Defense & Security Archive

Has Donald Trump lost faith in realpolitik? On the campaign trail, the U.S. president promised to adopt a hard-nosed approach to promoting America’s interests. He ostentatiously spurned the stock talking points about his country’s values and global mission that most presidential candidates tend to trot out. Since taking office, Trump and his advisers have sometimes repeated the case for a cold-eyed approach to foreign affairs. The president told one interviewer that the U.S. is not morally superior to Russia. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has warned diplomats that an excessive emphasis on advancing American values “really creates obstacles to our […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the potential pitfalls of Donald Trump’s first overseas trip as U.S. president. For the Report, Andrew Green talks with Peter Dörrie about how Uganda is struggling to maintain its progressive approach to refugees as more than 2,000 South Sudanese cross into the country each day. If you’d like to support our free podcast through patron pledges, Patreon is an online service that will allow you to do so. To find out about the benefits you can get through pledging as little as $1 per […]

On Thursday, at a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini announced that Europe’s first joint military command center could be launched in “a couple of days.” EU states already approved the creation of the new military training headquarters in Brussels, known in EU parlance as the Military Planning and Conduct Capability, or MPCC, back in March, but they have been hashing out the final details this week. Though the MPCC will initially only oversee joint EU military training operations in Africa, speculation has persisted that it could lay the groundwork for an […]

On the morning of May 5, Boko Haram militants attacked a Chadian military post in the Lake Chad region near the border with northeast Nigeria, where the extremist group is based. Nine soldiers were killed, the latest casualties suffered by Chad’s military as it responds to a crisis that, on Chadian territory alone, has left hundreds dead and displaced more than 100,000. The following day, in the capital, N’Djamena, the Chadian Convention for the Defense of Human Rights reported that Maounde Decladore, one of its activists, had been arrested. Decladore is also a spokesman for the group “It Must Change,” […]

Taiwan is like no other place on Earth. That’s not a line from a promotional video or tourist brochure. It’s a simple fact of history, politics and international relations. Taiwan, with its population of nearly 24 million, is a vibrant liberal democracy and a major node in global value chains. Without components designed in Taiwan and produced in Taiwanese-managed factories in China and Southeast Asia, many of the devices people use every day simply wouldn’t work. Taiwan is an indispensable part of 21st-century life. But it is not a member of the United Nations and only has diplomatic relations with […]

The world is currently trying to figure out what China might be doing, saying and thinking about North Korea. Observers looks for signs in Chinese state media that Beijing might finally cut Pyongyang off financially and politically. They scrutinize shipping traffic to parse whether the flow of oil and coal between North Korea and China might be diminishing, with potentially disastrous results for Kim Jong Un’s regime. With a new president in South Korea, debates will continue about how Seoul can convince China to use its leverage on Pyongyang to get it to freeze its nuclear weapons program. There should […]

Islamist extremist groups that were once confined to slivers of territory in the most marginalized areas of West Africa are increasingly expanding their operational footprint in the region. Whether it is Boko Haram, which has rebranded itself as the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s West African affiliate, or the myriad al-Qaida offshoots that occupied northern Mali following a coup in 2012, insurgent operations are no longer confined by these groups’ countries of origin. The Islamic State’s West Africa Province, as Boko Haram now calls itself, has spread beyond its base in northeastern Nigeria into neighboring Cameroon, Chad and Niger, which all have […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. Anti-NATO voices within Slovakia are becoming more vocal, spurred in part by the public’s susceptibility to pro-Russian propaganda and suspicions of the U.S. Yet Slovakia, a NATO member since 2004, remains a committed member of the alliance, and officials see clear benefits to the security assurance NATO provides as well as training that comes with participating in NATO missions. In an email interview, Dušan Fischer, an alumni scholar at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and […]

