Diplomacy & Politics Archive

A revived maritime dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia has led to a series of chest-thumping incursions and face-offs between the two countries’ navies. The stand-off reached its zenith, for now, after the Indonesian Navy reported Malaysian warships had entered the oil-rich Ambalat area off the Borneo coast several times over the last two weeks. The provocations almost crossed the line into conflict, with an Indonesian vessel reportedly coming close to firing at one of the Malaysian ships. However, with both sides pointing the finger at the other, apportioning blame for the crisis is difficult. Indonesia claims that the Ambalat oil […]

A few days after President Barack Obama stood on the podium at Cairo University sending a message of reconciliation to Muslims around the world, voters in Lebanon went to the polls and delivered a stunning blow to Hezbollah, the so-called Party of God. The victory by the U.S.-backed March 14 against the Iran-backed March 8 alliance came as a surprise to just about everyone. Since Lebanon is a microcosm of the Middle East, the vote had important regional resonance. But Lebanon is also a Rorschach test, so interpretations of the results reflected the multiplicity of views about what the most […]

On Friday, just over 46 million Iranians will go to the polls to elect the president of the Islamic Republic to a four-year term. Controversial hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the candidate to beat, but he is facing a stiff challenge in an intriguing struggle that has taken shape in the last few weeks of the campaign. Reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has emerged as the main threat to the incumbent, while another reformist, Mehdi Karrubi, and another hardliner, Mohsen Rezai, are also in the race. In Iran’s unique constitutional system, severe vetting by the Islamic Republic’s political elite determines […]

Throughout the developing world, the post-Cold War era has seen the emergence of increasingly powerful and violent criminal organizations, often referred to as “third-generation gangs.” These groups have exploited the major international trends of the past 20 years — including economic and financial integration, innovations in communication technology, the prevalence of weak and failed states, and a thriving global arms trade — to seize control over a myriad of illicit commercial networks. They now use violence and corruption to undermine the governments that oppose them. Latin America has proven particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The region has porous borders and […]

On Sunday, gunmen ambushed two of Somalia’s most respected journalists, while the two men were walking in Mogadishu’s Bakara market. Muktar Mohamed Hirabe, long-time director of Shabelle Radio, was killed; his companion Ahmed Omar Hashi, a senior producer for Shabelle, was wounded in the hand and stomach. On Monday, World Politics Review spoke to Hashi by phone, from his Mogadishu hospital. He said he didn’t know who was behind the attacks, or what their motive might have been. In recent years Somalia’s media has been targeted by all of the country’s warring parties, including criminal gangs, Islamic extremists from the […]

MEXICO CITY — Federal officials used the word “historic” to describe the May 26 arrests of 28 local officials, including 10 mayors, in the western state of Michoacán. Those detained were allegedly linked to La Familia, a drug cartel known for running extortion rackets, producing methamphetamines and corrupting municipal governments. Opposition politicians and some political observers, meanwhile, expressed disquiet with the arrests and questioned their timing. The sting operation — which netted mayors from the three main parties, including a pair from President Felipe Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN) — came barely five weeks before the July 5 midterm legislative […]

LONDON — Gordon Brown has come a long way from those heady days in April when he basked in the praise of U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders attending the G-20 summit in London. He had, after all, just saved the world. Happy days. That was then. Today, Gordon Brown looks drained and desolate, his political career in shreds, his leadership comprehensively trashed. The local government elections last week and European elections over the weekend could not have come at a worse time for Brown. Already fighting for his political life, the beleaguered British prime minister was left, […]

Much remains uncertain regarding the nuclear arms control treaty currently being negotiated by the Russian and American governments. But the parties have evidently decided not to try to address “non-strategic” nuclear weapons in the agreement. When asked about the issue at an April 6 conference on nonproliferation, two U.S. and Russian officials intimately involved in the negotiations said they favored excluding the issue from the immediate START follow-on talks. The latest Russian-American negotiating session that occurred last week in Geneva appears to confirm this decision. Rose Gottemoeller, the new assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance and the chief […]

