Defense & Security Archive

North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party held its Eighth Party Congress earlier this month, followed by a big military parade—the second one since October. According to Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, the series of well-publicized events were meant to project resilience at a time when North Korea is reeling from a “triple whammy” of economic sanctions, natural disasters and COVID-19. Kim joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss the big takeaways from the party congress. Listen to the full interview with Duyeon […]

When riots erupted across the Netherlands last weekend against a new coronavirus lockdown, the scenes of mayhem triggered a cascade of emotions. “My city is crying, and so am I,” said John Jorritsma, the mayor of Eindhoven, the country’s fifth-largest city, contemplating the damage from all the violence. But the sentiment was not just sadness. Furious, and perhaps a bit frightened, Jorritsma called the rioters “the scum of the Earth” and warned that the country could be “on our way to civil war.” The protests in nearly a dozen Dutch cities erupted under the banner of rejecting stricter measures to […]

North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party has had a busy start to the year. Earlier this month, the Eighth Party Congress was held in the capital, Pyongyang: Eight days of meetings, including a 9-hour work report read out by leader Kim Jong Un himself. Just a couple days after those sessions wrapped up, Kim oversaw a celebratory military parade, the second one since October, featuring a new missile described by state media as the “world’s most powerful weapon.” New analysis of satellite imagery by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute suggests Pyongyang could be preparing for […]

When Hurricanes Eta and Iota crashed through Central America in November, they caused massive devastation and destruction, leaving around 200 people dead and thousands displaced. Economists believe that in some parts of the region, the economic toll of these disasters could be greater than the damage inflicted in Honduras and Nicaragua by Hurricane Mitch in 1998—the deadliest hurricane in Central American history. Honduras was the worst hit by Eta and Iota. More than 4 million people were affected, around 95,000 of whom were forced to take refuge in shelters, and may not have homes to return to; 85,000 homes were […]

Afghanistan may not rank in the top tier of U.S. President Joe Biden’s policy priorities, given the host of pressing crises in the United States. But Afghanistan’s fate hinges in large part on how the Biden team decides to approach the country’s conflict and its tenuous, still-nascent peace process. Biden will be compelled to make critical decisions on Afghanistan during his first months in office that will affect the country’s conflict—and relationship with the U.S.—for years to come. Over the past year, the outgoing U.S. administration attempted to set a peace process in motion by signing a political agreement with […]

President Joe Biden will need to combine prudence with creativity to forge a more productive relationship with Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its largest economy. Notwithstanding Nigeria’s relative decline as a power within Africa, U.S.-Nigeria ties remain extensive by regional and continental standards. But they’ve been stymied in recent years by tensions over political corruption, Nigeria’s difficulties in managing the threat from the violent extremist group Boko Haram and the human rights record of Nigerian security forces. Nigeria’s importance to U.S. policy considerations lies in its large population, geographic size and economic heft, all of which have historically provided […]

The growing prevalence of zoonotic diseases, underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing loss of biodiversity around the world make tackling the illicit trade in wild animals imperative, since it threatens global public health and the extinction of endangered species. Fortunately, a practical approach is there for the taking. The Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime has launched a campaign to fill gaping holes in two international treaties: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, and the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, or UNTOC. The new Biden administration should […]

After security forces beat back the pro-Trump extremists that had occupied the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, shaken lawmakers returned to continue the work they had started that afternoon: certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Mitch McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, proclaimed triumphantly. But the would-be insurrectionists “don’t look at this as a failure,” says Colin Clarke, an expert on domestic and transnational terrorism at the Soufan Group. “They look at this as an overwhelming and resounding success … a rallying cry for the far right.” Earlier this […]

U.S. President Joe Biden’s first opportunity to pivot away from Donald Trump’s often cozy approach to Russia came just days before he took office. The Kremlin’s swift detention of President Vladimir Putin’s chief critic, Alexei Navalny, when he returned to Moscow on Sunday—five months after surviving a failed assassination attempt—presents Biden with perhaps unwelcome pressure to respond quickly. But it also gives his administration the chance to accelerate its goal of reversing four years of silence on Russia from the White House and simultaneously restarting diplomatic coordination with much-neglected European allies. Navalny’s decision to return to Russia was either foolish […]

The storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., by pro-Trump insurrectionists earlier this month was both shocking and utterly unsurprising. After all, for anyone paying attention to the rioters’ social media posts in the days and weeks leading up to the event, they made their intentions clear. A subset of the participants appeared to have technical training, and had laid meticulous plans well in advance of Jan. 6. The attack on the Capitol, then, was a culmination—not just of the insurrectionists’ efforts to train and arm themselves for a violent revolt, but also of years of recruitment and radicalization by […]

Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president was greeted with deep relief in Berlin, as it was in most other European capitals. After Donald Trump’s presidency—which was characterized by animosity toward Germany and repeated attempts to sow division among European countries—German policymakers hope that some immediate sources of tension can now be resolved, such as Trump’s tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports or the long-running trans-Atlantic dispute over aerospace subsidies. There are also multiple opportunities for Germany to collaborate on key strategic challenges with Biden, a committed multilateralist and Atlanticist, who has repeatedly underlined the value of a strong and […]

The son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge. A masonry worker from Des Moines, Iowa. A one-time Cleveland educator who said a day after the siege that she was “switching paths” to expose the “global evil of human trafficking and pedophilia.” A guy wearing a knit cap bearing the logo of the Chicago Fire Department, known on Twitter only as #extinguisherman for the footage showing him wielding an extinguisher near the steps where Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was beaten to death. These are the new anti-heroes of American democracy’s violent convulsions. There are hundreds more pro-Trump supporters implicated in […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive Africa Watch by email every week. United Nations peacekeepers helped the Central African Republic’s armed forces beat back a rebel attack on the capital, Bangui, on Wednesday, marking a dramatic escalation in a conflict that erupted ahead of last month’s presidential election and now threatens to spiral into a regional crisis. A Rwandan peacekeeper was killed during the attacks on two army brigades on the outskirts of Bangui, according to U.N. officials, and several […]

In November, as the Ethiopian government escalated its military campaign against the northern Tigray region, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed quietly ordered a drawdown of Ethiopian peacekeepers from neighboring Somalia. The scale of the move is still unconfirmed, but as many as 3,000 Ethiopian troops were reportedly redeployed to fight against the regional ruling party in Tigray, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF. Around 200 to 300 ethnic Tigrayan soldiers in Somalia were also disarmed, and some may have even been purged from the ranks. The Ethiopian troops’ departure injects additional uncertainty into Somalia’s already precarious security situation, as it […]

In the week since a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory, our picture of the day’s events has come into sharper focus. With every video and eye-witness account that appears, it becomes clearer that the attempt to subvert American democracy was far more violent than it initially seemed. But huge gaps remain in our understanding of how that violent mob managed to penetrate what should have been a heavily guarded and secure site, especially given the threats that had been circulating online about plans to […]

International expectations are high for Joe Biden’s presidency, but perhaps nowhere more than in Europe, where political leaders and observers see an opportunity to revitalize the trans-Atlantic relationship after years of drift and then downright antagonism under Donald Trump. They have reason to be optimistic. Biden and his pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, are confirmed Atlanticists. They recognize that, despite Asia’s rise, the United States and Europe are still the load-bearing pillars of any open and stable international system. The president-elect has pleased Europeans so far by pledging to return to the Paris Agreement on climate change, remain […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Not long before the New Year, I paid a visit to an Islamic teacher, known as a marabout, who lives in an unfinished house here on the outskirts of Burkina Faso’s capital. I had first spoken with him earlier in 2020, after he was displaced from his home near the northern city of Djibo, in Soum province, near the border with Mali—a part of the country that has become a major frontline in the campaign against violent jihadist organizations. The marabout belongs to the Fulani ethnic group, often the target of persecution despite being one of the largest […]