Defense & Security Archive

By now, you will have already seen the endless stream of scenes from the violent breach of the Capitol building on Wednesday by extremist supporters of President Donald Trump. There was the guy belaying down the wall from the Senate gallery, and the police with guns drawn in congressional chambers. There was the guy strolling through the halls of Congress with a huge Confederate flag. This is the new iconography of America’s 240-year experiment with democracy. Expect to see more of it. Only moments before those scenes unfolded, the good gentleman from Kentucky, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, struck […]

BANGUI, Central African Republic—On the evening of Dec. 27, poll workers here in the capital of the Central African Republic were busy tabulating votes from presidential and legislative elections that were held that day. Many worked in dark classrooms without electricity, using their cellphone lights to check ballots. Then, an explosion rang out, forcing them to briefly stop their work. Was it artillery fire? A grenade? In a city traumatized by seven years of violent conflict, and more recently by a surging rebel coalition threatening to advance on Bangui, many residents were not immediately sure what to expect. The cause […]

More than 340 schoolboys were abducted from their boarding school in northwestern Nigeria last month, apparently by armed criminal gangs affiliated with the extremist group Boko Haram. Though the boys were freed and reunited with their families a week later, the incident was a worrying sign that Boko Haram is expanding beyond its traditional base in northeastern Nigeria. According to Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Boko Haram’s resurgence suggests the need for a more holistic, transnational approach to countering […]

Just days into the new year, Iran announced that “a couple of hours ago,” it had started enriching uranium to 20 percent—a level that experts say would put it within a six-month sprint of converting its entire nuclear stockpile to bomb-grade material. Tehran’s move Monday raises the pressure on President-elect Joe Biden, whose administration now has no time to waste in facing an adversary signaling that it has no intention of warmly embracing Biden’s diplomatic outreach. Iran is raising the stakes for Biden in the waning days of the Trump administration, trying to set the timetable for nuclear negotiations even […]

Nigeria’s ongoing battle with the violent extremist group Boko Haram took a worrying turn last month, when more than 300 young schoolboys were abducted from their boarding school in Katsina state, in northwestern Nigeria. Thankfully, the students were freed and reunited with their families a week later. But the attack carried chilling echoes of another mass abduction from 2014, when 276 female students were kidnapped from their school in the northeastern town of Chibok. More than 100 of those girls are still missing. While Boko Haram has taken credit for last month’s raid, experts and Nigerian officials say the true […]

Nothing could be more normal than to regard the ceaseless spread of COVID-19 across the United States as a public health crisis. Indeed, as many commentators have called it, this pandemic is the preeminent public health crisis of the past century. As almost everyone knows by now, not since the 1918 flu pandemic have the lives and livelihoods of so many Americans—or people elsewhere, for that matter—been so gravely threatened by the uncontrolled spread of a single infectious disease. With the availability of new vaccines, however, this crisis is shifting into a new and completely different phase. The public health […]

As COVID-19 spread around the world last spring, El Salvador joined the dozens of countries that were appealing for urgent humanitarian assistance. Hundreds of millions of dollars rapidly flowed into El Salvador’s coffers from bilateral donors, private lenders and international financial institutions, including a $389 million loan from the International Monetary Fund that was approved in April. Flush with borrowed money and facing an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, the Salvadoran legislature approved a $2 billion emergency fund to combat the pandemic—equivalent to nearly 8 percent of the country’s GDP. But the sudden inflow of cash has also created […]

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office later this month, many U.S. allies and partners are eyeing an opportunity for better relations with Washington. But Turkey, under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will face an uphill battle to settle its ongoing disputes with the United States, not to mention its other NATO allies. There are three major impediments to a reset in Turkey’s ties with the West. First, the U.S. remains at loggerheads with Turkey over Erdogan’s decision to purchase an advanced missile defense system from Russia. Second, the European Union is considering tough sanctions against Ankara […]

VIENNA—As the clock ticks down to U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration this month, hopes are high that he will rejoin and preserve key arms control agreements that were abandoned or neglected by the outgoing president, Donald Trump. If Biden can successfully reverse course, it will go a long way to restoring America’s credibility, given that Trump has “bankrupted the United States’ word in the world,” as Biden put it in Foreign Affairs last March. “On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated,” he wrote. But how straightforward […]

The U.S.S. Nimitz was leaving the Middle East, until it wasn’t. The Pentagon’s abrupt reversal of its move late last week to send the aircraft carrier home is the latest sign of an ominous standoff with Iran in the last, chaotic days of Donald Trump’s presidency. A year ago, Trump ordered the brazen drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Fears that it would start a full-fledged war dissipated after Iran made a calculated show of retaliation, firing a barrage of ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. There were no […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Richard Gowan is filling in for Stewart M. Patrick, who will return next week. What lies in store for the United Nations Security Council in 2021? People unfamiliar with the council’s inner workings might be surprised to learn how much of it is routine, as diplomats update mandates for ongoing peace operations and sanctions regimes on a pre-set schedule. But unforeseen wars and crises always force their way onto the agenda. Addressing incoming diplomats of the council’s temporary members at an event in Brussels in December 2019, I warned that they must expect to address at […]