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On the campaign trail, candidate Donald Trump said that to defeat the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the United States had to “take out their families.” As president, his attitude hasn’t changed. According to an account in The Washington Post, Trump was shown footage of a CIA drone strike in which the operators had refrained from firing “until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside.” Trump reportedly asked, “Why did you wait?” Collective punishment is not only morally depraved, it is also illegal and counterproductive. But while Trump’s drone comments rightfully deserve scrutiny, most reactions to them […]

Peace processes are always excruciatingly complex, in part because peacemaking is rarely just a matter of making peace. Power politics almost always gets in the way. Two particularly difficult cases that currently loom over international politics are heading in strikingly different directions. Multilateral efforts to end the Syrian war are grotesquely stalled. North and South Korea, by contrast, are hurtling toward peace with an almost indecent haste. The two cases offer very different visions of the future of major power cooperation and conflict, and above all the continuing role of America as a global peacemaker. Since the end of the […]

In March, Swedish authorities said they had made a record number of drug-smuggling arrests since the start of 2018, following another record-breaking year in 2017. So far this year, Swedish customs authorities have seized more than 2,000 pounds of cannabis, over 725 pounds of cocaine, 307 pounds of amphetamines and 88 pounds of heroin coming in from outside the country. Sweden has long had one of Europe’s most restrictive drug policies, based on a zero-tolerance approach to eradicating drugs from society that is still highly popular domestically. In an email interview, Henrik Tham, a professor emeritus in the department of […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Over a three-day period in December 2015, Nigerian security forces carried out an operation in the northern town of Zaria that resulted in the deaths of more than 300 civilians, according to an official commission of inquiry. The attack targeted the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, or IMN, a Shiite organization founded in the 1980s by Nigerians inspired by the Iranian revolution. Nigeria is about evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and the vast majority of Muslims are Sunni. As […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about press freedom and safety in various countries around the world. In March, Tanzania’s government imposed sweeping new regulations restricting online media, including requiring a license to run a blog that costs $930—more than Tanzania’s GDP per capita in 2016. The new regulations also affect online radio stations, streaming platforms, social media and internet cafes, which will now be required to install surveillance cameras. The clampdown follows other restrictions placed on Tanzania’s media in recent years that have severely limited freedom of expression. In an email interview, Jeff Smith, the […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss American foreign and trade policies in Asia. For the Report, Paul Imison talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about Mexico’s upcoming presidential election. Mexican voters are clearly seeking a change, but the legacies of corruption and a weak rule of law will be hard to overcome. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your […]

BARCELONA—Catalans now know what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object: A lot of noise, but little movement. For the past six months, Catalan separatists and the Spanish government have been deadlocked. The separatists insist on the legitimacy of the independence referendum last October and Catalonia’s right to secede from Spain. The Spanish government is adamant that the referendum was illegal and that the region cannot break away. Senior Catalan activists and politicians have been arrested, charged with inciting rebellion and sedition, while Catalan home rule has been suspended by Madrid. To restore the region’s autonomy, the pro-independence […]

In the horrible days following the 9/11 attacks, America’s full attention was on punishing the culprits and reinforcing its defenses against terrorism. While these tasks clearly had to take priority, the attacks also demonstrated that the United States needed to decide whether its 18th-century Constitution was adequate for national defense in the 21st century. Yet this issue still has yet to receive the consideration that it deserves. Although the United States has poured immense effort, money and blood into the fight against transnational extremism and dramatically augmented homeland security, it has not assessed its constitutional framework for national defense. But […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the production and trade of arms around the world. Between 2014 and 2017, Germany’s government approved some $31 billion in weapons sales, including almost $18 billion to countries outside the European Union and the NATO alliance. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany has become one of the top five arms exporters in the world by volume, despite major domestic opposition to the sale of German weapons. In an email interview, Sophia Besch, a research fellow at the Center for European Reform and an expert on German defense and security policy, […]

One of the more intriguing aspects of the enormously complicated war in Syria is the position of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose allegiance and convictions appear to shift with developments on the ground. Two weeks ago, Erdogan hosted a summit meeting in Ankara to discuss Syria’s future. For a photo-op, he literally joined hands with the presidents of Russia and Iran, the main backers of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Erdogan not long ago was still condemning as a “terrorist” and the roadblock to peace in Syria. It was a gesture, it seemed, that Moscow, Tehran and Ankara now […]

President Donald Trump surprised almost everyone, including his closest economic advisers and both free trade advocates and protectionists in Congress, when he announced last week that the United States would consider rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the huge Pacific Rim trade pact that he withdrew from days after taking office. Trump had heavily criticized the TPP, the signature economic deal of the Obama administration, even calling it the “rape of our country” during the 2016 presidential campaign. In light of such statements, most observers believed the Trump administration intended to pursue only bilateral free trade agreements, if any at all. As […]

In mid-March, Canada announced it would be sending 250 troops and six helicopters on a 12-month deployment to support the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali, which is considered the deadliest peacekeeping mission in the world. Since 2013, 162 troops from the U.N. mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, have been killed by al-Qaida and other extremists. Canada’s involvement in international peacekeeping has lagged in recent years, but shortly after taking office in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised that his government would commit 600 troops to U.N. peacekeeping missions. In an email interview, Simon Palamar, a research fellow on […]

Iraq has the potential to help bridge current regional divides in the Arab world and establish a functional model of equilibrium, which is why it should remain central to U.S. Middle East policy. As it approaches parliamentary elections next month, Iraq is not poised for either a major political transformation or massive security improvements. Instead, as a U.S. official who has worked on Iraq for many years has often noted to me, “Iraq is like a cancer patient, but a patient that we have some idea how to treat.” Despite that prognosis, the country should still be at the center […]

As French President Emmanuel Macron nears the end of his first year in office, three key policy gambles that are central to his agenda are coming to a head this week. These gambles begin with domestic structural reforms, move out toward proposed reforms for the European Union, and culminate with France’s role in shaping trans-Atlantic ties. Macron’s ability to deliver on them will determine whether he fulfills what he sees as his historical destiny as a providential national figure, or becomes the latest in a long line of aspiring but failed reformist French presidents. Macron has his work cut out […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about press freedom and safety in various countries around the world. On April 13, Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, announced that two Ecuadorian journalists and their driver had been killed by Marxist rebels, who kidnapped them near the border with Colombia late last month, where they were investigating rising crime. Moreno revealed that the rebels were associated with a dissident faction of Colombia’s demobilized FARC guerrillas. The episode has raised alarms over the state of press freedom and safety in Ecuador, which witnessed a decade of media restrictions and intimidation under […]

The 105 cruise missiles that the United States, France and the United Kingdom fired at Syria late last week, in response to another suspected chemical weapons attack by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, deepened the divide between Western powers and Russia over how to approach the next stage of Syria’s war. But amid divisions playing out both at the United Nations and on the ground in Syria, China sits in a precarious and uniquely advantageous position. As an actor that strictly denounces the use of chemical weapons and upholds the principle of nonintervention, Beijing condemned both the chemical attack outside Damascus […]

The early reactions of Syria’s neighbors to the joint strikes by the United States, France and the United Kingdom on three chemical weapons-related facilities last Friday night fell into familiar patterns. As the reality of the very limited nature of the attack sinks in, expect the full range of responses, capturing the deep ambivalence in the Middle East toward American power. Most countries in the region resent excessive demonstrations of what they see as American arrogance, but they miss American force when it is not there. Some even hoped in vain that the strikes would signal a new willingness for […]