Defense & Security Archive

The popularity of Nayib Bukele’s iron-fisted crime policies in El Salvador has caused politicians across Latin America to emulate him. But the results of recent elections in Ecuador and Guatemala indicate voters want more than tough talk.

After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death, Russia’s long-term trajectory under Putin looks increasingly dire. The enormous complexity of Russia’s challenges is more likely to paralyze Russia’s elites in ways that will enable Putin to delay a reckoning until long after the damage he has done can no longer be fixed.

Jordan is considered a Syrian refugee “success story.” But Syrians who reside there are increasingly concerned about changes in the government’s posture toward them. They fear that they may soon be pressured to leave.

The recent coup in Niger presents the United States with a familiar dilemma in how it conducts security assistance. There is no easy solution, but current dynamics in the Sahel, which indicate that without outside help al-Qaeda and Islamic State-affiliated groups will rapidly gain strength in the region, call for U.S. policymakers to pursue a pragmatic course.

Four years after the Philippine government signed a peace accord with an Islamic militant group establishing an autonomous region in the country’s southern province, a tense encounter between the group and government forces has highlighted the fragility of the peace process leading up to the region’s first elections in 2025.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, independent Russian journalists who refused to follow the Kremlin’s narrow rules have had to flee the country, endure persecution by Russian intelligence and suffer the suspicion of those in their new homes. Now the attempted assassination of one of their own has raised their fears to new heights.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates has worked proactively to embrace Russian business while hoping to evade pressure from the U.S. and its allies. Despite narratives of the UAE and Saudi Arabia drifting from the U.S. orbit, the Gulf states continue to recognize their dependency on U.S. security ties.

The end of the war in Tigray in November 2022 brought relative peace to the region and eased international pressure on Addis Ababa. Yet, it has precipitated the explosion of another devastating war, this time between Ethiopian government forces and their erstwhile partners in the Tigray war from the country’s Amhara region.

Against the backdrop of the Maui wildfires, U.S. President Joe Biden is facing renewed calls to declare a climate emergency but has been hedging on whether to do so for political reasons. But Biden is overlooking an untapped source of political capital that would ease the declaration of a climate emergency: the U.S. military.

In early August, Kenya volunteered to lead a multinational police force, to which it will deploy 1,000 police officers. to reestablish security in Haiti. But when Kenya’s assessment team arrives in the country in the coming weeks, it will discover that Haiti’s crisis is not just a policing challenge. It is an urban warfare nightmare.

In March, the latest chapter was written in a political and legal controversy between Italy and France that dates back to the 1980s. But while a verdict from France’s highest criminal court caps a four-decade-long saga that began during Italy’s “years of lead,” it fails to resolve the tensions at the heart of those events.

When Myanmar’s ruling military announced last week that it was issuing a partial pardon for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, it seemed a sign that the regime might be preparing to loosen its grip and perhaps even compromise with the opposition. That optimistic interpretation, however, is being rejected by many Myanmar observers.

In the past two weeks, the coup in Niger has snowballed into a confrontation pitting the civilian-led states of ECOWAS against military juntas in West Africa. But the standoff is a symptom of broader dysfunctions in the global system that underscore the need for the EU and its members to reassess their approaches to foreign policy.

Since the launch of the “great power competition” framework, U.S. policymakers seem to have moved on entirely from the war on terror, focusing instead on countering China and Russia. But as the U.S. military’s significant presence in Niger demonstrates, it would be a mistake to consider the war on terror as solely in the past.

A congressional hearings last Wednesday suggested the U.S. government possesses extraterrestrial UFOs. Skepticism seems warranted. But if, for the sake of argument, it is eventually confirmed that intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms have visited Earth and continue to do, it would have profound impacts on international politics.

The coup in Niger caught much of the outside world by surprise, given the country’s image as a relatively stable outlier in a region beset by upheaval. But if foreign observers were stunned by President Mohamed Bazoum’s ouster, it did not come as a shock to many Nigeriens, and not solely because of Niger’s history of military coups.

A defense agreement signed by Iran and Bolivia in late July, the details of which remain obscure, constitute yet another step in Tehran’s effort to cement ties with leftist governments in Latin America. The campaign to build those relations is not new, but it appears to have gained new momentum in recent months.