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Following a landmark election on Sunday, the U.S.-backed “March 14” coalition held on to its slim majority in the Lebanese parliament, defeating the opposition alliance of Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), an officially secular but mostly Christian party headed by General Michel Aoun. Analysts are scrutinizing the returns in an effort to explain how March 14 managed to pull off a decisive win, given that extensive polling over a period of months had suggested a much closer race with a greater likelihood of an opposition victory. Coming as it did on the heels of […]

The Kashmir conflict is a legacy of the post-colonial partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into the Hindu-majority country of India and the Muslim state of Pakistan. From its genesis, the conflict has been defined by competition between India and Pakistan over the national identity of Kashmir’s population. But the elites of both countries have also made the territory central to their respective principles of nation-statehood. In Pakistan’s official ideology, Pakistan as a nation-state has been considered incomplete without Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory contiguous to the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. In the Indian counter-claim, […]

On June 3, 2009, leaders of Cyprus’ two communities, the Greek Cypriot south and the Turkish Cypriot north, met for the 31st time in less than nine months in the latest attempt to unlock one of the most intractable of the world’s “frozen conflicts.” Days before, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) President Mehmet Ali Talat had boldly predicted that the latest round of U.N.-sponsored negotiations could result in a reunification agreement by the end of 2009. But history has taught veteran Cyprus-watchers to regard any expressions of optimism with at least a degree of skepticism. Indeed, so many false […]

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the deceased leader of the Tamil Tigers, once likened himself to a spider in the center of a web, comfortably in control of a sprawling network. But over the past two years, the Sri Lankan military methodically, unflinchingly pulled his web apart, ultimately dismantling one of the most sophisticated insurgencies in the world. On May 19, the government claimed victory in a 30-year-old campaign, one that had cost tens of thousands of lives and seen the unraveling of much of Sri Lankan society. Though the guns have fallen silent, a state of emergency continues. Checkpoints are manned by […]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Last January, a group of World Bank scientists withdrew from the Guarani aquifer region in South America, after almost nine years spent elaborating a detailed picture of the water table there. Located beneath the surface of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, the Guarani is not only the world’s third-largest aquifer. It is also the only uncontaminated one of those three. With a volume of almost 55,000 cubic kilometers, it could supply drinking water to the world’s entire population for 200 years. The aquifer’s four countries decided not to renew the World Bank’s investigation license, which had […]

As the World Health Organization agonizes over whether or not to declare the H1N1 flu virus an official pandemic, I can’t help but think of the American national security establishment’s continuing struggle over the definition of threat in a post-9/11 world. In both instances, we see institutions with worldwide responsibilities coming to grips with an increasingly interconnected global landscape. And although that global landscape, according to all the available data, suffers less catastrophe, it nonetheless appears to present far greater potential for such catastrophes to unfold with seemingly uncontrollable consequences. By “less catastrophe,” I mean that in a world of […]

In his comprehensively titled tome, “Diplomacy,” legendary U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger laid out the two competing schools of thought that have guided American foreign policy in its rise to power. The first was realist, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, based on power and obsessed with the zero-sum game that guides the core of international relations. The second, touted by Woodrow Wilson, was idealist, based on cooperation and unflinching in its belief in the power of ideas. To Kissinger’s consternation, though he believed that realism was the right way through which to view the world, he says that it was actually Wilson’s […]

Yesterday afternoon, the stage was set: President Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim, had traveled to Cairo to give his long-awaited speech to the Islamic world, in an effort to repair the damage done to America’s image in the region by recent U.S. foreign policy. Judging by U.S. reactions, the speech was a huge success. But will the other half of the equation, the president’s Arab and Muslim target audience, follow the White House’s carefully crafted script? Though it is still too early to say with certainty, the U.S. could be in for a disappointment. To understand more […]

GRAZ, Austria — Austria’s far right, riding high on its recent national election success, is conducting one of the most hate-filled election campaigns in recent memory in a bid for EU Parliament seats. Jews, Muslims and non-European foreigners have all been maligned, while far-right supporters have expressed their loyalty to the cause by using the outlawed Nazi salute. The Freedom Party (FP) and the splinter Alliance for the Future (AF) party unexpectedly won almost a third of votes in last September’s national election. Two weeks later, the outpouring of sympathy that followed the death of Jorg Haider — the leader […]