Defense & Security Archive

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 what Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power could mean for U.S.-China ties. For the Report, Tim Ferry talks with Peter Dörrie about a little-covered angle of the increasingly bitter diplomatic sparring between Taiwan and China: Taiwanese telecom scammers who have fanned out across the world to avoid detection, but often find themselves extradited back to mainland China, and more severe punishment, when they are arrested. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read […]

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner—both former senior officials in the Obama administration—noted that over the past 45 years, “neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted.” From Richard Nixon on, American presidents believed that U.S. diplomacy and military power could “persuade Beijing that it was neither possible nor necessary to challenge the U.S.-led security order in Asia.” But that didn’t prove true. Today, as Campbell and Ratner note, “China is on the path to becoming a military peer the likes of which the United States has not seen since the Soviet Union” […]

Now that the self-proclaimed Islamic State is mostly uprooted in Syria, observers are wondering what the next stage in Syria’s complicated war will bring. The post-ISIS phase conjures a series of possible scenarios, including dangerous escalation and a much larger internationalization of the conflict, as seen in recent weeks with Turkey’s campaign against the Kurds, an American strike on reported Russian mercenaries attacking U.S.-backed forces, and Israel’s skirmish with Iran—all on Syrian soil. But there’s another area where the reverberations from the war in Syria have the potential to explode. Tensions between Lebanon and Israel are simmering, and all the […]