Defense & Security Archive

Despite the U.S. military’s superiority, there are several reasons America could lose a future war: An enemy could exploit America's fraying security alliances or its domestic political rifts or develop a militarily decisive technology that the United States lacks. The critical question is how the United States would react. Last week, I argued that while the U.S. military, the Pentagon and most national security experts expect that the United States will always win the wars it is forced to fight, America could in fact lose one if an astute enemy capitalizes on the nation’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I sketched out […]

In Liberia, one of the surest signs that a news story has captured the attention of the general public is when someone starts singing about it on the radio. In August 2014, the Auto-Tune-heavy hit “Ebola in Town,” by Samuel “Shadow” Morgan and Edwin “D-12” Tweh, caught fire right around the time the World Health Organization began describing the West African epidemic as an international emergency. During the most recent presidential campaigns, in 2011 and 2017, the candidates’ catchiest theme songs saturated the airwaves as Election Day approached. Recently, to the consternation of President George Weah, a new topical jam […]

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. When Meng Hongwei, China’s vice minister of public security, was elected president of Interpol in 2016, it was hailed in China as a sign of the country’s ability to lead international organizations. But in a dramatic turn of events late last week, his wife reported him missing to French authorities in Lyon—where Interpol has its headquarters—after not hearing from him since he traveled to China in late September. A text message with an ominous […]

In a speech last week that seemed as much an effort to catch up to recent events as a formal declaration of policy, Vice President Mike Pence put Beijing on notice that “the United States of America has adopted a new approach to China.” The address, delivered at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, for the most part covered familiar ground in terms of American grievances with the bilateral relationship. Having spent the past 20 years seeking to invite China into the international order as a “responsible stakeholder,” the U.S. has now run out of patience over Beijing’s unfair […]

Editor’s Note: This story was a Finalist for a 2019 Livingston Award, for excellence in international reporting. In July 2019, it also received an Honorable Mention by the National Press Club for the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence, which recognizes excellence in reporting on diplomatic and foreign policy issues. SAN SALVADOR—At around 2 a.m. on a Sunday this past May, Ricardo Canenguez sent his girlfriend, Damaris Perez, a text message with a license plate number. The plate belonged to the car of a police officer who, Canenguez said, had harassed him—and struck him—for no apparent reason while he […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss rising tensions and the risk of conflict between the U.S. and China. For the Report, Emmanuel Freudenthal talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about why the situation in Cameroon’s Anglophone region is a greater threat to President Paul Biya’s grip on power than the country’s presidential election this Sunday. 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 our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The […]

The U.S. military doesn’t spend much time thinking about how America could lose a war. Neither do America’s political leaders and security experts. Whether described in operational plans, strategic wargames or even fiction, the pattern mirrors the Civil War or World War II: Things are hairy at first and defeat even seems possible since an aggressor struck first, but then the United States gets serious, turns the tide and fights its way to victory. In the collective American memory, armed conflicts that have not followed this script—Vietnam, Korea—are largely forgotten or attributed to political ineptitude. Victory is still considered the […]

On Sept. 30, residents of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, were busy with an almost ritualistic activity this time of year: cleaning up after a tropical storm. Typhoon Trami had struck the day before, causing dozens of injuries, power outages and transportation disruptions. But this year, Okinawans had something else on their minds beyond the recovery efforts. They were preparing to go to the polls to elect their next governor. The election, initially scheduled for November, had been moved up due to the death of Gov. Takeshi Onaga in August, from pancreatic cancer. Onaga was a staunch opponent of a contentious […]

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. Much of China is on a weeklong holiday to mark the 69th anniversary of the country’s founding. But while the so-called Golden Week, which kicked off with China’s National Day on Monday, could offer a welcome respite from an especially tumultuous period for U.S.-China relations, there were few signs that tensions might ease in sensitive areas like security and trade. Last Wednesday, U.S. B-52 bombers flew over the South China Sea in what Pentagon […]

A little more than a year after the launch of its new South Asia strategy, the Trump administration—without officially announcing a change in approach—appears to have refocused much of its efforts in Afghanistan around a long-elusive peace process. Gen. John Nicholson, the departing top military commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, backed up the Afghan government’s extended cease-fire with the Taliban during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in June, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently appointed former Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as a new special envoy tasked with leading reconciliation efforts. But despite that summer cease-fire and some preliminary […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series about national drug policies in various countries around the world. Last month, South Africa’s Constitutional Court surprised many observers by upholding a lower court decision striking down the country’s prohibition on the consumption and cultivation of cannabis for personal use. The ruling was widely cheered by advocates, but lawmakers in Cape Town and officials in Pretoria must now decide how best to implement this sudden legal shift. In an interview with WPR, Anine Kriegler, a doctoral candidate in criminology at the University of Cape Town, explains why hammering out the […]

Cameroonian President Paul Biya is expected to coast to re-election on Oct. 7. But two ongoing conflicts have undermined what he has long pitched as his greatest strength: his ability to maintain peace in an otherwise unstable region. The coming years could be among the most challenging of his decades-long reign. In the grainy cellphone footage, Cameroonian soldiers march two women down a sandy road. One of the women wears a pink t-shirt, large silver earrings and a bright blue headwrap. Her head upright, she carries a baby on her back. The other woman has an outfit of green patterned […]

On Sept. 26, in a tense, crowded courtroom in Guatemala City, a three-judge panel ruled unanimously that genocide and crimes against humanity occurred in the Maya-Ixil region of northern Guatemala in 1982 and 1983, at the height of the country’s civil war. But in a split 2-1 vote, the court determined that the defendant, retired Gen. Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, did not bear criminal responsibility for the crimes and acquitted him on all charges. Ixil witnesses who testified during the trial described the court’s ruling as “bittersweet” and vowed to continue their fight for justice. This was the second acquittal […]

Last month, Turkey and Russia, largely on opposites sides of the Syrian civil war, struck an 11th-hour deal to prevent a military assault by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on the last remaining rebel stronghold of Idlib in northwestern Syria. While the agreement, which was reached in the Russian Black Sea resort town of Sochi, won’t end the Syrian conflict, it buys some time to attempt to find a sustainable resolution in Idlib, where there are some 30,000 rebel fighters, perhaps a third of them al-Qaida-linked extremists. But if all things fail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has crafted the agreement in […]