Latest Archive

Gabon hardly ever makes headlines outside of the French-language press, so it’s little surprise that the storm brewing over this small, oil-rich country on the west coast of Central Africa for the past few months has received little attention. Yet all indicators point to political turbulence ahead in the run-up to Gabon’s next presidential election, which is scheduled for mid-2016, given a series of protests and strikes, including a teachers’ union strike that has paralyzed Gabon’s education system since February. The growing social unrest has affected Gabon’s economy, with its health, petroleum and telecommunications sectors all feeling the impact; in […]

Last week, officials from the United States and Cuba held their first formal talks on human rights since both sides announced they were working to restore diplomatic ties last December. In an email interview, Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, discussed the human rights situation in Cuba. WPR: What are the major human rights violations committed by the Cuban government, and are the policies driven more by the central government or by local actors? Ted Piccone: The Cuban government has a mixed record when it comes to the full panoply of internationally recognized human rights. On political […]

Several events in the past month have raised the question of whether the United States has entered the first stages of its decline in the global arena. Of them, the framework agreement reached between the P5+1 powers—the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China—and Iran in Switzerland last week has received the most scrutiny. The U.S. entered diplomatic efforts with the stated goal of seeing Iran’s capabilities to enrich uranium completely dismantled—but ended up accepting Iran’s right to preserve, albeit under rigid supervision, a good deal of its nuclear infrastructure. While the Iran talks have dominated the headlines, there have […]

On April 1, U.S. President Barack Obama signed an executive order expanding Washington’s ability to deter cyberattacks, by empowering the government to apply financial sanctions on hackers and companies overseas that benefit from cyber-espionage. The directive authorizes the secretary of the treasury, in consultation with the attorney general and secretary of state, to impose sanctions on individuals and entities that he determines are responsible for, or complicit in, malicious cyber-enabled activities that may constitute a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy, economic health or financial stability. The measure was no April Fool’s Day joke. Indeed, it reflects a move […]

While Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi has his eyes on Yemen, with plans apparently hatched to commit Egyptian troops to a possible Saudi-led ground invasion there, the Sinai Peninsula still smolders. Last Thursday, militants attacked checkpoints in the northern Sinai near the Israel-Gaza border, killing 15 soldiers and two civilians. Threats to Egypt’s domestic security linger, but last week, el-Sisi said that Egypt was involved in Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen because “it was not possible for us to abandon the security of the Gulf.” That being said, Saudi Arabia and its fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation […]

Russia’s military has experienced a remarkable recovery during the past decade. This is most evident in the success of Russia’s swift occupation of Crimea last year and ongoing support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Equally impressive, if less visible, is the rebound of the country’s military-industrial complex, referred to by the Russian initials VPK, which suffered heavily from the break-up of the Soviet Union’s integrated defense industries and the Russian government’s budgetary difficulties during the 1990s. In its worst years, under former President Boris Yeltsin, the VPK was unable to manufacture more than a few weapons systems each year. […]

Beginning in January and accelerating in the last week of March, senior State Department officials have been making high-profile speeches on U.S. interests and policies regarding Central Asia. The policy rollout culminated on March 31, when Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution on Washington’s long-term vision for Central Asia. Combined, the speeches offer insight into Washington’s approach to the resource-rich and highly contested region. As some observers have pointed out, one novel element of that approach is an explicit U.S. attempt to praise China’s growing presence in Central Asia, while condemning that […]

The city of El Alto, Bolivia, should be a stronghold for President Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party. Perched on the Andean Plateau above its sister-city La Paz, the sprawling, fast-growing El Alto is considerably poorer and more indigenous than the capital. Almost three-quarters of its almost 1 million inhabitants are, like Morales, ethnically Aymara, and in the past voters have supported the president and other MAS candidates by large margins. On March 29, however, things took a turn in regional elections as the party lost dramatically in both the El Alto mayoral and the La Paz […]

