Defense & Security Archive

Poland’s harsh policy on drugs, in place for nearly two decades, has not been effective. Now civil society groups are pushing for a new approach. Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. Poland’s strict drug laws, in place for nearly two decades, are considered among the harshest in Europe. But criminalizing even minor drug possession has proven ineffective, and the president who signed the measures into law has admitted they are a policy failure. In an email interview, Kasia Malinowska, director of the Global Drug Policy Program […]

TAIPEI, Taiwan—In early May 2016, a police raid on a suspected money-laundering operation in the Taiwanese city of Taichung instead uncovered a large and wide-ranging telecommunications scam. Based in the Dominican Republic, the operation spanned the world, stretching from Taiwan to China and the United States. According to Capt. Lee Chi-shun, an investigator with the Criminal Investigation Bureau of Taiwan’s National Police Administration who was heavily involved in the case, the small shop raided by local police turned out to be a data center where money that had been fleeced from victims of telecom fraud was transferred onward to bank […]

After almost three years of deadly, sporadic crises, 2018 brought signs of much-needed change to Ethiopia when the government announced in early January that it would release many jailed journalists, politicians and protesters. But instead of opening up, Africa’s second-most populous country has returned to a formal state of emergency following the surprising resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn on Feb. 15. With an emboldened opposition, and divisions within the ruling party, Ethiopia now faces more uncertainty. The chaotic chain of events underscores the difficulties for the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, in trying to […]

It is hard to feel excited about United Nations Security Council resolutions anymore. On Saturday, after days of exhausting diplomacy, the council unanimously passed a resolution calling for a 30-day cease-fire across Syria. Most diplomatic observers reacted either cautiously or outright cynically. Previous U.N.-backed cessations of hostilities in the country have evaporated quickly. A veteran of the siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia in the 1990s once told me that he had kept a list of how long each cease-fire there had lasted before a shot was fired. The shortest was less than a minute. The record in Syria is no […]

In late January, Yemen’s foreign minister, Abdul-malik al-Mekhlafi, traveled to Moscow where he met with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. As they discussed the implementation of an elusive peace settlement in Yemen, Lavrov emphasized Russia’s willingness to mediate between rival Yemeni factions. Lavrov’s somewhat surprising announcement was followed up days later by a statement from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, offering to broker talks in the burgeoning conflict between separatists in southern Yemen and the forces of Yemen’s internationally recognized government, whose president is in exile in Saudi Arabia. Until recently, Russia has maintained a diplomatic presence in Yemen’s […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. This summer, Canada is expected to become only the second country in the world to legalize the recreational use of marijuana nationwide. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new drug policy is both a break from his conservative predecessor and from the hard-line stance taken by the Trump administration in Washington, which has bucked state-level trends toward marijuana decriminalization in the United States. In an email interview, Daniel Bear, a professor of criminal justice at Humber College in Toronto, explains why the […]

The ongoing and increasingly grim conflict in Syria is a portent of wars to come. As I wrote last week, future Syria-style wars will be defined by four characteristics: intricate complexity, a conflict-specific configuration of antagonists, an inability of the international community to undertake humanitarian intervention and a failure of the United Nations to play an effective role in ending the fighting. But beyond these core features, wars resembling Syria’s civil war will share other attributes both on and off the battlefield, with profound and troubling implications for the United States. In any war, resource streams are crucial. Because a […]

Earlier this month, before leaving for a five-country trip in Latin America, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speculated about a potential way out of the economic and political chaos in Venezuela. Perhaps, he suggested, the best solution was a military coup d’état. “In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is oftentimes that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad and the leadership can no longer serve the people,” he told an audience at the University of Texas. President Donald Trump first introduced the notion of prioritizing bullets over ballots in Venezuela […]

Editor’s note: This is a special Wednesday edition of Diplomatic Fallout. Judah Grunstein will return with Balance of Power next week. There is a long history of bold ideas for peacekeeping missions that never quite took off. In 1936, British officials considered deploying 10,000 peacekeepers to the Rhineland as a buffer force between France and an increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany. In 1969, the Irish foreign minister called for a United Nations force to counter mounting sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland. London said no. In January 2009, in one of its very last foreign policy initiatives, the outgoing George W. Bush […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the production and trade of arms around the world. Earlier this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that his country would no longer buy defense systems, software or products from other countries, except in cases of emergency, in the interest of building up Turkey’s own defense industry. A NATO member, Turkey has bought arms from allies like the United States for years. In an email interview, Iyad Dakka, a fellow with the Centre for Modern Turkish Studies at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Canada, […]

The recent international conference in Kuwait to help Iraq rebuild after its war against the Islamic State provided stark and surprising insights into which countries are most invested in Iraqi stability. While the United Nations and the World Bank led the launch of a new recovery and resilience program for the country, it was the neighboring Gulf states and Turkey that stepped up to the plate with new pledges. Given heightened regional tensions over Iran and Syria, the commitment to help Iraq recuperate looks like a positive development for the Middle East. Perhaps with some trepidation and ambivalence, its neighbors […]

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 a tale of two corruption scandals in Israel and South Africa. For the Report, Mackenzie Weinger talks with Andrew Green about why Finland is in the vanguard of efforts to counter Russia’s use of hybrid threats to undermine Western democracies. 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 some of our uncompromising analysis delivered twice a week straight to your inbox. The […]

Week by week, month by month, the horrific war in Syria grinds on, killing combatants from many countries and, most tragic of all, Syrian civilians—the unintended or, in many cases, intended victims of the warring parties. As Liz Sly and Loveday Morris wrote recently in The Washington Post, “A war that began with peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad is rapidly descending into a global scramble for control over what remains of the broken country of Syria, risking a wider conflict. Under skies crowded by the warplanes of half a dozen countries, an assortment of factions backed by rival powers […]

Secessionists in southern Yemen have agitated for independence for almost as long as there has been a unified Yemeni state. But since unification in 1990, a common complaint among foreign diplomats and Yemeni government officials was that the secessionists were too diffuse and too poorly organized to credibly demand independence or even political relevance. They were seen as a noisy rabble with no real platform or strategy. Yemen’s civil war has changed that, as a group of secessionists is now moving to build a state within Yemen’s state of chaos. In late January, clashes in the southern port city of […]

On Jan. 31, India signed a 20-year agreement with the island nation of the Seychelles to build an airstrip and jetty for the Indian navy. The pact, which was in the offing for years, reflects greater competition between India and China to establish naval positions in the Indian Ocean. In an email interview, James Holmes, the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Navy War College, discusses the deal and India’s wider strategy to keep tabs on China in what New Delhi sees as its “rightful nautical preserve.” WPR: How does India’s port deal with the Seychelles […]

Less than three weeks ago, Colombians saw a familiar face splashed across every news platform. The man known by his nom de guerre “Timochenko,” the leader of what used to be Colombia’s largest guerilla group, which fought government forces for more than half a century, was formally launching his campaign for the presidency. As the head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC by its Spanish acronym, Rodrigo Londono had commanded thousands of men and women in a campaign for a radical Marxist revolution. But Londono also guided the militia to a peace deal in 2016, vowing […]

Much was made in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency of “Trump’s generals,” the retired and active flag officers who made up his Cabinet and White House staff. Retired generals James Mattis and John Kelly, acting as defense secretary and then-homeland security chief respectively, and active-duty Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, were seen as experienced national security hands who would, it was hoped, create a buffer between America’s vital interests and a new president who wasn’t just inexperienced but often reckless and incendiary. From the outset, there were misgivings about such an outsized role for military […]