Defense & Security Archive

On Jan. 6, soldiers in Bouake—Cote d’Ivoire’s second-largest city and the former rebel capital during the country’s civil war in the 2000s—left their barracks, firing their weapons into the air. They quickly seized control of Bouake’s main streets and announced a mutiny, the latest in a string of them in recent years in Cote d’Ivoire. Within a day, soldiers throughout the country joined the mutineers, including in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s largest city and commercial capital, where gunfire was reported at the army headquarters. Although the government and soldiers claim to have reached a deal to end it, the standoff proved […]

Last month’s terrorist attack in Jordan, which the self-declared Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for, was a brutal reminder of the kingdom’s fragile security situation. Gunmen attacked a police station in the southern city of Karak and then stormed a Crusader castle popular with tourists. They killed nine Jordanians in the firefight, including seven security officers, and a Canadian tourist. In the days after the attack, three Jordanian gendarmes and a police officer were killed in security raids in Karak, where authorities discovered a huge cache of weapons and explosives that apparently belonged to the gunmen. “Judging by the quantity […]

Most of the policy shops and intelligence agencies in the U.S. government focus on near-term threats or issues, reflecting the time horizon of elected officials who often have little interest in events beyond the next election. But long-term thinking, as senior intelligence officer Gregory Treverton noted, “is critical to framing strategy.” For this reason there are a few government agencies designed specifically to peer deep into the future. The Pentagon, for instance, has its small Office of Net Assessment. The intelligence community has what is called the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Every four years, the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group publishes […]

The so-called Islamic State received some modest good news recently from Somalia, in what has otherwise been a dismal stretch of losses for the jihadi group. In October, a small militant faction aligned with the Islamic State took and held Qandala, a port town in northern Somalia, for more than a month before withdrawing. It was the first time a group linked to the Islamic State has occupied a town in Somalia. Talk of the Islamic State dominated much of the debate on counterterrorism issues during the U.S. presidential campaign. Yet as concerning as the Islamic State’s Qandala operation is, […]

When U.S. President Barack Obama took office eight years ago, his two overarching foreign policy goals were to oversee the winding down of America’s costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to repair the damage to America’s global standing and reputation that the invasion of Iraq and the excesses of the global war against terrorism had caused. A major component of the latter project involved reassuring America’s allies, partners, friends and rivals that Washington would recommit itself to the global order it had helped build and defend during and after the Cold War. This meant not only backstopping the rules-based […]

This week, the National Intelligence Council released its quadrennial report about global trends, and it’s a sober read. Governance is getting harder, and the nature of power is changing. While the report doesn’t predict major power conflict, it sees Russia and China both exploiting the erosion of confidence in the West to expand their influence in the international system. One policy-relevant judgment is about resilience: Countries that invest in infrastructure, innovation and relationships will fare better in this unstable future. Every four years, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produces an unclassified, broad-gauged assessment of long-term global trends. The work of […]

In early November, barely a month after the ruling Georgian Dream party’s commanding victory in parliamentary elections, Georgia’s defense minister, Levan Izoria, outlined an ambitious defense reform program that captured immediate headlines for reintroducing conscription. The former defense minister, Tina Khidasheli, had officially abolished conscription in late June, just a few months before the elections and only weeks before she officially departed her post. Although Khidasheli’s political coalition allies attacked her for dissolving the draft, conscription is widely seen as unpopular in Georgia, which likely explains why Izoria waited until after the elections to reintroduce it. Obscured by the focus […]

The battlefield defeat of the self-styled Islamic State in eastern Syria and western Iraq is far from certain but increasingly likely. Iraqi government forces, in conjunction with Shiite and Kurdish militias, are slowly liberating Mosul, the largest city the Islamic State has conquered. While the Syrian government is less concerned with the group than with other rebel forces it faces, a Kurdish-Arab militia alliance called the Syrian Democratic Forces is pushing toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s most important stronghold after Mosul. In parallel, a global coalition led by the United States is undercutting the group’s economic base. The extremists still […]

The harrowing image last month of a Turkish police officer standing over the Russian ambassador he just shot, while blaming Moscow for the devastation in Syria, captures a key foreign policy challenge for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump: How can he attempt to stabilize the Middle East by bringing conflicts to a close, rather than letting Russia and Iran lead the region into further cycles of repression and violence under the rubric of fighting terrorism? Trump’s current defense priority—“to crush and destroy” the so-called Islamic State—plays right into Russian and Iranian machinations, with their selective definitions of terrorism and scorched-earth tactics. […]

In July, World Politics Review launched its Global Agenda series, inviting authors to make their case for the biggest priorities facing the international order and U.S. foreign policy today. Over the following months, contributors took turns diagnosing the gravest challenges, and greatest opportunities, facing the global community. 2016 has come and gone, bringing a series of tectonic shifts to the geopolitical landscape. What developments might 2017 bring about as an encore? WPR has compiled 11 articles from the series that provide a roadmap to the upcoming year in international affairs. The following 11 articles are free to nonsubscribers until Jan. […]

If there is only one certainty about the Syrian civil war, it is that any ultimate resolution of the conflict at this point will be horribly unsatisfying, politically and morally. The current tenuous cease-fire and peace process negotiated and overseen by Russia, Turkey and Iran is just that on both counts. But despite all its many flaws, it—or any other arrangement that effectively silences the guns and opens at least the possibility of a lasting political accommodation—represents a lesser evil than continued fighting. The deal’s flaws are immediately obvious. To begin with, it is the result of a military onslaught […]

The fall of rebel-held eastern Aleppo in Syria last month was a stunning personal blow for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had openly backed Syrian rebel groups after the civil war began in 2011. Losing the rebels’ self-styled “capital of the revolution” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies is an insurmountable setback for years of Turkish regime-change efforts in Syria. But there is a silver lining for Turkey. After Aleppo, Ankara can focus all its diplomatic, military and political efforts on pursuing its more immediate national security interests in northern Syria: fighting the so-called Islamic State […]

In 1987, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was loosening the screws on free enterprise, high-school teacher Bronislav Zeltserman opened a new teaching center in Riga, the capital of what was then the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. In a country receptive to new ideas for the first time since the 1950s, Zeltserman hoped to develop academic thinking and rear a new generation of students connected to the West. Tapping into the spirit of the times, he called his project “Experiment.” The Soviet Union collapsed four years later, in 1991. Today, the small Baltic nation […]

The drama and disruptions of the year just ended fill some with dread for the new year. Will the challenges of domestic polarization and a tilt in international influence toward the nondemocratic powers of the East only worsen? Without sounding too naïve, it’s possible to imagine outcomes that are not the worst-case scenarios for three of the world’s enduring problems: the European refugee crisis, the Syrian civil war and the Israel-Palestine conflict. The past year has been full of tumult, domestically in the U.S. and several major Western powers, as well as on the international stage. The election of Donald […]