The framework agreement announced last week by Iran and the P5+1 states—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany—on how to regulate Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program faces many obstacles before it can be finalized as a formal accord by the self-imposed June 30 deadline. To survive the onslaught of spoilers on all sides, however, the permanent deal will need to be sound not only on the technical level, in terms of the verifiable limits it places on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability, but also on the political level. Nevertheless, the successful outcome of the talks in Lausanne, Switzerland has revived […]

Is U.S. President Barack Obama the last great Cold War statesman? Obama aspired to be a transformational figure in U.S. politics. Yet when it comes to international affairs, he often harks back to America’s old confrontation with the Soviet Union. Justifying the last-minute push for a nuclear deal with Iran last week, he borrowed a line from former President John F. Kennedy: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” After Iran agreed to the framework deal Thursday, Obama returned to the history books. Speaking at the White House, he quoted Kennedy again and […]

In late February, communist rebels killed five Philippine soldiers in an ambush in the northern Ilocos Sur province. In an email interview, Patricio Abinales, a professor of Asian studies at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, discussed the Philippine communist insurgency. WPR: What are the objectives of the New People’s Army, and how has their insurgency evolved over the past decade? Patricio Abinales: The New People’s Army (NPA) is the armed group of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), established in 1968 to wage a Maoist-style “protracted people’s war” aimed at “surrounding the […]

On Monday, in a result that surprised no one, Uzbek President Islam Karimov won re-election to another five-year term with over 90 percent of the vote. Karimov, who became president of Uzbekistan in 1990, a year before the republic’s independence from the Soviet Union, is widely regarded as one of the most authoritarian post-Soviet leaders. But while his overwhelming victory was never in doubt, the 77-year-old president’s regime may be less stable than it appears. Political intrigue in Tashkent and a shifting geopolitical landscape in Central Asia hint at the uncertainty that might follow Karimov’s rule. The most populous of […]

After a six-week election delay in February, Nigerians went to the polls last weekend. To the surprise of many, they voted out an incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, who faced growing criticism for failing to address corruption, poverty and the threat of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. Jonathan was defeated by 72-year-old Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general who led a successful military coup in 1983 and, more recently, was runner-up in the previous three presidential elections. Buhari’s decisive victory, which relied on substantial support from northern and southwestern Nigeria, was the first electoral defeat of an incumbent president in Nigerian […]

In January 2017, a new U.S. president will move into the White House. He or she will immediately instruct the National Security Council to assess American national security strategy and provide policy options, particularly for key regions and issues. In all likelihood, no assessment will be more complex and important than the one dealing with the Middle East. After the end of the Cold War, U.S. strategy in the Middle East focused on promoting stability largely by supporting like-minded regional states. While nominally opposed to the more nefarious dictators in the region, before 2003 the U.S. did not do much […]

As The Associated Press reports, “After marathon negotiations, the United States, Iran and five other world powers announced a deal Thursday outlining limits on Iran’s nuclear program so it cannot lead to atomic weapons, directing negotiators toward a comprehensive agreement within three months.” A fact sheet distributed by the U.S. State Department provides the key parameters of the framework nuclear deal, with surprisingly specific terms. Iran has agreed to reduce its number of installed centrifuges by approximately two-thirds and not to enrich uranium over 3.67 percent for at least 15 years—a level suitable as fuel for nuclear power plants, but […]

It wasn’t very long ago that Turkey was held up as an example of a country in the midst of a great democratic transformation—a nation steadily enhancing democratic norms, finding easy coexistence between Islam and democracy and moving optimistically in the direction of membership in the European Union. Today, it’s difficult to find many people expressing hope for Turkey’s prospect of joining the EU. Even more troubling, there is a growing consensus that Turkey is visibly and rapidly drifting away from democracy. The driving force behind the country’s dramatic change of direction is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the […]

On March 11, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian unveiled an updated version of the Military Programming Law for 2014-2019, a five-year blueprint for the country’s force structure and defense budget that will be debated in Parliament in June. As part of the revised law, previous plans to reduce the armed forces have been walked back, with the government announcing new investment to meet persistent threats at home and abroad. However, in a climate of stagnant economic growth and austerity-driven fiscal constraints, doubts persist about how sustainable this approach is. Le Drian’s announcements are a direct consequence of the Charlie […]