Defense & Security Archive

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, Middle East Memo, which takes a look at what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s on the horizon in the Middle East. Subscribe to receive it by email every Monday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it. The Iraqi state has been on life support for years. But it has lurched deeper into decline over the past few weeks, as renegade militias accelerated their assassination campaign against both dissidents and government officials, appearing to shrug off a symbolic attempt by Prime Minister Mustafa […]

The United States is “back,” proclaims U.S. President Joe Biden, seemingly as often as he can. The coming week will show if the same is true of the West. At successive summits of the G-7, NATO and the European Union, Biden and fellow leaders will confront a dual task: reviving the community of advanced market democracies and showing that the West is capable of resolving today’s complex transnational challenges. Biden’s election in November heartened the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and understandably so. The new president promised to pick up the mantle of global leadership that Trump had cast aside and […]

When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met last month with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Reykjavik, it prompted inevitable comparisons with another high-level encounter in Iceland’s capital: the famous October 1986 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that set the stage for the thawing of the Cold War. As the current American and Russian leaders, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, prepare for their first summit on June 16 in Geneva, prospects are slim for the kind of breakthrough achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev. Tensions remain high due to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which uses relevant WPR coverage to provide background and context to the week’s top stories. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. This week, the story I followed most closely wasn’t a breaking news item or global development, but an important debate taking place in Washington these days over whether or not restraint should serve as the guiding framework for U.S. foreign policy. The concept of restraint grew out […]

While Americans commemorated their fallen soldiers on Memorial Day this week, a group of activists in Luxembourg were inaugurating a different kind of war memorial. Handicap International Belgium, that country’s chapter of an NGO originally dedicated to civilian victims of landmines, unveiled a sculpture by artist Manolis Manarakis commemorating the civilian dead of all modern wars. It was the latest in a series of monument unveilings, including another just last month in Brussels, meant not only to recognize civilian victims of war, but to underscore their absence in the global culture of war memorials. In the United States, Memorial Day […]

Developments in the Eastern Mediterranean region are unfolding at a breakneck pace. Blink an eye and one is bound to miss a new multilateral initiative, an impressive military exercise or even the creation of an international organization. Greece is very much in the middle of this diplomatic and military frenzy, so understanding Greek foreign policy can provide penetrating insights into developments in the region. Athens views the Eastern Mediterranean as a source of turbulence and instability—a transit route for waves of refugees, bordered by war-torn states like Libya and Syria, and with the potential for jihadist terrorist attacks. The recent […]

A decade ago, while researching a book about Chinese migration to Africa, I made an extended stay in Namibia, then one of a small number of African countries I had never visited in a lifetime of writing about the continent. To get to know the place as well as I could, I rented a car and drove with my brother, James, throughout much of the country, a land more than twice the size of Germany. The reference here is appropriate, because it was Germany, a relative latecomer to European imperialism in Africa, that colonized Namibia toward the close of the […]

In early May, when Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki visited Sudan, the official objective of the trip was to strengthen bilateral ties within a regional framework. The visit nevertheless raised eyebrows. It came on the heels of Eritrea’s military participation in Ethiopia’s civil war in Tigray region, and also at a time of rising tensions between Ethiopia and Sudan over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and a border dispute involving areas near Tigray, among other issues. Unofficially, local observers have suggested that Eritrea may seek a role in mediating between Ethiopia and Sudan. Whatever the actual purpose of Isaias’ visit, it […]

Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of wartime violence and rape. PRISTINA—It’s a cold morning in Rance, a mountainous village east of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, and Isak Asllani is preparing to pay tribute at a memorial for his fallen family and friends. It is a painful ritual he carries out every Feb. 17 to mark the anniversary of Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, and the end of decades of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Asllani was 40 years old in May 1998, when he decided to join the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian, separatist guerilla group that fought […]