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Portugal goes to the polls Sunday, but with high voter apathy, turnout is expected to be at its lowest since the country transitioned back to democracy in the 1970s . In an email interview, Thomas Bruneau, the vice president of Global Academic Professionals and professor emeritus at the Naval Postgraduate School, discussed Portuguese politics and what is at stake in Sunday’s election. WPR: What is current public opinion in Portugal toward austerity, and how will this affect Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s bid for re-election? Thomas Bruneau: Public opinion in Portugal toward austerity, which has resulted in unemployment, reduced pensions […]

Security experts often disagree when ranking America’s security challenges, but most believe that the top three are violent Islamic extremism, Russia and China. These adversaries or potential adversaries have radically different capabilities and goals, but share one characteristic: All seem to be beating the United States on what can be called “the battlefield of perception.” Unconstrained by democracy and driven by a fierce pursuit of power, they adroitly craft and disseminate narratives to weaken and delegitimize the existing international order and undercut American will, thus seeking to counterbalance the U.S. advantage in military and economic power. They consider belief and […]

On Oct. 20, 2014, Joko Widodo, popularly referred to as Jokowi, was sworn in as Indonesia’s new president—a champion of the people and pin-up for clean, open and efficient governance. What a difference a year can make. Over his first year in office, the limits to Jokowi’s power, political agenda and capacity to manage complex relationships have been repeatedly exposed. Powerful political oligarchs, an entrenched and entitled bureaucracy, an army eager to reinvigorate its relevance and a corruption-riddled justice sector—to name a few—were always going to present significant challenges to Jokowi’s presidency, and they didn’t delay. One of the most […]

On Sept. 15, police in Paraguay seized 650 kilograms of marijuana in Curuguaty, in the country’s southeast region near the border with Brazil. Substantial as this seizure was, it was not in itself a big story in a country where authorities claimed they seized 462 tons of marijuana in 2013. Paraguay is notoriously one of the largest producers of marijuana in Latin America. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Paraguay has in recent years produced approximately half of South America’s marijuana, second only in Latin America to Mexico. The estimated 600 metric tons of marijuana […]

This week saw big news for foreign military engagement in the Syrian civil war: On Sunday, France launched its first round of air strikes against Islamic State targets, after years of reticence toward any military involvement in Syria. And on Wednesday, Russian aircraft dropped bombs against Syrian opposition fighters—after asserting it would target the Islamic State. That same day, France announced the opening of an unprecedented inquiry into crimes against humanity under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. France began an air-strike campaign against Islamic State targets in Iraq last year but refused to engage in Syria, arguing that strikes there could […]

On Monday, as U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders spoke loftily about diplomacy and international cooperation at the United Nations General Assembly, a picture of chaos and destruction materialized thousands of miles away, in Afghanistan, a country whose future depends to a large degree on decisions taken by the people giving speeches this week in New York. As the U.N. gathering got underway, Taliban fighters rolled into Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, and, in a manner reminiscent of last year’s fall of Mosul, Iraq, to the self-declared Islamic State, they took control without much resistance. It was […]