains the background and current state of the D-8. WPR: What is the historic background and focus of the Developing 8, and how is it evolving? Gareth Jenkins: The Developing 8 (D-8) was founded on June 15, 1997, in Istanbul. It was the brainchild of Necmettin Erbakan, modern Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, who wanted to create a Muslim alternative […]

In his April 2009 Prague speech, President Barack Obama ambitiously pledged to “secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years.” The goal is driven by the need to ensure that terrorists never obtain a nuclear weapon or materials usable for a nuclear device, and its urgency cannot be overstated. Twenty countries are believed to possess bomb-grade nuclear material that is not secure. While fissile material security is usually associated with developing countries, developed countries such as the U.S. must also take additional steps to safeguard their own nuclear materials. What’s more, despite a myriad of national laws […]