Defense & Security Archive

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. ORAN, Algeria—Early one morning last April, Etienne, a 36-year-old migrant from Cameroon, was asleep in the hotel room he rented by the month in this port city on the northwestern coast of Algeria. His plan, like most days, was to wake up at 6 a.m. and head to the private residence where he worked as a gardener. On this particular morning, however, he was roused ahead of schedule. At 4 a.m., a […]

Judging from the political priorities in Berlin, Rome or any other European capital these days, you’d think that migration control and border management are the only important issues facing policymakers. Everywhere you look, more and more policy tools are being used to “fight” or solve problems related to migration, with some repurposed for the task. The same has been true for the European Union in recent years. In Brussels, this trend can be traced back to the summer of 2016, when the EU published its updated doctrine for defense and security policy, called the European Union Global Strategy. The doctrine […]

In May, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the international nuclear deal with Iran, which was negotiated and signed by both countries along with France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia and China. The agreement, known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, had imposed strict controls and oversight on Iran’s domestic nuclear program, in return for the easing of multilateral sanctions and the suspension of U.S. unilateral sanctions on Iran. In withdrawing from the deal, Trump promised to reimpose sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry, as well as so-called third-party sanctions on any companies that did business […]

Ending wars means working with bad people. You cannot forge a cease-fire or hammer out a peace deal without talking to leaders who are directly responsible for death and brutality. Some of these leaders may be genuinely honorable individuals. A lot won’t be. This is a hard truth that professional peacemakers admit in private but tend to avoid mentioning in public. Analysts and officials working on conflict resolution have developed a blandly bloodless technical vocabulary for discussing their field. Political agreements should be “locally owned.” Peace should be “sustainable.” Peace operations should be “people-centered,” and so on. Every profession has […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Ahead of this week’s elections in Zimbabwe, Simon Allison noted in an in-depth report for WPR that the ruling party, ZANU-PF, has been “pitching itself as the party of change” despite having run the country since it attained independence in 1980. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, it appears the world will get to see what exactly the party means by “change,” though the events of recent days offer several reasons to be pessimistic. On Friday morning, officials […]

As the United States became a superpower in the 20th century, its grand strategy relied on qualitative military strength, economic power and, in the information realm, an appealing narrative about American national interests and foreign policy. This combination—what security experts call the “elements of national power”—was immensely successful, underpinning American hegemony and projecting U.S. influence around the world. But today, America’s preponderance seems in decline. In the military and economic realms, this is relative, largely the result of what Fareed Zakaria calls “the rise of the rest.” America’s diminishing ability to wage information warfare is harder to explain. Leaders in […]

After 13 years of relative stability, a politically weakened German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had to endure major upheaval in recent months. Merkel cobbled together a governing coalition after winning re-election last year, but her government is increasingly beholden to the nationalist tendencies of its smallest member, the Christian Social Union, the sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Beyond Germany’s borders, Merkel must confront ongoing divisions within the European Union, lingering questions about how to process migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and the uncertainty created by the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The following 10 WPR […]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a surprise visit to Israel last week for talks about Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria. The negotiations came amid heightened tensions along Syria’s southern border with Israel, where the Assad regime’s recent offensive to retake lost territory from rebels renewed conflict in an area that had been protected by a 2017 cease-fire agreement guaranteed by Russia, Jordan and the United States. The fighting raises concerns about the proximity of Iranian-backed forces, including Hezbollah, to northern Israel. In response to this threat, Israel launched a series of attacks on Iranian targets within Syria, including the […]