If there is a prayer on the lips of international affairs columnists these days, it goes something like this: Please let there be something to write about other than Donald Trump this week, and if it has to be Trump, please let me publish it before the next news cycle makes whatever I’ve written irrelevant or obsolete. Having already settled on a Trump topic before the latest self-created crises to buffet the White House broke, suffice it to say I’m typing as fast as I can. As we now know because he himself admitted it, during his Oval Office meeting […]

As India tries to stem the flow of citizens joining the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the state of Kerala, on the southern coast, has emerged as an area of special concern. According to government statistics, more citizens have been arrested for Islamic State ties in Kerala than in any other state. In an email interview, Animesh Roul, executive director of the New Delhi-based Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict, describes what could be making Kerala—and India more generally—fertile ground for Islamic State recruiters, and how the government is trying to crack down on the problem. WPR: How widespread is […]

Uganda has been celebrated for its progressive approach toward refugees. But its open-door policy is being tested by the ongoing flood of arrivals from neighboring South Sudan. The conflict in South Sudan has been raging for more than three years, but it has proliferated after a tentative peace deal collapsed in July 2016. Since then, more than 841,000 South Sudanese have fled the country, raising the total number of refugees to nearly 1.7 million, according to the United Nations. Roughly half of them have headed to Uganda. Listen to Andrew Green discuss this piece on WPR’s Trend Lines Podcast: On […]

U.S. President Donald Trump’s first overseas trip will begin in Saudi Arabia and Israel, two countries whose leaders have vocally welcomed Trump’s shift in approach to the region compared to his predecessor, Barack Obama. But the new president’s unpredictable nature means that neither country can take anything for granted during his visit. The White House has previewed the president’s trip, which will also take him to Italy for the G-7 Summit in Sicily and a meeting with the Pope, and Brussels for the NATO Summit. Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, briefed the press Friday, outlining an ambitious […]

Can Antonio Guterres save the United Nations from the tyranny of overinflated expectations? The U.N. secretary-general, who has been on the job for four months, seems clear about the limitations of his post. When the Security Council selected Guterres for the job last October, he declared that the Syrian war would be his top priority. But speaking in London last week, he implied he could not do much about it. Peace will only be possible, Guterres noted, “when all the parties in the conflict understand and believe they cannot win the war.” This is not exactly a revelation: U.N. officials […]

Echoing the symbolic spark of the 2011 uprising, a Tunisian vendor set himself on fire on Wednesday in the town of Tebourba outside Tunis, after police had instructed him to close his fruit stand. Riots ensued, and a crowd of young men clashed with police as the vendor was hospitalized for treatment. The incident took place at a tense moment in Tunisia’s stumbling democratic transition, which entered its seventh year in January. Protests over economic marginalization have multiplied across the south of the country, and on Tuesday, Chafik Sarsar, the head of the country’s electoral commission, resigned—refusing, he said, to […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series about NATO members’ contributions to and relationships with the alliance. Last month, Poland’s government gave a warm welcome to a U.S.-led NATO battalion, which is part of a series of deployments to create “tripwire” deterrence to Russian aggression. “Generations of Poles have waited for this moment since the end of World War II, generations that dreamt of being part of the just, united, democratic and truly free West,” said President Andrzej Duda. As the largest country to join NATO since the end of the Cold War, Poland has tried […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the upcoming summit for China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, and how China is positioning itself to take advantage of the United States’ shifting approaches to international trade and global engagement. For the Report, Richard A. Bitzinger talks with Peter Dörrie about China’s naval buildup and global security ambitions. If you’d like to support our free podcast through patron pledges, Patreon is an online service that will allow you to do so. To find out about the benefits you can get through pledging as […]

In recent years, Russia has learned how to punch above its weight in the global security system, exercising influence out of proportion to its actual political, economic and military strength. It has done this through ruthless skill and willingness to adopt almost any method that advances its interests while limiting the risk. Moscow has developed—even mastered—what national security experts call “gray zone” methods based on slowly emerging aggression that combines a wide array of techniques. These include conventional military intimidation, cyberattacks, economic warfare, political-psychological operations by Moscow’s extensive army of online trolls, and alliances with political and criminal proxies of […]