Defense & Security Archive

China has a growing terrorism problem. For many years Beijing believed it could avoid transnational extremism simply by staying out of the security affairs of other nations. But this no longer works. Just as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan found that leaving extremists alone did not protect them from terrorism, China is reluctantly being drawn into the conflict with global Islamic extremism. Two things are driving this. China’s growing international presence, both governmental and business, has set off an “antibody reaction.” Chinese nationals have become targets of terrorism simply because they are foreigners from a rich great power, rather than because […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the resignation of Mexico’s finance minister, the prospects for Gabon’s opposition after that country’s contested election, and the EU’s ruling on Apple’s back taxes in Ireland. For the Report, Hugh White joins us to talk about great power rivalry and the risk of war in the Asia-Pacific between the U.S. and China. Listen:Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant Articles on WPR: Mexico’s Economic Malaise, Not Just Trump Visit, Forced Finance Minister Out Cards Stacked Against Gabon’s Opposition in Election Challenge to Bongo EU Ruling on […]

With the warring parties in Yemen locked in a stalemate on the ground, the battle for the Arab world’s poorest country is moving to a new front: the economy. The government-in-exile of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi is planning to shut down the Central Bank of Yemen in the capital, Sanaa—a city that Houthi rebels have controlled for two years—and establish a new bank in the southern port city of Aden. Hadi hopes to cut off financing to the alliance of Houthi rebels and military units loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, which control Yemen’s northwestern highlands and western […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series inviting authors to identify the biggest priority—whether a threat, risk, opportunity or challenge—facing the international order and U.S. foreign policy today. The most urgent priority in international affairs today is to avoid a war between the United States and China. The consequences of such a war, military as well as economic, would be so vast as to dwarf all the other serious perils the world faces. Of course, a war is far from inevitable, but the risk is real, and much greater than most observers seem to realize, especially […]

Once taboo, the targeting of hospitals and health care providers in wartime has become such a frequent occurrence in today’s conflict zones that Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian aid organization that goes by its French acronym MSF, now calls it the new normal. Attacks that previously seemed to occur unintentionally or sporadically now appear to be a deliberate strategy of war. This is particularly the case in Syria and Yemen, where hospitals and doctors are targeted so often that medical care now has to be provided in places such as caves and chicken coops in order to avoid detection by […]

This week, America commemorated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the world worried once again about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. All that is missing to illustrate all three of the biggest threats that will be priorities for the foreseeable future is a catastrophic natural disaster linked to climate change. The next president will have to update the strategies to cope with all three, with varying international mechanisms in place to do so. National security experts often say that if everything is a priority, then nothing is. They wish that political leaders and bureaucratic processes would do a better job at […]

On Aug. 24, Ukraine celebrated 25 years of independence from the Soviet Union with a military parade in the capital, Kiev. President Petro Poroshenko, elected in the wake of the 2014 Maidan uprising, proudly recounted the country’s progress to the crowd: “Independence already gave us democracy and liberty, sense of human dignity and national unity; taught us to defend ourselves and opened the European perspective. The middle class has been formed as well as the civil society. The first post-Soviet generation with a new European world outlook has grown up.” Less than two weeks later, a mob of far-right protesters […]

As the Syrian people suffer the unspeakable horror and deprivation of war, it must seem to them that the violence will never end. Every week brings new brutality, whether the use of barrel bombs and chlorine gas by an evil regime or the up-close barbarity of the so-called Islamic State. It is hard to overstate how shocking this has been: In 2011, almost no one foresaw that protests demanding democratic reforms and the release of political prisoners by President Bashar al-Assad would devolve into a protracted humanitarian disaster that would devastate Syria, destabilize its region, and fuel the rise of […]

Uganda is pulling out of the hunt for Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), taking with it the best hopes of eliminating the militia once regarded as one of the world’s most brutal. The withdrawal of the roughly 2,500 Ugandan troops from an African Union military mission, which is set to be completed by the end of the year, comes with a recognition of the LRA’s diminished stature after years of being on the run in Central Africa. But the move has also raised fears that the group could rebuild some of its strength and take advantage of […]

Separatist rebels from the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) said they killed 12 Angolan soldiers in an ambush near the border with the Republic of Congo on Sunday. More than 50 Angolan soldiers have been killed since fighting escalated in August. In an email interview, Alex Vines, the head of the Africa program at Chatham House, discusses the state of the separatist insurgency in Angola. WPR: What is the current state of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda, and how has its insurgency evolved since the 2006 cease-fire was signed with […]

On Tuesday, Francois Hollande became the first French president in 12 years to visit Vietnam, a former French colony. Despite their troubled past marked by a nearly decade-long war that ended with France’s military defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, relations between Paris and Hanoi have warmed during Hollande’s presidency, part of France’s deepening interest in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific more broadly. By a number of measures, the visit was a productive one. Vietnam Airlines purchased 40 jets from France’s Airbus, totaling $6.5 billion in sales; low-cost private airline VietJet purchased 20 planes, totaling $2.39 billion; a regional […]

President Barack Obama has often been more upfront than past American presidents on what he thinks about the nature of ties with Saudi Arabia. Years before he came into office, he referred to Riyadh as one of America’s “so-called allies” in the Middle East. Last year, when asked by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull if the Saudis were America’s friends, Obama reportedly replied, “It’s complicated.” And he does little to hide his frustrations with the kingdom, whether over its export of Wahhabism around the world or its treatment of women at home, in interviews, as was the case with The […]

The international headlines generated recently by the Philippines combative new president, Rodrigo Duterte—over extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers in the country and a slur directed at U.S. President Barack Obama this week—have overshadowed his efforts to seek peace with communist rebels to end one of Asia’s longest-running insurgencies. Just over two months after being inaugurated, Duterte opened a first round of official talks in Norway in late August. Although early overtures suggest a level of promise not seen for decades, it remains to be seen whether the government and rebels can succeed where past talks have failed and translate […]

Over the past week, Myanmar held its eagerly awaited national peace conference in Naypyidaw, with hundreds of the country’s ethnic armed groups gathering in the capital alongside the government, parliament, the powerful military and political parties. The conference was a centerpiece of the agenda of the new administration led by the once-opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). It was designed to be a kind of sequel to the Panglong Conference held in Myanmar in 1947, when NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, independence hero Aung San, presided over the last meeting that brought together the country’s numerous factions and […]

Iran has had the chance to change how it engages with the outside world as a result of the nuclear agreement it signed with world powers a year ago, and also as a key player in the crises that haunt the Middle East. But there’s little sign that Tehran wants to take a new tack in its relations with the West or with its neighbors, and political forces in the U.S. also appear uninterested in prospects for normalization with Iran. Instead, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems bent on ensuring that the nuclear agreement signed in July 2015 does […]

This is it. As of Aug. 24, after 52 years of fighting and four years of negotiating, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have a peace accord. The FARC will cease to be one of the hemisphere’s largest generators of violence and will transition into a peaceful political movement. Already, the past 13 months have been the least violent period in Colombia since the conflict with the FARC began in 1964. And at midnight on Aug. 29, the government and the leftist guerrillas made it permanent, calling a definitive halt to all hostilities. The […]

One of the most momentous decisions the United States made after 9/11 was to go on the offensive against violent extremists, seeking to cut them off at their source. This was to be done by helping governments in the Islamic world provide prosperity, security, justice and a sense of national identity. While sound in theory, this forced the U.S. to work with deeply flawed partners and repeatedly crashed against three problems. First, extremists, appropriating or misappropriating religious themes and local grievances, are often deeply ingrained in the societies where they operate, whether by ethnicity, clan, tribe or religion. Second, political […]