Defense & Security Archive

In a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, President Joe Biden discussed the two leaders’ intent to “pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues,” according to a White House statement. Specifically, Biden said he hopes to build on the U.S. and Russia’s recent agreement on a five-year extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, which is the last remaining nuclear arms control deal between the two countries. According to Sarah Bidgood, the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation […]

After two decades of a war that started out with what he called clear objectives and a just cause, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he would withdraw the last remaining American troops from Afghanistan. In a 15-minute speech from the White House Treaty Room, where then-President George W. Bush informed the nation in October 2001 of the first U.S. airstrikes against al-Qaida training camps, Biden declared, “I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.” How he inherited the […]

For years, the Venezuelan government has permitted armed groups from neighboring Colombia to operate within its borders. It has even occasionally conspired with these groups, taking a cut of the profits from their drug trafficking, extortion and other illicit activities in exchange for allowing them freedom to maneuver. But last month, Venezuela launched a major military offensive against a faction of Colombian guerrillas that is active near the two countries’ border, and which is believed to have fallen out of favor with President Nicolas Maduro’s autocratic government. These are not the first clashes between Venezuelan security forces and Colombian armed […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Rachel Cheung and Assistant Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. On Monday, China’s People Liberation Army flew 25 aircraft, including fighter jets and bombers, through Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, marking the largest such incursion since the self-ruled democracy began making its data on them public last September. Taiwan has continued to monitor the movements of the Chinese aircraft, transmit radio warnings to them and track them with its missile defense systems. But […]

One of President Joe Biden’s first actions after taking office in January was to agree with Russian President Vladimir Putin on extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Better known as New START, it is the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, verifiably limiting each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems. The renewal of New START was widely welcomed by experts, given its important role in limiting the number of deployed nuclear weapons in the world. In a phone call this week, Biden and Putin discussed their intent […]

In the introduction to her 2013 book, “Policing Protest,” the Italian scholar Donatella della Porta described the stereotypical image of a British policeman as a “friendly bobby giving directions to a foreign tourist.” That amiable, unarmed, neighborly figure, she noted, was emblematic of a traditional policing style in the United Kingdom that had once been seen as a model by many agencies elsewhere in Europe. Today, the prevalent image of British security forces could not be more different. On March 12, a London Metropolitan Police officer was charged for the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard, an […]

Every four years, the U.S. intelligence community, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publishes its Global Trends report looking ahead 20 years into the future. As efforts to identify far-horizon threats today, the reports usually make for fairly gloomy reading. This year’s “Global Trends 2040” report is no exception. It describes the ongoing pandemic as “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political and security implications that will ripple for years to come.” Worse still, it warns of “more intense and cascading global challenges” ahead. Though he is not cited […]

BOGOTA, Colombia—In his last visit to Colombia as U.S. vice president in December 2016, Joe Biden praised then-President Juan Manuel Santos for the historic peace accord reached that year with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the country’s largest guerrilla group, better known as the FARC—which ended the longest-running armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere. More than four years later, the Andean nation is at risk of losing most of the security gains from the hard-won peace agreement, with violence escalating to levels last seen before the peace talks. Now that Biden is back in office as president, he must pay […]

Some things haven’t changed in seven years. One of the first pieces I wrote for WPR was on the prospects for transitional justice in Syria someday, roughly three years into a civil war that still hasn’t ended today. The news hook back then was the appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee of a former Syrian military photographer, hidden under a blue hoodie and identified only as “Caesar.” He had defected from the regime and smuggled a trove of roughly 55,000 photographs out of Syria, documenting the deaths of some 11,000 prisoners killed in Bashar al-Assad’s jails—many showing signs of […]

In the days after Myanmar’s military staged a coup on Feb. 1, it likely hoped to consolidate power with minimal bloodshed. Having overthrown the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Tatmadaw, as the armed forces are known in Myanmar, set out to create a managed democracy like neighboring Thailand’s, with an electoral system that guarantees victory for military-aligned parties and their allies. The coup leader, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, probably hoped that neighboring states and possibly even the world’s leading democracies would eventually recognize Myanmar’s new government. Indeed, as protests erupted across the country in the coup’s […]

When it comes to armed drones, is smaller and more precise necessarily better? The question came to my mind upon seeing the news that the U.S. Air Force just successfully test-launched a new weaponizable drone, the ALTIUS-600, making it the smallest drone in operation. Even more remarkably, this tiny aircraft was launched from the second-smallest-drone, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, while the Valkyrie was in flight. There is nothing objectionable about the development of mini-drones. One could even argue they would be improvements, in humanitarian terms, over the use of the much larger Reaper to deliver 500-pound bombs in allegedly “precise” […]

There is perhaps nothing so difficult or so important as thinking independently in the face of a gathering consensus. Very few people have the courage displayed by Rep. Barbara Lee, who just three days after the attacks of 9/11 cast the sole vote in Congress opposing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which gave the Bush administration broad discretionary powers to wage war against terrorists. Lee’s opposition was not based on naïveté or ideological purity, both of which can be the source of what otherwise resembles iconoclastic thinking. Rather, she had the prescience and lucidity to see the dangers […]

Facing his most severe political crisis since taking office in 2019, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, resorted to a broad reshuffle of his Cabinet last week, giving more of a voice to center-right parties in order to shore up his support and reduce the risk of impeachment while ousting three military commanders whom he considered insufficiently loyal. As Brazil heads into a perfect storm—an out-of-control pandemic combined with economic collapse and growing political discontent—Bolsonaro appears to be surrounding himself with loyalists who are willing to protect him and his four sons, all of whom are under investigation for crimes ranging […]

Millions of people in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region are facing starvation. Until now, it’s been a crisis without pictures. Those wrenching images of emaciated children and mothers with dull-eyed gazes, so sadly familiar from famine zones, have yet to emerge. But that’s because journalists aren’t permitted to travel to the worst-hit areas of Tigray, where hunger is deepening by the day. When the media can finally get access, or when starving villagers abandon their homes and flee to towns, the pictures will surely remind viewers of drought victims from Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, which prompted the famous LiveAid benefit concert and […]

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. For more than a week, Islamic State-linked militants have laid siege to Palma, a coastal town in northern Mozambique that serves as a hub for natural gas projects worth a combined $60 billion. The sustained attack has left dozens of people dead, potentially displacing tens of thousands more. It is the most severe escalation of a jihadist insurgency that began in 2017, and is expected to exacerbate an […]

For the better part of six years since Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk II cease-fire accord for the disputed eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass, one question has loomed: How will the U.S. and NATO respond if Russian troops again cross back over the so-called Line of Contact, dividing Ukrainian forces from Russian-backed separatists? With reports now trickling in of a buildup of Russian military forces along the border and in Crimea, Washington and Brussels may need quick answers soon. In response to those reports, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke this week with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, […]

Nigeria is once again facing a challenge that has grown all too familiar: children in peril. Kidnappings first gained international prominence in 2014, when the jihadist group Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok. Despite a global media campaign to urge their safe return, #BringBackOurGirls, more than 100 of them are still missing today. Many more children have been abducted since then—and the trend could get even worse. Over the past four months, armed groups have raided boarding schools and kidnapped more than 650 students. In perhaps the most prominent of these […]